Usagi Yojimbo DojoBoard

I was wondering earlier today about how many manga are written and drawn by separate people. It seems like most of them are written and illustrated by the same person. The only major manga figure I could think of who is only a writer is Kazuo Koike, the writer of Lone Wolf and Cub, Golgo 13 and several other manga. How many others are there?

I think this is somewhat interesting since it's the opposite of the US system where about 70-80% of comics (with some exceptions like UY) are written and illustrated by separate people (and even people like Frank Miller get others to illustrate their comics part of the time) and often are made by teams with separate people who do the inking and coloring and so on. How many manga are made by these teams in a similar fashion to US comics?

Is it possible that some manga artists have assistants who, for whatever reason, tend not to receive credit in US translations? This came to mind when I was thinking about how mind-boggling it is that Osamu Tezuka drew as many manga pages as he did during his life (and directed some animation too). Was he just a really fast-working workaholic, or did he ever have assistants help him?

Almost all manga nowadays are done with a studio system, that is with a team of assistants. Some assistants are very specialized, and might only draw backgrounds. For the most part, they are uncredited but might rise to get their own series someday.

This is very much like the old US studio system, such as with the Eisner-Iger Studios headed by Will Eisner. They produced such classics as Sheena and Hawks of the Sea. They employed cartoonists as Bob Kane, who would go on to create The Batman and establish his own studio, and Jack Kurtzberg, who would become arguably the best comics creator in the US after he adopted the pen name, Jack Kirby. Even during the later Spirit years, the Eisner Studio employed artists like Jules Feiffer, Wally Wood, and Mike Ploog (who will be illustrating the new Spirit comics for DC, written by Sergio Aragones and Mark Evanier).

Dr Tezuka was both very fast and a workaholic. When I was a guest of Tezuka Productions in Japan, Matsutani-san, the CEO, told me a story about Tezuka: He was doing three series simulaneously and editors were camped out in the hallway as he worked. To complicate things, Dr Tezuka was scheduled to fly to France for a comics festival the next morning. He had barely made the deadlines for two of the features. The last editor rode with him to the airport while Tezuka inked two more pages. He continued working in the parked car while someone checked in for him at the airlines (security was almost nonexistent in the '60's). The editor followed him to the gate where Tezuka finally finished the pages as they were announcing the final boarding call.

During his lifetime, Tezuka drew about 150,000 pages. Even Jack Kirby, as prolific as he was, did about 50,000. I've been working in the industry for more than 20 years, and have probably drawn 5,000 pages tops.

That's amazing. Insanely creative and prolific artists like Tezuka always make me feel like such a slacker.

I remember that Scott McCloud made an interesting comment in his excellent book Reinventing Comics to the effect that anyone who tries to emulate Tezuka's drawing style is probably really only emulating one of his many styles.

Some of the little doodles that I've made lately have a little bit of an Astro Boy influence. In particular, I've started to draw a few characters modeled somewhat loosely on Sunsaku Ban (aka Mustachio), a recurring character in several Tezuka manga:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shunsaku_Ban

I think it would be fun to incorporate a little bit of this style in a comic book that was a crazy mashup of Popeye (a little of both the Segar strips and the Fleischer cartoons), 30's B&W Looney Tunes, and 60's robot manga. (I'd probably need to find someone who can draw better than me to do finished illustrations based on my rough drawings.)

Jet_Jaguar wrote:I think it would be fun to incorporate a little bit of this style in a comic book that was a crazy mashup of Popeye (a little of both the Segar strips and the Fleischer cartoons), 30's B&W Looney Tunes, and 60's robot manga.

As William Stout might describe it, it would be "Bob Clampett meets Mitsuteru Yokoyama...with more nudity." (See the introduction to UY vol. 8 if you don't know what I'm talking about.)

http://www.usagiyojimbo.com/casl/letter ... ook_8.html

Death Note is a manga who separate writer and artist the writer is a woman Tsugumi Ohba and the artist is a man Takeshi Obata thats all i know.....

see ya!!