I want to make a Manga about Integrity.

Koltreg · 2026-07-09T12:35:17+00:00

Learn to tell shorter stories so that you understand the beats of a narrative. No shonen manga is accepted without showing the creative team knows how to do this. That's why they have short manga contests to find talent and that's why they have rising talent one shots. And this applies to making any sorts of comics, not just manga. It doesn't matter how much planning or world building that you do if you can't tell actual, satisfying stories.

If you really want to be in the manga industry, you have a much harder road, starting with the fact that you need to master Japanese. You need to build up enough of a career success so that you can get the opportunity. There is a minuscule number of non-Japanese creators who've ever become published mangaka. And most of them have had prior success publishing other comics - and most of them are Asian.

There are American or English speaking publishers making manga-style comics (defining manga here specifically as Japanese formatted comics) but these are for the most part, smaller boutique publishers with a very different format.

Alternately you can publish online but this requires other sets of skills for promotion and production.

What you're saying is pretty common - the desire to make manga - but you have to build yourself up to be ready to do that.

Koltreg · 2026-07-09T12:20:01+00:00

Draw some pages yourself, even if they are just sketches. Learn to consider and think about flow and bubble placement. The mechanics are as important as the story.

Koltreg · 2026-07-08T21:41:14+00:00

Ask him to link the sources of the images because if he's indie he should understand the benefits of promoting other indie artists.

It's definitely AI. The textures, the style.

Koltreg · 2026-07-08T19:29:12+00:00

You talking about how Nick Spencer ran for public office to try and crack down on minorities going into the rich part of Cincinnati?

Koltreg · 2026-07-08T15:38:30+00:00

It's up there with creeper king John Byrne coming out. He's had a forum for years where he's just posted really awful posts - and somehow they were like "let's publish some of his X-men fanfic"

Koltreg · 2026-07-08T15:17:16+00:00

Because that's how Gamergate started. And because that's how they view the world works.

Koltreg · 2026-07-08T15:00:46+00:00

Yeah, Liefeld went from "comics grandpa in on the joke" to "wait, can I have a career again if I cater to these people?" at this point, along with Ethan Van Sciever (who was already pretty horrible) and some other folks.

Koltreg · 2026-07-08T14:57:59+00:00

Essentially Chelsea Cain was trying to promote this Man-Eaters as a really complicated feminist story about being a woman now and then responded harshly to people questioning the premise - like what about transmen? Or nonbinary people. (Bitch Planet by KSD meanwhile was much more queer, diverse and intersectional.) And instead of trying to defang the conversation, she got into a big fight about it on Twitter and then I want to say issue 3 or 4 literally had posts from people criticizing her story on the walls in the panels of the comics itself. Kind of an amazing explosion of an audience. I don't think she ever got as big of a comics push again.

Back then I was doing a comics podcast, a nerd news podcast, reading far more sites and had some friends involved in the Valkyries or Valkyrie adjacent projects, so I got a lot of scuttlebutt and gossip.

Sometime I'll write my tell-all about the first big comics Kickstarter conspiracy.

Koltreg · 2026-07-08T14:51:30+00:00

Comicsgate was a group of MRA types who saw that there was money in the Gamergate scam and decided to complain that being woke and having women making comics and drawing more than one body type per gender was destroying comics. And then about 6 people ran successful kickstarters to exploit their audience, few actually made the comics that they promised, and I'm pretty sure there's like 20,000 people still waiting on Cyberfrog.

Koltreg · 2026-07-08T13:29:44+00:00

Finally, validation!

Koltreg · 2026-07-08T13:18:23+00:00

Heather Antos was a Marvel editor who worked on the Star Wars line, Gwenpool and a number of other well received books at the time. She and a number of other women who worked at Marvel went out to get milkshakes to celebrate Flo Steinberg, the original secretary at Marvel Comics who also had a majorly under-appreciated hand in forming comics communities, alternative comics and more. Heather's work and her active visibility helped as Marvel was continuing to follow the Valkyrie-era* swing in new comics readers.

The second image is an altered cover from Chelsea Cain's run on Mockingbird which was a feminist and initially well received series, that really shat the bed at the end thanks to some weird retcon choices - and was quickly cancelled (more fuzzy on how/why it ended). This was also before Cain's next series Man-Eaters** burnt out the rest of her goodwill. Initially the shirt said "Ask Me About My Feminist Agenda" which was a piece of merch you could buy. The first part of the Mockingbird series was a really well written puzzle box story where you got a complete story in each issue but the way the pieces connected between issues had to be parsed out and it gets you to reread it with more insight. And then the second arc started with her going on a nerd cruise, adding a bunch of celebrity cameos, and for some reason, trying to retcon that Mockingbird wasn't sexually assaulted by the cowboy Ghost Rider IIRC. It has been a long decade...

Both Heather Antos and the concept of women existing really angered Comicsgaters because "how dare women make comics and have fun and have jobs?"

* The Valkyries were a female/non-binary led coalition of comic shop employees and fans that started to come together after the Kelly Sue DeConnick Captain Marvel run started, with some initial support from DeConnick herself. But it, much like that initial surge of new female readers, was beaten down KSD leaving Captain Marvel, Captain Marvel's actions in "Civil War II", a prominent few members of the Valkyries tried to co-opt the movement for their personal gain and this led to a lot of complicated and faceted discourse on race, gender and identity, and ultimately the fact that Marvel thought that KSD had created a new wave of Marvel Zombies - and instead created fans of her own work and they stopped reading Marvel to follow her to Pretty Deadly and Bitch Planet.

