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Message: <blockquote data-quote="WizarDru" data-source="post: 3811941" data-attributes="member: 151">It would be disingenuous to suggest anime has not had an influence on western comic book artists in the last 20 years.  Folks like Frank Miller were doing manga-inspired work over by the time he did Ronin, for example.  Eastman and Laird have made a decades-long career out of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles which, originally, was a direct parody/homage to some of the same material that inspired Miller.Folks also need to remember that anime is informed by Western culture just as much.  Bubble Gum Crisis stole very heavily and blatantly from Blade Runner, for example.  Much early anime and manga was inspired by American animators and European comics.  That those influences are coming back around should hardly be surprising.  Anime and manga artists were drawing their inspiration not just from Osamu Tezuka and Shotaro Ishinomori, but also from folks like Jack Kirby, Moebius, Richard Corben and Enki Bilal.More recent artists may or may not be directly influenced by manga and anime, but the youngest generation of Western artists certainly is informed by any and all of these sources.  The problem with this sort of discussion is that apparently no one can even agree what anime IS, let alone the scope of its influence.  The Seven Samurai was influenced John Ford westerns and kabuki theater.  The Magnificent Seven was, in turn, a copy of that.  The Dark Tower, by Stephen King, takes inspiration from BOTH of them.  And to bring us back to Japan, a story arc in the second Fist of the Northstar series (aka Hokuto no Ken 2) featured characters called the "Wasteland Seven", which was the film's title in Japan and are modeled after the cowboys.My point is that you can't ask to remove the influence (especially with some folks saying applying the same definition to anime that they do to pornography...making it a total personal and subjective label), so much as select the art that you like.  Much of the illustrations shown here don't feature anime tropes or even specifically anime-inspired layouts.  American and European comics have featured many of these techniques since the late 60s and early 70s.  And each group can influence the other, sometimes in subtle and not-so-subtle ways.The Paizo artwork, for example, is clearly by some artists who very consciously are influenced and possibly even are attempting to emulate the anime style (I forget their names...the Kim brothers?  Memory fails me).  On the other hand, some of the art presented here as 'anime' doesn't really have any obvious point-at elements of anime you can name.  Dynamic layouts certainly aren't an anime or manga exclusive thing.  A lot of what I see above was the kind of stuff Kirby was doing in the early 1960s, before manga OR anime really existed in any sort of quantity.<img src="http://comicology.net/wp-content/uploads/2007/05/kirby-contest.png" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " data-size="" style="" />And one final thing to consider:  When Osamu Tezuka pretty much invented what we now consider MANGA and ANIME, his style of art was considered WESTERN.</blockquote>

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