Trying to cater your comic to a Franco-Belgian or Japanese audience makes more sense than trying to cater to an American one at this point, admittedly. Especially France and Belgium, as those guys read comics by the friggin truckload.

(An important caveat here, however is that France reads comics because their comics are actually good.)

Japanese comics vary a lot more in quality; plenty of really, really good stuff and absolute garbage in equal measure. The industry over there can support this because it’s ginormous and highly competitive.

Ultimately, American comic creators need to learn that, rather than aping surface level aesthetics common in either of these industries in a vain attempt at capitalizing on them, we need to dig deeper and actually analyze what made them a success to begin with.

the cartoon and the comic industries here are filled with people who grew up on stuff like toonami, for example,but the best they can do in attempting to replicate the success of the Japanese animation and comics they love so much is drawing a character doing the Akira bike slide

Its geared towards American nostalgia for old anime and manga localizations rather than showing an actual understanding of why Akira and other works became the juggernauts they are. This is why we see so many, “lol the 90s were so epic” and “Pokemon jelly donuts” kinda moments.

This is why it’s important to look towards other comic markets like Europe and Japan. No one understands why people like manga more than the Japanese. No one understands why Asterix and Tintin are such universally loved comics more than France does.

Learn from them.