Manga in #fourcomics

A week ago, Twitter users started posting cover images (or sometimes interior pages/panels) of “four comics that influenced you when you were growing up” (Jim Zub’s original wording). The Beat posted a summary of participating comic creators. Most of them are middle-aged Americans, so I wondered if they had selected any manga at all. And indeed they had:

1. Akira (Scott Snyder, Jim Demonakos)
2. Battle Angel Alita (Jake Parker, Jennifer de Guzman)
3. Appleseed (Brandon Graham)
4. Blade of the Immortal (Becky Cloonan)
5. Children of the Sea (Sarah Horrocks)
6. Jing: King of Bandits (Zachary Clemente)
7. Ranma 1/2 (Becky Cloonan)
8. Sand Land (Zachary Clemente)

Clearly, some people interpreted the challenge differently and chose comics that they must have read as adults. Interestingly, while Akira was chosen twice, no one chose Lone Wolf and Cub. Then again, the selection of comics creators (32 people) in this The Beat blogpost is quite limited. Unfortunately, most Twitter users posted only images and not the titles as text, so it’s not feasible to automatically compile them into a list.