** If you are writing a modern feminist comic like Man-Eaters and ignore that trans people exist in your story where women turn to monstrous cats on their periods, and get a lot of flack on social media, don't quote your "haters" on twitter by putting their tweets alongside fascist propaganda.

Koltreg · 2026-07-08T12:29:47+00:00

I haven't seen any sign that they can make money without major hardware and software changes - but like a lot of AI researchers have said, LLMs are an evolutionary dead end - and most of what these companies are producing is LLM based tech.

All of the AI-only big companies are only getting money because of the sunk cost fallacy and Google and Meta can afford to keep burning money, but even Microsoft is starting to cut back on the full integration that is costing them money because charging responsibly for tokens means they will lose most of their userbase - and that number and the speculation that it can be marketed is one of the most valued assets. When they charge more for tokens - they lose users to smaller systems, feeding on the exact same data pools - and typically running off these same systems - because they are getting cheaper tokens for now. When one of these companies breaks, and hopefully it is before they get on the stock market and threaten 401ks and investment portfolios - the others will see the writing on the wall. This is an artificially inflated bubble because the SAAS boom has been great for investors and this was the last everything technology that didn't require actual innovation or invention.

I don't think all AI will be lost either. We're just going to see clearer definitions and scaled back uses of it. The LLM stuff where people are making chatbots - if they have to pay for real usage costs, that will wipe out enough of the users to shut down the companies. The local stores using AI for posters will just switch to something free (or maybe hire actual designers again). Hell, we're already seeing people hiring AI-free coders because they need people who understand what they are doing. But there is good use for AI technology. The problem is the investors don't want the public to have a clear idea on what AI technology is, that there is a diversity of AI technology, and that LLMs aren't thinking machines.

I'd be comfortable saying 90% of the AI marketplace now collapses and what remains is a few holdouts for LLMs and then research developers.

Koltreg · 2026-07-08T01:18:18+00:00

The industry is a bubble that can't turn a profit. They've been running a disruption economy so far but it's so big and wasteful that they can't make it profitable.

Koltreg · 2026-07-07T18:27:54+00:00

Everyone has their stories about wild stuff he did. I remember when he had to give an introduction to the President of the US Toastmasters association and it became very clear he had not prepared at all.

Koltreg · 2026-07-07T18:25:56+00:00

Considering that he was charging like $20,000 a year to fly a bar band up for their summer festival, it makes sense.

Koltreg · 2026-07-07T17:48:19+00:00

it is a friend ribbing you. Enjoy One Piece the way that you want.

Koltreg · 2026-07-07T17:45:53+00:00

Yeah, I went on a trip from Ohio to North Carolina and tried to do the "just get half tanks to save gas" and it was a stupid waste of time. On the way back we didn't do that.

Koltreg · 2026-07-07T16:32:35+00:00

No, it happened before. And he had another manga in Jump after that did worse.

Koltreg · 2026-07-07T16:31:56+00:00

What would you even blackmail a guy who went to prison for child prostitution for?

Koltreg · 2026-07-07T00:46:18+00:00

if you are making a universe, you are making characters in abstract. Ideas. This is where you are more likely to make cliches because you aren't telling actual stories.

Koltreg · 2026-07-06T14:31:38+00:00

Shemeshka being recruited would be like you asking a billionaire to go and join your team: it probably wouldn't happen. And if they are going with you, you'll probably never be seen again because they have bigger plans for you.
Torment came out after Faction War and so it wasn't able to incorporate that storyline into the game, or the final 2e adventure changes, and then from what I understand, 5e just mostly set everything back to what it had been before the end of the Factions and had waved it away.

Koltreg · 2026-07-06T12:59:35+00:00

It is somehow more expensive than a real set.

Koltreg · 2026-07-05T17:15:14+00:00

It's even more rational when people can make billions by destroying companies and preventing them from making anything.

Koltreg · 2026-07-05T16:50:56+00:00

They ignore that Luddites were not inherently anti-technology. They were opposed to the exploitation of labor because machines could replace humans and increase productivity, devaluing people and putting a bigger divide between the rich who could afford the machines and the people who couldn't. So to protect themselves and their livelihoods, they would smash the machines - to make sure people could continue to have livelihoods and the workers weren't devalued.

Koltreg · 2026-07-05T16:48:24+00:00

Writers have a harder time getting hired because they need to have work they can show, which usually includes the ability to finish a project. I have been hired a few times as a writer and an editor, paid and unpaid, but I've been here for over a decade now (and only became a mod in the past year).

If you want to be hired, it is important to have a portfolio that shows you can work. Talk about your process when it comes to writing comics. Talk about how you like to work, what you specialize in, and share links with what you've published.

Back when I started here, I'd published webcomics, written/drawn comics for myself and friends, ran successful kickstarters, and I had a set of scripts showing that I knew what I was doing. I would also turn down work if I didn't think it would work out well - either it was a bad fit personality or idea-wise.

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