How To Be A Manga Superstar

Fame game Pro artists at the top of their game tell Tom May how they’ve been able to attract global acclaim for their manga artwork

Manga is in rude health, and if you paint it you’re in good company. It’s now possible for manga artists to amass hundreds of thousands of social media followers, get crowdfunded via sites like Patreon, sell their art commercially, and even go and live and work in Japan itself.

But how do you go about it? Here, four artists who have found success share their advice on how to follow in their footsteps.

The first, and perhaps most obvious, point is that you need to get your art in front of people. “If you create a lot of illustrations but don’t post them anywhere, nothing’s going to happen,” says Ilya Kuvshinov, a Russian artist based in Tokyo with 1.3 million Instagram followers (@kuvshinov_ilya). “It can be scary to expose your work publicly, but there’ll be people who love it – trust me!”

Just posting in one place, though, may not be enough, says Larienne Chan. Better known as Lärienne or Princess Lärienne, the Polish illustrator has made a huge impact on the DeviantArt community, which honoured her with its ‘Deviousness’ award in 2016. But she’s also built strong bases on Instagram (@ lariennechan), Tumblr and the online Japanese art community, Pixiv.

Fierce competition

“Some people think just being good is enough, but unfortunately that’s no longer true,” Larienne says. “In these times of constantly changing algorithms and fierce competition, you never know where clients or fans are coming from, so you need to be in as many places as possible.”