This post is a comment on Michaels post about Manga. I suggest you read that first, otherwise some of what I say below won’t make any sense.
The rising popularity of japanese comics in the west (explosion, more like it!) has brought a lot of kids and young women to comics — among them many who wouldn’t touch a comic book with a ten foot pole. This is a GOOD THING.
If manga (and it’s moving counter part anime) is popular, we will of course see a lot of young artists imitate the style. The book series ‘how to draw manga’ is currently up to at least 35 volumes. How many books how to draw comics of the western style[1] is there out there? Two? Four? Anyone? Bueller?
Most artists—wether they draw, paint, write, play music, make films and so on, really, really… suck. And it’s okay; we don’t expect a 15 year old kid to draw as good as a seasoned vet with ten years of day to day work as an artist. The latin root of the word ‘amateur’ means litterary Love, and doing something out of love is beautiful, even if what is done is crap.
What does the aspiring manga artist do when they notice that they’re having real trouble with imitating, say, Katsuhiro Otomo? Some work harder on perspective, anatomy, body language, check out photo reference to learn just how a house or a car or something else really looks.
Most give up. Humans are by nature lazy. So they choose to do big eyes, to do a girl and a boy where the only way of telling them apart is by their hair style, they don’t bother to much with things like backgrounds and perspective, because then they might notice that a) they can’t do it b) they can do it, but to do it resembles actual work to much.
[1] Yes, I know that to lump together everything from Moebius and Hergé with Jack Kirby and Bill Watterson and call it Western style is pushing it, but I’m talking of the way to tell a story with comics, not what artistic style was used by the artist.