Not that I’m a huge consumer of manga, but wouldn’t part of that be because the body types, especially the facial structures, are very non-Japanese?

They’re also very non-human. The rest is open to each person’s interpretation.

And what can I say, I’m curious. I get facial structure (sort of), but what constitutes a Japanese body type?

And here I was thinking that Superman was an old lady all this time.

Superman, for decades, was drawn with black-and-blue hair, which everyone took as code for “black hair with blue highlights” — even though black hair doesn’t actually have blue highlights, unless you’re shining a bright blue light on it. But we accept that Superman’s hair isn’t “really” blue.

This is interesting.But still, I’ve seen a lot of japanese anime feturing blond characters that were supposed to be Japanese people;it made me wonder.

He realized that HE was the one on the Internet who was wrong.

It’s very frequent that I run into something that I really, really want to blog an argument against, and I end up reciting my new mantra to myself: “I’m a cartoonist, not a blogger; I’m a cartoonist, not a blogger; I’m a…” Sometimes I actually do recite this aloud, which I imagine would be pretty funny-sounding if anyone else were in the room to hear. :-)

Holy shit, that cartoon is my life from 1999 to mid-2007!

What happened mid-2007?

That nit-pick aside, I do know what you’re talking about — the “big-eye” style common to a lot of manga and anime.

The thing is, that’s not actually “western-style.” It’s cartoony, with no realistic resemblance to either “western” or Asian eye structures. I don’t see it as Asian eye structures because my internal “default” isn’t set that way, but I’ve been told by many people who would know that Japanese readers, unless there’s a context telling them otherwise, read these characters as looking like their own culture’s defaults.

Not that I’m a huge consumer of manga, but wouldn’t part of that be because the body types, especially the facial structures, are very non-Japanese? Correct me if I’m wrong - perhaps I’m confusing it with some other art form - but doesn’t manga always show the characters with exaggeratedly Western-style eyes?

Or even that he felt that he could use a pony-tail on a female stick figure. I know more men with pony-tails than women and my first reaction to one is that it’s a marker for a guy who wants to say that he’s unconventional.

;->

—Myca