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Hello, Welcome to my humble dwelling! I am a hobbyist web comic/manga artist… I try to draw inspiration from life and history and write the best stories I could! I hope you’ll enjoy your stay here.
My Webcomics
This is a collection of all ongoing/complete web comic stories of lengths both long and short by miracaro (me!). The catalogue is still growing, so be sure to check back once every so often for updates!
Long Stories
As with most artists, there are comic ideas or concepts that stuck with me through the years. These are the stories that I will dedicate my life to, and they are not going to be short. But without any publisher obligation, they will have a definitive end. I swear!
Wandering Souls: A World With Just the Two of Us
Short Stories
Not all ideas are meant to be expanded into a 700-volume manga series. Some are probably best kept limited in scope. Sometimes I get inspired by a 7 hour documentary I just watched. Or a 3 minute music video. Or a mistake I made at work. I want to be able to explore these ideas but not have to overthink it. Here are the results.
About Me
Hi! I am miracaro, or miraculous carrot! I’m a hobbyist manga/web comic artist. I aim to create web comics with a strong emotional core and simultaneously explore the micro (human relationships) and the macro (society and history). I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I do writing them!
I always wanted to be a manga artist watching Digimon, Inuyasha, Naruto… but as I grew older I also grew tired of the tropes in mainstream Japanese anime and manga. It may be in large part due to my family and I moving to North America where Japanese anime/manga culture is considered foreign and weird, and I started seeing why outsiders would think that way. Fan service had always been awkward, yet I was never disgusted by it than I was until that point. Hayao Miyazaki once said in an interview,
“[Almost all Japanese animation are] produced by humans who can’t stand looking at other humans.”
I wouldn’t go so far as to say most of Japanese animation has been created by people with no life experience or empathy, who only have a limited perspective on the world based on the anime they grew up with; but it made a lot of sense.
For years I stopped following Japanese manga and animation entirely. Despite that, my dream of drawing manga never really go away, and instead I looked to film for narrative inspirations.
A few more years passed, and reality kicked in: being a manga artist isn’t a feasible career path, not in anywhere outside of Japan. Living a “normal adult” life taught me many things about people.
It was also around this time I understood I can’t be a wannabe film director who doesn’t watch films. When I immersed myself into the world of manga again, I realized it was I who had a limited view of the medium. There’s a whole world of manga out there, written by authors who can write everyday emotions without being melodramatic, tangible characters that are deeply flawed but also undeniably relatable, and traditional narratives built upon human relationships and not tropes. It is a shame that the manga industry in Japan is largely based on traditional publishing schedules and business practices, which greatly stifles creativity.
My on-off relationship with manga only strengthened my resolve be the artist young me would read and fall in love with. I hope you can join me on this journey as well.
Come say hi!
facebook: miraculouscarrot
instagram: @miracaro.comics
email: contact@miraculous-carrot.com
About My Comics/Manga.
The following is clearly SEO text. Please don’t waste your time reading.
Why is it “comics” and not “manga”? (or vice versa) AKA What is manga (really)?
Ah, the tough question. Does “manga” have to be written by Japanese people, or be inherently tied to the culture, or just have to have a certain art style? Does “comic” just mean sequential art, or has it become synonymous with the “Western” or more realistic/cartoony style? I mean can I call my stuff Manhwa (Korean), or Manhua (Chinese)?
The fact is you can get entirely different answers asking different people. Given my history with manga, I started drawing in a Japanese “manga” art style but then there was a large period of life where I didn’t look to the East for inspiration at all, leading to a style I think feels more culturally “Western”. So while it’s undeniable my style looks like “manga”, it’s not really manga at heart.
It comes down to the question of how I’d present my work. If I say I draw “comics”, the first thing that comes to mind is probably Garfield or X-men type stories. If I say I draw “manga”, people think of Naruto or Sailor Moon and its surrounding culture. If I call it “manga-comic hybrid”, that’s just pretentious.
So to avoid that mess I’ve decided to just call my stuff comics/manga. A bit of both worlds, I’ll let you –dear reader– decide what it really is.
Why is it read from left to right unlike *real* manga? It’s confusing. AKA Why is manga read from left to right?
Unless you are used to reading manga already, it’s unlikely you would know to read from right to left. Instead of blindly following conventions of manga, it’s important to note WHY it’s read that way. You see, East Asian languages are character-based and look “blocky”. Traditionally, Japanese and Chinese are written from top to bottom, then right to left; unlike Latin-based languages which are spelt/written from left to right, then top to bottom.
Most manga write dialogue top to bottom right to left. While the text looks fine in the textbox in, let’s say, a Chinese translation of a manga, it’s a different matter for a language like English. Those speech bubbles were not drawn to fit in English words, hence you get the awkward hyphenized words so oftenly seen in English translations of manga.
I chose to draw left to right because that way of reading is much more universal (hence natural to most readers). Many Asian language books (even some manga) are printed from left to right as well. This is one of the examples of why I’m hesitant in calling my stuff “manga”.
… Wait, this isn’t an actual web comic! I’ve been duped! AKA What is a “web comic”?
Ahhh! As I mentioned before, I never really set out to draw a web comic, instead I just put my comics on the web. “Web comics” is a subcategory of the comic medium, and have developed some techniques that are unique to the viewing experience of being on the interwebs. These techniques include long scrolling panels, sound effects, animation, and even javascript (gasp!) triggered special events! It’s become its own thing, literally “outside the box”!
… and that’s probably not the experience you’ll get here. My problem with web comics is that it has also encouraged panelling to get lazy. Since it’s scrolling from top to bottom, many artists just draw a column of boxes. The narratives can still be enthralling (plus the aforementioned cool story telling techniques), but I personally prefer the ol’ framing stories in a panel in a sequence of panels in a page in a chapter. Hopefully you can see what I mean.
Why does it take so long for a chapter to come out? AKA Why can’t you draw faster???
Unfortunately doing this doesn’t pay the bills, which means I work on this on the side. Plus, being a comic artist means I am the director, the screenwriter, and the actor. That’s a lot of stuff to think about (but I also love the control)!!!! I also try to put out work that I can be proud of, so I don’t want to rush it if I know things didn’t turn out the way I wanted them to.
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I read some of your stuff and I loved it!
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I read some of your stuff and they totally sucked.
Thank you! Tell me what you think on my facebook page!