Re: Amateur Manga: Hangout
Thanks for your input, both of you!
Waterdroplet, your introduction sounds highly interesting and I'm very happy to have someone here who can give a little advice to others. Publishing your own comic is still a progress in a very early stage in western countries, so very few info to find about it.
If you have a little time on your hand, instead of answering many PMs - why not write a guide or info thread about creating your own manga? Maybe containing a linklist to tutorials and helpful websites would also be a nice idea (others can help adding links). I would sticky such a thread since I think that it would be appreciated much by our amateur mangaka. There're surely a lot of Newbies who don't know how to start and others who already started but have no clue how to proceed further.
Doobious (do I need the doctor title to call you?
), I think the problem is very simple. Most mangafanpages are dedicated to the professional works published in Japan. They're simply not focusing on amateur and/or western works which is nothing you can blame on them. Mangahelpers also has it's focus on officially published manga, slowly opening to manhwa and manhua as well.
Amateur comics usually fit better into so called "underground comic" scenes till they're recognized by the public. There're actually quite a lot of such communities online, just very few with a focus on Eastasian-influenced comics. I think it's no use to try forcing yourself into the "normal" manga scene community since there's a traditional split between professional works and doujinshi (amateur works).
Also you have to understand the history behind the Edited Manga community. Manga were originally hard to get in western countries, I remember those times quite well. There was a blackmarket before the internet boom already, especially on anime fansubs. Since the internet grew such rapidly the people and groups who worked on bringing manga to the western world also grew rapidly. We're now stepping over a borderline since manga are - theoretically - recognized enough to not need Edited Mangas to such extend anymore but still the groups continue for various reasons (e.g. rampant discontent with the western publishers or simply to still bring new, unlicensed series to the fans).
Now I've seen mangahelpers post in the upper ban a few amateur manga's, but those seem to only be the naruto spin offs and the DBZ one. I almost felt like I should just do a 10 page naruto doujin just to get some notice, but really what would be the point of that? For me it's more fun to create my own universe.
That's not it. The ones who get shouted are the ones with an own board or are active and regulary releasing here at Mangahelpers. It doesn't matter whether it's a fanmanga or an original concept. We just started out here with fanmanga (which received quite a lot attention, e.g. leading to our Raruto MH fansub, heh) and have still only few original works posted.
All sections on MH work with member activity. A new subsection will be created when the interest and activity is clearly there and they get closed when it's becoming inactive. Sometimes members ask us for a subboard, sometimes we recognize that a single thread isn't enough anymore for a topic. In the same way, the more activity throught the members, the bigger a section becomes and the more we can do for a section topic. That's a simple basic of a forums community.
This goes for the Amateur manga section as well. Originally this section was made for fanmanga of the series we support here at MH. But lately more original works get posted here, that's why I thought a little reorganization made sense to support this kind of selfmade comics more^^
But it needs the activity and interest to become bigger. Or simply put: Post here regulary, get a little fandome - then we shout your releases like we do with Raruto & Co (and we actually shouted a original work last year for quite a long time, but the project became sadly inactive). Bring this section to life and we'll make it bigger, with e.g. a workshop subboard for tutorials or we simply split fanmanga and original works. This thread here is also for you to give suggestions - but again: We can't do anything when it's staying as sleepy as it is at the moment but we're open to built up when the members show us that they want it
Let's finetune this section a little more, with e.g. tutorials and info threads. I'll bring up to include the info that we're more open to original works now in the next news post, okay?
Actually we're playing with the idea to have a quarterly fanmanga contest similar to our art contests - would you like that? The plan was a short manga of 2-8 pages about a given topic. We're currently having a summer break for the art contest and will reorganize them till september, so if a Amateur manga contest sounds interesting to you, feel free to give suggestions on it and I'll bring it up to the staff into the contest discussion.
