Ugh, so much to respond to in this thread...
I'll start by saying that I often find myself feeling like an out of touch old man when I come to these forums. Why, back in
my day, we all wanted to draw like Jim Lee and Todd McFarlane! I remember one time driving around all night once, just to find a copy of ANY anime, and it wasn't called "anime" back then, it was Japanimation. Now, where's my teeth?
The thing is that kids are influenced by the popular culture they grow up in, and the Japanese comics and animation thing is something that is definitely a unique mark of the kids who grew up post-Generation X. I figure that the vast majority of people who maintain an identifiably "Japanese" influence to their style were pre-teens during the mid-nineties.
There are a few things that I can definitely use as identifiers of why those formative years have had such an influence on the style, and how it all came to a head around 1997 or 1998. First off, the internet was just gaining its legs from the mid-90's on. I remember that during 1995 and 1996, there were some pretty awesome sites devoted to screen caps of anime that was pretty hard to find in the U.S. However, the internet was still pretty slow, and pretty text-oriented. There wasn't any Flash, and everyone was still slogging along on a 28.8 kbps modem at fastest. That meant few clips or sounds. Maybe a few GIF animations, because they were really big back in the day. Not to mention, if you weren't looking for Japanese comics and animation on the internet, you probably wouldn't easily come across it.
Secondly, there was the Sony Playstation, providing 32-bit graphics, which seemed to be enough to more accurately describe Japanese stylizations within video games. Yes, there were a few great Japanese giant robot cartoons in the 80's (yay Voltron!), but the innitial influence of the Japanese style wasn't really maintained until the advent of video gaming, because any Japanese cartoons at the time were drowned amongst the throng of American counterparts of the time. Thus, Japanese stuff has been growing within the popular culture for twenty years, since the NES hit the scene. Of course, 8-bit graphics didn't do much for showing style, and neither did 16-bit graphics for that matter. So, what we see is a bigger explosion of the style around 1997 or 1998, when the Playstation and N64 really began to start gaining their positions in the gaming market.
Thirdly, you had this thing called
Pokemon. I don't think that proper credit is given to that show when fingers are pointed and fault is assigned for the otaku phenomenon. If Pokemon hadn't exploded in popularity with its games, cartoons, cards, and subsidiary merchandising, I daresay that most people would meet Japanese animation with the response of "animawhat?!" It was Pokemon that pulled WotC out of the fire and made them viable for purchase by Hasbro. It was Pokemon that helped the popularity of the Gameboy Color. It was popularity of Pokemon specifically that led to the expanded importation of shows like Sailor Moon and Dragonball Z. Yes, as stated before, there were Japanese shows in the U.S. before Pokemon, and there were even shows based upon video games before Pokemon, but most of them lacked any kind of entertainment value ("do the Mario!"), and none of them had the critical mass that Pokemon exhibited within the children's market.
How do I know this? I've been paying attention for a long time. I was going to art school in Seattle during the late nineties. Seattle, home of Nintendo US, home of WotC, and certainly a gateway to the first wave of the Anime Invasion. I was was gleefully watching it all happen in real time. Sure, I was more interested in Record of Lodoss War, Battle Angel, Nausicaa, and of course Akira at the time (and still am), but that doesn't negate the fact that before Pokemon came around, if I wanted anime I'd have to go to a specialty video store, and manga wasn't really on the popular radar yet.
Before 1997, anime and manga fandom was clearly a small subculture. There were small geeky college clubs that devoted time and resources to it, but it was not something that you could find at the local Barnes and Noble or SunCoast. I remember once in 1998, I went to a Japanese animation festival in a warehouse near the freeway. Nine straight hours watching anime that was rarely dubbed, and often found only in Japanese without subtitles. The surprising thing is that this stuff is pretty recognizeable today; Tenchi Muyo, Golden Boy, Blue Seed, amongst others. But few knew these titles back then.
So, I guess what I'm getting at here is that when you look at the trend from a historical perspective, it makes sense. It also makes sense that when you check the median age of the people who's primary influence is of the Japanese variety, and it comes in at 20 and below. It also explains why there's such a seemingly huge quantity of manga-ka wannabes. It's actually kind of a trick of technology when you think about it. Like I'd said early on, when I was a teenager, everyone wanted to draw like McFarlane and Lee and work for Marvel or Image. If the internet was such a permeating entity ten years ago, I could pretty much guarantee that people would have been decrying the sheer amount of McFarclones and acolytes of Father Lee that were out there. The way I see it, whether it be big eyes or big muscles, these things move in cycles amongst the young and impressionable. Lord knows what's gonna come next.
Also...
BloodKnight wrote:
...What really pisses me off is the majority of fan boys think the japanese are freaking artistic with all these 'techniques'. No kids, the japanese aren't artistic, they are just lazy. Kind of like White Wolf with their hundreds of rpg books.
They're not LAZY, Blood Knight.
They're CHEAP.
