Review: Mangaka America

After a few moments flipping through the new Collins Design tome Mangaka America, I found myself wondering exactly who the target audience for this book is. I mean, besides the people at Tokyopop that wanted a nice book that people would pay for, something along the lines of the Spiegel catalog. Tokyopop inked a deal in Harper Collins in March of this year, and the company’s creators are given front-and-center attention in this scattershot collection of stock profiles, pinups, and tutorials.

The profiles seem to be compiled from the same email questionnaire sent to Tokyopop creators and their ilk and offer very little in the way of insight into the creators’ development process, instead choosing to have generic questions such as “What are your influences” without followup. There are exceptions, mostly because the creators had more to say than was asked; Corey Lewis acquits himself well, and I was impressed with Sabrina manga-fier Tania Del Rio, who manages to come across as professional and passionate about what she does. The pinups (of varying artistic merit) scattered throughout the book are occasionally frustratingly undersized, but the reproduction quality is sublime – probably not a surprise in the digital age. I can’t really say much about the tutorials – some, such as “Lindsay + Jared’s” step-by-step for screentoning in Photoshop seemed quite helpful and others seemed to be too brief for someone to find them useful in any real way.

If Collins Design wants to put out a tutorial book featuring American manga creators, they should do just that. If Collins Design wants to put out a book profiling American manga creators and featuring their work, they should do just that. This schizophrenic, badly-designed book serves too many masters, and does it poorly. Adam Warren’s introduction, however, is quite interesting and zippiply written. It could probably be expanded to an interesting longform essay or book that I’d pay cash money to read on its own.