I wanted to comment as well but this nails it entirely.
Focusing on getting "women"(insert any identity group here) into any field as opposed to getting "the best" into a field has been disastrous for us all on almost every aspect of life.
The obsession with getting girls into comics included hiring women for the sake of having women. They didn’t care about talent so they didn’t care that these women didn’t have any interest in comics or their history. I honestly think any woman who has a passion for comics would have trouble getting a job with the big 2
It's also IdPol. They were hired as women to appeal to other women. The mission objective of these new female writers was to 'write from the female perspective' in order to rope in the mythical 'female audience'.
The superhero comic book industry soon took a nosedive.
It's the same reason girls suck at everything in the west. They're coddled and told they can do no wrong while having no lived experiences worth noting, so they produce nothing but self-interested, boring Mary Sues.
Western comics had a mass die off and only cape shit survived. There aren't any good male comic writers either. I don't think anyone actually reads floppy comics. I think the two sources of income for comic shops are dead guys with active pull lists and laundering small time weed money.
They've diversified. All those Pokémon and Magic tournaments bring in money, especially since you need to be using the most recent cards to participate. They're also now selling new and used movies/ anime, vinyl records, Funko's and retro games. Anything that's "Geek Culture" besides or in addition to books. But if local laws permit, I could see them selling a little THCA/ Delta products too.
And the capeshit comics are still basically impenetrable unless you are already reading them. Even if they promise a "full reset" every decade its still filled with hundreds of required readings to fully understand.
It pisses me off how much capeshit has held comics back. Hell, DC and Marvel have even held back capeshit from becoming good enough to warrant its apex position within the western comic industry. Without fail the comics I read that are from other publishers are superior offerings to whatever slop I've tried to engage with from Marvel.
There are maybe about three and a half good writers in the whole industry.
What's really funny is that "webcomics" have basically picked up all the slack of regular Western Comics and were more popular than them for a very long time.
And then they fell to the same trap, becoming shitty vehicles for political takes or shipping drama. Leaving very little of value to prevent the cringe factor from becoming their entire reputation.
Like, look at how relevant XKCD was and now how completely forgotten he is.
And good fucking riddance. There are few web comic writers I hate more than the guy who does XKCD.
Yes, I'm still fucking salty about his 'free speech' comic. Talk about a masks off moment, and probably one of the first instance I had shoved in my face about how alien leftists could be about things.
I actually knew him briefly through a mutual friend back before he blew up and became a big internet sensation. Dude was a little weird back then but I wouldn't have guessed just how far far off the deep end he would go. Said friend later told me that fame changed him. His younger brother was way more chill.
But yeah, "alien" is definitely an apt term for him.
I think the intended meaning is that you can't "fix" someone. In context I'd wager that its going for a depressed girl can't be fixed by just loving her hard enough and other dumb ideas that guys at the time fell for a lot. Its a pretty good message imo, because we were all that kind of retarded 22 year old falling for a BPD nutcase. Or even the more direct message of "you aren't responsible if they kill themselves" might be what he wanted to say.
But it also undermines Leftism in general, because that's 120% about taking responsibility for everyone's happiness even at the cost of your own. Whether its uplifting niggers, immigration, infinite gibs to every other nation, etc.
Webcomics are the example I hold up as evidence that western comics have been held back. There is absolutely and appetite for western comics that aren't just Marvel/DC slop. There's a ton of stuff you can explore with the medium that just straight up isn't getting a chance to shine. I have read probably in the realm of hundreds of webcomics over the years and the shear number of gems I've come across that should have been seminal works in the broader culture but languished in obscurity before vanishing off the face of the internet is absolutely staggering. Even the capeshit genre had stronger showings in the realm of webcomics than what you can find at your local comic shop.
There is a reason why literal garbage like Crossed has half a dozen spinoffs, its because its a rare non-cape, non-kiddy Western Comic.
Shit its half the reason why Scott Pilgrim was remotely successful. It was something of serviceable quality. Which is also why anything of value calls itself a "graphic novel" now, because the label of comic itself stifles them.
Another great example of women have to be a part of everything no matter if they care about the subject or not.
Just shovel them into the fire like coal.
What do you mean sales are tanking? We got women writers now bigot! We are winning the great and constant culture war!
If you lower the bar and start serving shit, people will start to notice. It's not that it's by women that is the issue. It's that you hired bitter, resentful, vastly unqualified people that don't care about the end product to do the job.
And it shows in the end product being whatever hatred ran through their minds at the time of writing. If you need to write angry shit down ladies, get a diary and leave comics to people that actually care.
