Are Anime and Manga artists welcome?

 :rolleyes: Now what ever gave you that impression? >hides Japanese dictionary behind back & looks innocent<

 I have lots of art along THOSE lines sitting around from my worldlier (read "less discriminatory") days. Sadly the images are of copyrighted characters, so I don't feel right about posting anything like that myself. But sooner or later I'll get brave and start doing my fiction characters, and then I'll probably have lots of this style of art to share. I'm just a "noob" (newbie) when it comes to realistic art. (It's easy to cheat in photoshop on realism, but my hand skills are lacking.)

There are actually discussions I've seen about whether or not this style counts as "art" but I say absolutely. If any cartoon (regardless of nationality) can be counted as art, then this can too. Actually there are some quite impressive Japanese artists who do very realistic work in that field. (Moral content aside.) I think the question, on a slightly deeper note, is simply what it's content is, not so much what style it is.

If my memory serves me correctly, not all great Catholic art has been super-realistic. Seems one of the more recent SSPX calendars featured a kind of art some people might consider "lacking" because it wasn't realistic looking, but which nevertheless drew the mind to think upon what was represented in them. The idea with that style, in fact, was to take the emphasis off of the artist, and even I think off of how magnificent the work was (or wasn't), and to put ALL of the focus on the subject matter. Seems to have caught on pretty well.


NOTE: If you don't know what anime is, trust me, you're better off NOT knowing. The more Catholic you become in spirit, the more you realize that like movies in general, there isn't a lot out there we, as Catholics, could watch. I remain enamored with the artistic style, (which among other things is easier for me to draw), but I've had to more or less get out of anime as I turned more and more to God in my life.