Random thoughts about comics, manga, and other fun stuff from a pop culture addict

So I'm finally starting a blog. Even though I've thought about doing so for years I never got off my lazy butt to do it. My primary motivation for this is that I'm drawing comics again, after a long self-imposed hiatus. I had a brief fling with a comics career back during college and shortly after, when I worked for some small independent companies and also self-published my own comic called Athena. During that time, I used to write small columns about the art of comics in the liner notes of the issues or on our raggedy website. It became a fun thing to do, often more fun than doing the comic itself. So, since I'm drawing comics again, I decided to pick this habit back up since it seems to help me organize my own thoughts on the unique art form of comics and I hope that some people out there will enjoy it as well.

I guess I should start things off with the name of this blog, which kind of happened by accident. I stumbled upon this entry in the Urban Dictionary for "comicker". I had heard the term before, most prominently used in the Japanese how-to series named Comickers. I had no idea that it had made its way into pop culture so much as to become an entry in the Urban Dictionary. Then the example sentence they used for this entry hit me like a bolt of lightning: "I am a comicker".

Language is a funny thing, and you can tell a lot about a culture or society by its language. What words are often used and what words are non-existent can paint a fairly accurate picture of what that particular society considers important or not. Since I'm semi-fluent in Mandarin and have a working knowledge of Japanese, I can see that the differences can be huge. One of the most important words in Chinese, xiào, can be roughly translated into filial piety. The fact that there's no commonly used English word to describe that idea shows how little the concept is valued in American society. Another example is the Swedish word lagom, which has no equivalent in our culture of excess but can be loosely defined as "perfection in just the right amount". One last example from our own backyard is the recent proliferation of American terms used for sexy older women: cougar, milf, etc. Just a few decades ago, the idea that older women could be found sexually desirable by younger men, and even become sexual predators, was probably considered inconceivable by the general public. Now new words must be invented to describe something that is becoming increasingly commonplace.

Anyway, I've always had a major gripe with the lack of a broad term in English for a comic creator who writes and draws the comic. In Japanese, they are called mangaka, with the suffix character -ka indicating a person's profession. Therefore, a person who makes manga is called a mangaka. Simple, no? Here in the West, the common practice of dividing the task of creating a comic into distinct writing and art duties has forced a separation of terminology into "comic writer" and "comic artist". So, for those of us who feel the compulsion and need to write and draw our comics, we're left with clumsy terms such as "comic creator" or "comic writer and artist", or even worse, a confusing misnomer such as "cartoonist". So, I'm all in favor of this new term that describes the profession with elegance and simplicity.

I am a comicker.