My relationship with manga and anime goes back to childhood. Whenever I visited my family in Chile, my mornings would start early, sitting in front of the TV watching an arrangement of anime shows before the day began. Coming back to the UK was somewhat disappointing in comparison. Apart from shows like Batman, X-Men, or Spider-Man, Western cartoons felt flat. I could never find the anime that offered ridiculous humour, visual intensity and more importantly understandable visual narratives.
Each trip to Chile also meant picking up manga. I didn’t just enjoy the stories; I studied the artwork. The compositions of characters and worlds, the way emotions was drawn into faces and bodies. Recreating what I was reading which eventually led me to create my own one or two page comics. At the time, I didn’t think of this as “learning,” but looking back, this was my first engagement with visual storytelling.
That early exposure shaped how I think and work as an illustrator now. Manga pushed me toward narrative-led image-making. It influenced how I think about anatomy, exaggeration, movement, and atmosphere. It also gave me permission to explore the strange, the surreal, and the emotional without needing to justify it. I felt as though manga/anime existed beyond boundaries and western comics/cartoons regulated itself, it felt too safe.
Manga is often first published serially in weekly or monthly magazines, sometimes hundreds of pages long, before being collected into volumes. This industrial and cultural structure has no real Western equivalent, which partly explains why it is often misunderstood (Berndt, 2018).
Anime is closely linked but distinct. Often adapted from manga, anime translates these stories into moving image. As Understanding Manga and Anime suggests, anime operates through timing, framing, and motion in ways that align more with film than print comics.
From the late 1980s onwards, titles like Akira opened the door for manga and anime in the West (Usher, 2016). Since then, their influence has spread across illustration, film, fashion, music, and games. Despite this, within my experience of formal art education, manga and anime has often been treated as secondary or derivative.
In my own education, my interest in manga was discouraged. I was steered toward Rembrandt, Degas, and the Western principles. While those artists are important, manga was framed as irrelevant, unserious, or something to “grow out of.”
This dismissal reflects what Stuart Hall (1997) describes as struggles over representation and cultural value. Manga does not fit comfortably into Western hierarchies of art, so it is often misread or reduced. Yet its global reach and influence make it impossible to ignore. Manga and anime are not marginal practices they are central to contemporary visual culture.