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Honestly, I was excited because I like the manga art style.

OEL creators are constrained by this same limitation, and have accordingly adapted their creative offerings to appeal to a big, young chunk of the market. Which brings us to the big, omnipresent thing that OEL titles simply don’t have at this point, and one of the domains that manga must concede to US creations: the ability to tell a distinctly American story in a manga format and have it be written by an American author.

The issue isn’t that it can’t be done, but rather, that our current market won’t allow it to be. Even if a visionary, thoughtful creator emerged and produced a visionary, groundbreaking piece of work, who would publish it? OEL is on shaky legs as it is. Ask a company to take a risk on an adult oriented, culturally serious title?

the vast majority of "manga-influenced" and "OEL" comic artists in America today are influenced by shojo manga, far more than shonen manga.

The other editor felt that the reason was, this audience hasn't matured yet. Prior to Sailor Moon and the Tokyopop explosion (which was mostly buoyed by shojo manga and shonen romantic manga like Love Hina), the number of seriously manga-influenced artists in the U.S. was negligible. Since then, a whole generation of excellent artists has developed, mostly influenced by the things which manga did which American comics didn't do -- shojo and romantic material. This other editor felt that the future Naruto-and-Bleach-influenced artists simply weren't old enough yet.

As someone who was in the trenches at the start of this trend, as an editor, and later as a writer, I’d like to say once and for all that OEL was most certainly not coined by Tokyopop. Tokyopop just called all of its works “manga.” The company’s line was/is not to have a distinction in classification between books created in Japan, Korea, Europe or the Americas. “OEL” was first coined, if I remember correctly, by the folks on the Anime on DVD manga forums, as many folks didn’t like (and still don’t like) Tokyopop’s blanket usage of the term.

The real subtext of Hoffman’s comment seems to be authenticity — OEL manga fails because it isn’t created and published in Japan. Yet authenticity is a more elusive concept than most of us are willing to admit. Most of us call something “authentic” when we think it exemplifies cultural traits that are inaccessible to outsiders.