One odd characteristic of female illustrators I've noticed is that they draw ethnic characteristics in a less relative manner.
If the Japanese characters look Japanese to an American, probably a female illustrator.
Not exactly sure why this. It might just be experience from putting on makeup(which requires attention to minute facial details) and paying more attention to hair, it might be something more intrinsic to how women view the world.
Rising of The Shield Hero is "What if a guy got isekai'd, but the princess Me Too'd him because she's a bitch and now everyone hates his guts even though he's innocent so he has to pull himself up by the bootstraps."
There's more to it than that, but that's the hook that got everyone's attention.
Rumiko Takahashi has been spinning gold from her oekaki pen for decades... Not really in love with Yasha Hime (inuyasha spinoff, basically a "the next generation" type of deal), and Kyōkai no Rinne took me being in the right mood to get into, but most of her stuff is amazing.
sidenote: read the inuyasha manga. it's a lot darker, more in line with Mermaid Saga than her more light-hearted stuff, and the visuals give you a better idea of why inuyasha had so much trouble choosing between kagome and kikyo.
It is still endlessly amusing to me that the "harem" manga that Western women love to complain about being sexist or terrible was straight up created by a woman who became basically one of the top 5 most popular creators in Japan.
To this day every single harem archetype can find its roots in Ranma, for better or worse.
Eh, I enjoyed most of her stuff but I won't go so far as to call her characters "deep."
Most of her bigger stuff works because the characters are serviceable for the role they need to be, and never really develop beyond that. You already know 90% of their development and arc within their intro and a single story beyond it.
Not that that is an inherently bad thing, she has made it work incredibly for her and her biggest series are great for "oh that's on" watching forever, similar to Family Guy in the West. I just take umbrage with that descriptor.
not all of them of course, but main characters especially are often given time to develop and grow. over the course of a given series. maison ikkoku is a great example of this.
I'm going to still disagree, if only because the "time taken" is often so long that its basically nonexistant. The characters will be completely static in what is basically endless filler until suddenly they do something slightly different and then that is the new status quo for more endless filler (that often won't acknowledge the change either). And then it ends with the exact place you predict it will from the first few chapters.
Again, I like her work. Ranma was one of my OG series and I still go back to it. But almost every series could be 3-5 volumes long and lose nothing but extra side characters, but they get stretched forever with every character mostly being a handful of traits instead of anything comprehensive.
Slice of Life/harem/romance nonsense is my guilty pleasure of manga, so I've read far too many so I am comparing it a lot to what came after her and how much better it can be done. She set the foundation for all of it, and that can't be denied, but its popular due to how simple it is.
Otoyomegatari and Victorian Maid Emma, written/drawn by a woman, both by the same author. Some of the best historical fiction I've seen. Very comfy and heartwarming.
Even funnier that most of the most blatant wish fulfillment or absurdly degenerate manga are also created by women.
Dress Up Darling was criticized for being absurdly ridiculous in "generic boring nice guy MC gets the hottest girl by being nice" until people realized "oops, the gyaru girl is the mangaka's self insert and that's her dream man."
Or when you walk around doujin selling places and the ones with guro, hate rape, cockroaches or something worse is all being sold by cute-ish Jap girls. While the tables of non-yaoi shipping is guys trying to get their waifu pure loved.
The good female writers know there was never any real shared money in comics. The big writers were really the only ones making bank. The easy money is in novels and novellas, especially the spicy kind aimed for other women.
Seeing how wokies/leftist lose their shit at mangas like demon slayer simply because a male character has three devoted wives when the mangaka is a woman tells you enough. Leftist will never allow any female writer that doesn't toe the line and spread their deranged ideology.
The concept of a target audience is lost on western corpos. Female mangakas are good because they know the kind of audience they are writing to, FMA has a quite different tone than Sailor Moon
Meanwhile we get forced shit like I'm not Starfire and modern Harley Quinn, because western comics also have to appeal to wahmen
White women on average have ten IQ points less than Asian women. As a collective whole for both. The Japanese skew towards the highest end of this, and American white women.... Skew towards the bottom end.
Edit: Amongst everything already noted by others. The Anglosphere's tendency towards gynocracy is really an issue for the West. Most of the other people on the planet don't behave like this, even if they have a bit of feminism.
It is tempting to blame diversity which can be part of it but I'm going to blame a cabal of like-minded people who decide who writes for the big two. That highlights another problem. The west, or rather America, is just the same few characters written over and over again telling the same stories again. Capeshit as someone already said. Japan manages to have anthology magazines in which chapters of various stories are published together. France manages to have range of stories in their Bandes Dessinee besides some regulars like Asterix.
