I’ve just fixed the link in Kei’s post and thought I’d take a minute to explain what has her so worked up.
A young Japanese wannabe-mangaka sent some sample work to the major Japanese publishers, where it ended up being circulated by a number of popular/famous mangaka, who were all pretty cruel about it – remember this is still a kid’s work, they’ve got years to mature yet before they hit the age that any of the pros who are commenting were when they started in Industry.
Kei knows full well how important support and advice from people who’ve made it in the industry is to anyone trying to enter – she was mentored for years by several well known people in the industry, and mentors young artists herself – and couldn’t believe anyone in her line of work could be so callous. As the people involved in the scandal are reasonably well known in the US, she wants to make sure that the American comics industry is aware of the scandal, and that the publishers know to her avoid – her dream is to do some work for DC, so the idea that someone so unworthy could be getting breaks for them or Marvel pains her. Again, the mangaka in question are Kotaro Mori (Gurenn Lagann), Miwa Shiro (Dogs / Hatsune Miku), Ryuusuke Hamamoto (PuchiEva / Alan Moore-chan), with Kotaro Mori apparently being the guy who (illegally) leaked the manga first.
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Yeesh, if I were to have sent some of my early software projects to a professional for advice only to have it leaked without permission and harshly analyzed publicly I would’ve probably been pretty devastated. Seems pretty petty that people famous enough to probably have fairly legitimate excuse to ignore their fanbase seems to have the spare time to attempt to humiliate them. I’d say I’d boycott them, but none of those artists series’s interest me anyway, except perhaps Hatsune Miku, and that’s not as a character really, that’s just because I find Vocaloid to be a highly impressive piece of software.
This is just sad. To think that professionals can forget where they come from, and ridicule where all artist start is just despicable on their part. For shame!
yes. They have not apologized to the young person yet.
I think these “professionals” should be ashamed of themselves for doing that. They most certainly owe this young person an apology for being so unkind!
However, I think that this may mark an important point in this artist’s career. If they want this bad enough, they will bend, and let the criticism flow by. They will be forged by the heat of the flames and go on to improve and shine. They might even become famous! If they break, maybe they weren’t cut out for the life of a professional artist to begin with. I hope the former is the case. I wish them well in their future endeavors nonetheless!
I also am supporting young person’s dream.
Kouta Hirano(Hellsing) commented that it is very terrible thing.
Just checking, but were they really being vicious about it or was the criticism constructive?
If they were just being nasty, then yeah, they really should know better. Unfortunately, empathy is a rare asset these days, and you get a lot of elitists in any field.
Very vicious – “look at this idiot, he wants to be a pro”, that sort of thing – afaik the comments didn’t get back to the original artist until the commentary was leaked
That’s just cruel. EVERYONE has to startsomewhere. I mean, they didn’t even provide tips on how to make it better, or, if it can’t be improved, say WHY it couldn’t succeed! They should be ashamed.
That does sound like just plain cruelty and also seems very unprofessional. The thing I don’t get is that as far as I can tell, it isn’t even like they’re that much more established of mangaka. Both Kotaro Mori and Ryuusuke Hamamoto mainly seem to just be people who write manga versions or spin-offs of popular anime titles, for instance, which doesn’t really give much insight into whether they could make a series of their own that could be successful. Miwa Shiro at least has a series of his own creation under his belt, but…from what I’ve read of DOGS, he seems like he might just be kinda a jerk. Still, its a shame that these “pros” don’t have the decency to actually act professionally in a situation like this. Mocking someone just because they are less experienced than them, just makes these mangaka seem like bullies.
Hearing about this made me wonder what the sample work the the person aspiring to be a mangaka sent in was like, so I checked the link to see if it would reveal anything, and apparently the video has been taken down with this text in its place: “この動画は株式会社アスキー・メディアワークス の申立により、著作権侵害として削除されました。対象物: 著作権者より著作権の管理委託を受けた著作物”
As far as I can tell from my limited understanding of Japanese, that the video was taken down due to copywrite violations and that the group that petitioned/suggested this is called something like “ASCII Mediaworks”? Not sure if this is a good sign or not, but I figured it might be of interest to the others who have posted comments here.
Yeah the video seems to have been pulled by ASCII Mediaworks, who are a major publisher – it appears they’re trying to pull the video from wherever they can in order to save face (as they’ve been involved in rather a number of scandals recently)