#ochibarf

I know this is a really endearing quality for a lot of the fans, but tbh I'm really not big on Damian pivoting into manga/comic art. It's not egregious to me or anything, and it has brought some cute/fun moments, but I have never been able to buy into why it needs to be this way in the first place.

I have a few issues with Williamson's characterisation of Damian, which has ended up becoming somewhat of a soft "reboot"? It pretty much comes down to him taking the "easy way out" to make Damian more palatable, even if it doesn't service his past or present development.

Manga and anime is at the height of popularity with teenagers at the moment, and I can't shake the feeling that Damian was somewhat forced into this box as a quick and easy way to seem more relatable.

Damian was already established to be incredibly gifted in life drawing, and perhaps Williamson took that at face value for Damian being an "artsy kid". Life drawing was a soft skill among his foundational training that Damian seemingly has a genuine passion in; a way to communicate and show his quiet observations, and through that, his thoughtfulness for the world around him.

Not to sound like I'm saying "anime art is inferior" (I was the anime kid in class, goodness!), so please don't twist my words. But to me, what makes Damian so compelling is the constant "otherness" that he feels, and I think it's more powerful if the character themselves, and the writers are able to embrace that in a positive way. There's a something poignant about how Damian was "drawing mozart" at that age with no sense of pretention or ego.

But he's just a hormonal teenager, of course he's going to express himself through art! But every time his little self-insert manga is brought up, I can't help but to think about if there was any other way to convey this, without the excuse of Damian just randomly finding a manga on the street one day.

Like imagine if Damian just had pages of his sketchbook filled with life-like pencil renders of Nika instead of a caricature/persona? Doesn't that just seem so much more sweet and sincere? Similarly to how a portraiture artist is able to pull the essence out of a muse? Romantic, in a way that the woman who raised him would adore?

But what if you want to keep the teen angst and dorkiness? What if Damian used his technical skills to draw in his self-inserts through fantastical illustrations, inspired by the stories of ancient heroes and champions that he grew up admiring. I'm talking about the likes of Frank Frazetta, Boris Vallejo, Manuel Sanjulian etc., during the height of 80s high fantasy poster art.

(Ignore the content of the examples here, but instead focus the dream-like quality of sketches. Examples are in order of the mentioned artists.)

In no way am I implying that this is any better of a direction, but imagine how delightfully cringe it would be (equally so to a self-insert manga) if we had this kid with the existing art skills of a realist painter, and he just starts churning out day-dream sketches of himself as some kind of heroic knight, and Nika as a badass damsel for him to save. I personally think it would be awful (wonderful). Damian gets to keep his embarrassing teenage phase, whilst still building upon his past established development.

Obviously there's nothing wrong with Damian reading manga, or anything to argue for it being OOC, and I can think of several ways you can spin it. I just wish that the justification for it was earned through the writing before we all just start running with it as the new status quo. And also, to not forget why artist Damian was/is such an effective window into to character in the first place.