Because feminists. They've spent decades telling girls that comics (and many other spaces) were hostile to them when they never were. So the girls that loved comics were pushed away and the ones who DO go into it are doing it to "stick it to the patriarchy" and burn down what's there.
They weren't unwelcome in games, STEM, comics, whatever. There were fewer of them because they were, on average, less likely to be into those things. The ones who were into it were as accepted as anyone else. Activist outsiders gaslit the public into thinking the demographics were due to hostility rather than an organic differences in interests and created a self-fulfilling prophecy: the only women getting involved are shitty activists* who destroy everything they touch, so those spaces try to protect themselves by gatekeeping. Then the feminists smile about the issue they created, claim it shows they were right the whole time, and beg for [government] money.
* I know there are some women whose genuine interests are so strong that they ignore the social stigma and love those things for their own sake. And it sucks that they'll get hate from all sides. Unfortunately, they don't seem to be statistically significant in perception.
tl;dr: Japan didn't have a bunch of blue haired land whales telling girls that they weren't welcome in manga and discouraging them from pursuing it.
Meritocracy, the manga industry is cut throat and so you REALLY have to bring your A game.
The west has quotas and pandering which artificially lowers those barriers leading to inferior products being made by Women.
I wanted to comment as well but this nails it entirely.
Focusing on getting "women"(insert any identity group here) into any field as opposed to getting "the best" into a field has been disastrous for us all on almost every aspect of life.
But especially in media.
Bingo.
Rumiko Takahashi climbed to the top of the industry over the corpses of her rivals.
She was a relentless artistic machine that won a battle of attrition while others could not perform as consistently or as often and burned out.
She earned her place as the top selling mangaka of her generation through blood, sweat and tears.
Bingo.
The obsession with getting girls into comics included hiring women for the sake of having women. They didn’t care about talent so they didn’t care that these women didn’t have any interest in comics or their history. I honestly think any woman who has a passion for comics would have trouble getting a job with the big 2
It's also IdPol. They were hired as women to appeal to other women. The mission objective of these new female writers was to 'write from the female perspective' in order to rope in the mythical 'female audience'.
The superhero comic book industry soon took a nosedive.
Very true
It's the same reason girls suck at everything in the west. They're coddled and told they can do no wrong while having no lived experiences worth noting, so they produce nothing but self-interested, boring Mary Sues.
Western comics had a mass die off and only cape shit survived. There aren't any good male comic writers either. I don't think anyone actually reads floppy comics. I think the two sources of income for comic shops are dead guys with active pull lists and laundering small time weed money.
They've diversified. All those Pokémon and Magic tournaments bring in money, especially since you need to be using the most recent cards to participate. They're also now selling new and used movies/ anime, vinyl records, Funko's and retro games. Anything that's "Geek Culture" besides or in addition to books. But if local laws permit, I could see them selling a little THCA/ Delta products too.
I know of a place that is a combination tabletop game store with axe throwing and a liquor license.
Well, that's certainly ... something. 🤔
And the capeshit comics are still basically impenetrable unless you are already reading them. Even if they promise a "full reset" every decade its still filled with hundreds of required readings to fully understand.
It pisses me off how much capeshit has held comics back. Hell, DC and Marvel have even held back capeshit from becoming good enough to warrant its apex position within the western comic industry. Without fail the comics I read that are from other publishers are superior offerings to whatever slop I've tried to engage with from Marvel.
There are maybe about three and a half good writers in the whole industry.
What's really funny is that "webcomics" have basically picked up all the slack of regular Western Comics and were more popular than them for a very long time.
And then they fell to the same trap, becoming shitty vehicles for political takes or shipping drama. Leaving very little of value to prevent the cringe factor from becoming their entire reputation.
Like, look at how relevant XKCD was and now how completely forgotten he is.
And good fucking riddance. There are few web comic writers I hate more than the guy who does XKCD.
Yes, I'm still fucking salty about his 'free speech' comic. Talk about a masks off moment, and probably one of the first instance I had shoved in my face about how alien leftists could be about things.
I actually knew him briefly through a mutual friend back before he blew up and became a big internet sensation. Dude was a little weird back then but I wouldn't have guessed just how far far off the deep end he would go. Said friend later told me that fame changed him. His younger brother was way more chill.
But yeah, "alien" is definitely an apt term for him.
What's funny is that he made a comic with only a single line in it that is anathemic to almost every Leftist belief.
He literally dismantled their entire political party's foundation and didn't even recognize it because he is too big brained for such simplicity.
xkcd 383
I don't get it.
