Old School (Part 13)

By: Brian Mah

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Besides downloading, what are the other biggest hurdles for artists today?
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Patrick Macias: Money, exposure, language and culture barriers.

Rikki Simons: Large publishing houses with connections to management firms and Hollywood demanding creator's movie, TV, and ancillary rights, and the demands of those same publishers to give up your moral rights: it's not worth it. It's not worth giving up your freedom for a lousy $20k advance. Prose, manga and comics and web comics are the last places where a creator can control their work and render their visions without producers or contemporary establishments there to water them down for mass consumption.

Tavisha Wolfgarth-Simons: Finding the right attitude. I'm a very humble artist and it still shocks me whenever I encounter other artists with big egos. Too many times I encounter a new artist out to "prove" something, instead of actually honestly enjoying their art and craft. I think a lot of respect is lacking these days towards fellow artists. I still call classic manga mentors "sensei" when most of this generation merely refers to them as "mangaka".

Jan Scot-Fraizer: Originality. I see rehashes of rehashes of rehashes and it's tiring and uninteresting. I find this is a great difficulty with the creators of today, particularly the children of mass media and entertainment as commodity. Tezuka and Disney and Jack Kirby were inspired by radio shows, classic films, classic literature and their own boundless imaginations. The next generation grew up on the work those folks created and the classics as well, which gave them an even larger horizon. The next generation lost the classics and by the time they were teenagers the magic of going to a movie in a theater and reading a great old novel was mostly gone, replaced by home video and hundreds of movies pumped out purely for profit. The next generation grew up on their own replacements of the earlier replacements and I think that their stories have lost a lot of the dynamics of the older stories. There will always be great movies and great stories but so much stuff is dumped in the market now it's hard to find them. The worst part of it is that folks are merely repeating what they've seen before rather than analyzing it to find out what makes them like it so much. Without that you can't create a great story because great stories are about exploring themes and ideas deeply.