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Newbie Manga Artist Opens Up On Twitter About Abusive Editorial Department

The artist wants to raise awareness about harsh workplace environment through his manga.

Twitter user @kokekokkooooo__ , who claims to be a manga artist posing as a chicken, drew and uploaded a short manga to the platform which talked about the abuse that was meted out to him (or her) by the editorial department of a certain magazine.

According to the artist, the editors criticized his work in a very bad way. The scenario detailed in the manga revealed that the editors ridiculed the art, saying it was crap and that the manga was stupid.

They concluded that the artist’s drawings were too bad to be published anymore, as it would lower the standards of the magazine in question.

The editor who was responsible for coordinating with the manga artist said that the meetings that he had with him were a pain and that comparing notes with him were not worth it. When the artist tried to point out that he had never missed a deadline, the editor called him a “low-level” artist and said that he’d be better off publishing his work on the web or some other medium.

The artist was very shocked with the feedback that he had received from the editors. While he understood that it is an editor’s decision to choose a manga to be published in the magazine, the artist believed that there was a better way of pointing out mistakes.

He was of the opinion that editors should be grateful to the artists who provide them with manga, just as an artist who is grateful to the editors for publishing their work.

The artist claimed that he drew the manga, not to highlight a mangaka’s cruel life, but to raise awareness about the abusiveness at workplace. According to him, words should be chosen more carefully in a workplace, even while pointing out someone’s mistake.

“Even if there are problems on both sides, you should choose the words, and can you say the same thing in a non-one-to-one situation?” the artist tweeted.

He further added that the magazine in question did not pay him a manuscript fee, despite claiming to be “magazine rated”.

“When I was approached to write the book, they were reluctant to pay me a manuscript fee,” the author wrote in his post. “You wouldn’t want to work at a place that doesn’t offer an hourly rate or salary, would you, if you were reading this article?”

Manuscript fees are like an “hourly rate” or “base salary,” that most publishers decide to offer an artist. It is finalized on at the beginning.

The artist however did not reveal the name of this magazine or the editorial department as he did not want his actions to affect the activities of other manga artists who were associated with them.

Source: Twitter, Note