What's supposed to be the take home message?
It kind of makes me think of the medical themed one (from Samuel Shem's House of God I believe).
I think the intended meaning is that you can't "fix" someone. In context I'd wager that its going for a depressed girl can't be fixed by just loving her hard enough and other dumb ideas that guys at the time fell for a lot. Its a pretty good message imo, because we were all that kind of retarded 22 year old falling for a BPD nutcase. Or even the more direct message of "you aren't responsible if they kill themselves" might be what he wanted to say.
But it also undermines Leftism in general, because that's 120% about taking responsibility for everyone's happiness even at the cost of your own. Whether its uplifting niggers, immigration, infinite gibs to every other nation, etc.
Webcomics are the example I hold up as evidence that western comics have been held back. There is absolutely and appetite for western comics that aren't just Marvel/DC slop. There's a ton of stuff you can explore with the medium that just straight up isn't getting a chance to shine. I have read probably in the realm of hundreds of webcomics over the years and the shear number of gems I've come across that should have been seminal works in the broader culture but languished in obscurity before vanishing off the face of the internet is absolutely staggering. Even the capeshit genre had stronger showings in the realm of webcomics than what you can find at your local comic shop.
There is a reason why literal garbage like Crossed has half a dozen spinoffs, its because its a rare non-cape, non-kiddy Western Comic.
Shit its half the reason why Scott Pilgrim was remotely successful. It was something of serviceable quality. Which is also why anything of value calls itself a "graphic novel" now, because the label of comic itself stifles them.
I still read and collect but with rare exception just old comics.
Another great example of women have to be a part of everything no matter if they care about the subject or not.
Just shovel them into the fire like coal.
What do you mean sales are tanking? We got women writers now bigot! We are winning the great and constant culture war!
If you lower the bar and start serving shit, people will start to notice. It's not that it's by women that is the issue. It's that you hired bitter, resentful, vastly unqualified people that don't care about the end product to do the job.
And it shows in the end product being whatever hatred ran through their minds at the time of writing. If you need to write angry shit down ladies, get a diary and leave comics to people that actually care.
Agreed. I actually Inuyasha is good, Full Metal Alchemist is a masterpiece.
Also Frieren is written by a woman, and Magi and Mushishi and Kimetsu no yaiba. And everything Clamp.
Its suspected that the author of Rising of the shield hero is a woman but not confirmed.
Edit: Sorry i made a mistake. Frieren's illustrator is a women but the writer's gender is unconfirmed but suspected to be male
Unfamiliar with "Rising of the shield hero".
One odd characteristic of female illustrators I've noticed is that they draw ethnic characteristics in a less relative manner.
If the Japanese characters look Japanese to an American, probably a female illustrator.
Not exactly sure why this. It might just be experience from putting on makeup(which requires attention to minute facial details) and paying more attention to hair, it might be something more intrinsic to how women view the world.
Rising of The Shield Hero is "What if a guy got isekai'd, but the princess Me Too'd him because she's a bitch and now everyone hates his guts even though he's innocent so he has to pull himself up by the bootstraps."
There's more to it than that, but that's the hook that got everyone's attention.
Dungeon Meishi was also written by a women, and it is superb.
As was Redo Of Healer.
Rumiko Takahashi has been spinning gold from her oekaki pen for decades... Not really in love with Yasha Hime (inuyasha spinoff, basically a "the next generation" type of deal), and Kyōkai no Rinne took me being in the right mood to get into, but most of her stuff is amazing.
sidenote: read the inuyasha manga. it's a lot darker, more in line with Mermaid Saga than her more light-hearted stuff, and the visuals give you a better idea of why inuyasha had so much trouble choosing between kagome and kikyo.
It is still endlessly amusing to me that the "harem" manga that Western women love to complain about being sexist or terrible was straight up created by a woman who became basically one of the top 5 most popular creators in Japan.
To this day every single harem archetype can find its roots in Ranma, for better or worse.
well, that, and the woman's work was genuinely good. she's brilliant at writing memorable, even deep characters, even in her more comical works.
Eh, I enjoyed most of her stuff but I won't go so far as to call her characters "deep."
Most of her bigger stuff works because the characters are serviceable for the role they need to be, and never really develop beyond that. You already know 90% of their development and arc within their intro and a single story beyond it.
Not that that is an inherently bad thing, she has made it work incredibly for her and her biggest series are great for "oh that's on" watching forever, similar to Family Guy in the West. I just take umbrage with that descriptor.
not all of them of course, but main characters especially are often given time to develop and grow. over the course of a given series. maison ikkoku is a great example of this.
