Seattle sisters teach others the Japanese style of cartooning
Lisa Heyamoto wrote:Showing someone the first comic book you ever drew falls into the same category as naked baby pictures and seventh-grade poems.
"It's so embarrassing," protests Danielle Pelham, 19, as her sister pulls "Guiding Light" out of its manila envelope and spreads it on the table of their Northgate anime store....
Before Nicole Pelham learned to call it manga, the idea of realistic-acting-if-not-looking characters had been knocking around in her brain for years. She'd been writing mini-novels with elaborate plots, but could never fully articulate exactly what she wanted the characters to look like. It wasn't until she saw her first anime that the idea took shape.
Manga is both anime's predecessor and its evolution. Before, say, Pokémon was cereal-side entertainment, the stories were playing out in the pages of a manga. After Pokémon made it big, interest in its original manga began to grow....
