Adis, also know as Adrian Ramos – the man behind Count You Sheep – has announced another strip. The second strip, dubbed No Room for Magic, isn’t a totally new project, but rather one he hasn’t worked of for a while and wanted to bring back. According to his web site Adis will be taking Magic in a different direction than if had before.
The strip will hosted at Keenspot and will begin with updating every Thursday, except this week with one today in addition to tomorrow’s strip. The new strip and an archive of previous strips posted over September and the fist of October can be found here.
For those who haven’t read any of Adis’s stuff, it’s not your regular web comic, but is still excellent. If I weren’t such a bastion of manliness, it would be the only strip to make me cry, in a good way.
If you’ve ever heard any for/against manga arguments and not understood or just want some more quotes for your own, Piro, the artist for MegaTokyo posted a fairly in depth rant on his feelings on what really is manga. I don’t take sides on this issue, but still found it interesting and helpful. Read it here.
With anime styles ranging from neigh realism to extreme super deformity, I have a hard time defining even traditional manga/anime. It is like grouping Loonytoons, Exosquad, and The Simpsons into one category and calling it \”cartoons!\” Wait… we DO do that… well, if we are going to be so inclusive in our labeling of \”traditional\” works, I don\’t see why the online world will be any different. Like Piro said, others will label your work if you don\’t, and it seems that people are used to using broad groups with poorly defined edges.
My only problem with the whole Manga label is how widespread the amount of Japanese influence on comics and even American Culture is today. (Not even comics: American Idol and Fear Factor are literally repackaged Japanese shows from the 1980\’s.) Its massive influence is making the term slowly but surely redundant outside of manga-centric communities. Is Sexy Losers a manga? I wouldn\’t call VGcats a \”manga\” comic, but the guy even addresses the fact that a lot of the expressions he uses are overtly Japanese in origin. (http://www.vgcats.com/comics/?strip_id=148)
Hell, over at UGO.com they posted a few of the new Spiderman pages with the redesigned Doc Octopus design on them and I can\’t even pretend the manga influence isn\’t right there on the page.
The whole \”fluid character design\” aspect of anime/manga is liberating for a lot of people, self included. Labelling what you do as Manga comes with a lot of baggage and assumptions…but it\’s just a word. The same applies to calling something a webcomic. It\’s just a word. The definition of that word shouldn\’t define what it is that you do.
-jared
\”who apologies for sounding preachy. Hell, I\’m just rambling. Nevermind.\”