I'm going to still disagree, if only because the "time taken" is often so long that its basically nonexistant. The characters will be completely static in what is basically endless filler until suddenly they do something slightly different and then that is the new status quo for more endless filler (that often won't acknowledge the change either). And then it ends with the exact place you predict it will from the first few chapters.
Again, I like her work. Ranma was one of my OG series and I still go back to it. But almost every series could be 3-5 volumes long and lose nothing but extra side characters, but they get stretched forever with every character mostly being a handful of traits instead of anything comprehensive.
Slice of Life/harem/romance nonsense is my guilty pleasure of manga, so I've read far too many so I am comparing it a lot to what came after her and how much better it can be done. She set the foundation for all of it, and that can't be denied, but its popular due to how simple it is.
Read the entire manga back around the time it finished, many years ago. Only seen a few episodes of the tv show.
have you read mermaid saga yet? same kinda dark horror themes, less grewsome artwork, but better writing in my opinion than junji ito.
that being said, a collaboration between the two would be amazing...
Otoyomegatari and Victorian Maid Emma, written/drawn by a woman, both by the same author. Some of the best historical fiction I've seen. Very comfy and heartwarming.
Even funnier that most of the most blatant wish fulfillment or absurdly degenerate manga are also created by women.
Dress Up Darling was criticized for being absurdly ridiculous in "generic boring nice guy MC gets the hottest girl by being nice" until people realized "oops, the gyaru girl is the mangaka's self insert and that's her dream man."
Or when you walk around doujin selling places and the ones with guro, hate rape, cockroaches or something worse is all being sold by cute-ish Jap girls. While the tables of non-yaoi shipping is guys trying to get their waifu pure loved.
Comics and Manga are not the same
Feminist nepotism and ideological circle-jerking vs encouraging actual talent and success.
The good female writers know there was never any real shared money in comics. The big writers were really the only ones making bank. The easy money is in novels and novellas, especially the spicy kind aimed for other women.
Seeing how wokies/leftist lose their shit at mangas like demon slayer simply because a male character has three devoted wives when the mangaka is a woman tells you enough. Leftist will never allow any female writer that doesn't toe the line and spread their deranged ideology.
The concept of a target audience is lost on western corpos. Female mangakas are good because they know the kind of audience they are writing to, FMA has a quite different tone than Sailor Moon
Meanwhile we get forced shit like I'm not Starfire and modern Harley Quinn, because western comics also have to appeal to wahmen
White women on average have ten IQ points less than Asian women. As a collective whole for both. The Japanese skew towards the highest end of this, and American white women.... Skew towards the bottom end.
Edit: Amongst everything already noted by others. The Anglosphere's tendency towards gynocracy is really an issue for the West. Most of the other people on the planet don't behave like this, even if they have a bit of feminism.
It is tempting to blame diversity which can be part of it but I'm going to blame a cabal of like-minded people who decide who writes for the big two. That highlights another problem. The west, or rather America, is just the same few characters written over and over again telling the same stories again. Capeshit as someone already said. Japan manages to have anthology magazines in which chapters of various stories are published together. France manages to have range of stories in their Bandes Dessinee besides some regulars like Asterix.
Because feminists. They've spent decades telling girls that comics (and many other spaces) were hostile to them when they never were. So the girls that loved comics were pushed away and the ones who DO go into it are doing it to "stick it to the patriarchy" and burn down what's there.
They weren't unwelcome in games, STEM, comics, whatever. There were fewer of them because they were, on average, less likely to be into those things. The ones who were into it were as accepted as anyone else. Activist outsiders gaslit the public into thinking the demographics were due to hostility rather than an organic differences in interests and created a self-fulfilling prophecy: the only women getting involved are shitty activists* who destroy everything they touch, so those spaces try to protect themselves by gatekeeping. Then the feminists smile about the issue they created, claim it shows they were right the whole time, and beg for [government] money.
* I know there are some women whose genuine interests are so strong that they ignore the social stigma and love those things for their own sake. And it sucks that they'll get hate from all sides. Unfortunately, they don't seem to be statistically significant in perception.
tl;dr: Japan didn't have a bunch of blue haired land whales telling girls that they weren't welcome in manga and discouraging them from pursuing it.
because western entertainment is rotten to the core with ideologues that somehow believe they are important and not just dancing monkeys.
Sailor Moon has entered the chat
Historicaly women cannot and will not write original based material
Even when they write based material its a rip off and they add sin, alot of sin to it
Louise Simonson is the only one that came to mind.