Most comic book artists draw comic books. As a result, it's a common occupation or hobby for characters in media. These characters are typically very Genre Savvy or Wrong Genre Savvy and possibly Fourth Wall-breaker. Most often they are aspiring Comic Artists / Mangaka who work on Sequential Artworks (Comics, Doujin, or Manga) to sell at Fan Conventions. Sometimes these can take the form of an Author Avatar relating problems they had or have making their work. They tend to have a penchant for Cosplay generally as the characters in their own works, or works they're fans of.
In Japan, they are more often Female and are often Yaoi Fan Girls. Males are far more common in the Western world thanks to the western idea that Comic Books are for boys.
A common Superpower for these characters is Art Initiates Life.
Examples:
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Anime and Manga
- Cool-Kyou Shinsha has had multiple mangaka across his various series that range from doujinshi (Mayotama and Miki in I Can't Understand What My Husband Is Saying, Takiya and Fafnir in Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid), to hentai (Mizuki in Paranoia Cage), to mainstream manga (Yuzu from Metsuko ni Yoroshiku)
- There are a few mangaka characters in 20th Century Boys, whose philosophizing about manga is a reflection of the author's own opinions.
- Bakuman。's entire premise is two teenagers forming a two-person mangaka team, with one as the artist and the other as the storywriter. They publish manga at the Shonen Jump, aiming for their series to become an anime. Several characters are also manga authors publishing their own series in the same magazine.
- Even a Monkey Can Draw Manga tells the tale of a loser aspiring to draw a successful manga. It's a parody of "How to draw manga" books, the Japanese comic industry, the conventions and cliches of manga, and generally very apt.
- The main character of Freesoul, Keito, is an aspiring mangaka.
- The protagonist of I Am a Hero works as an assistant manga artist in the beginning of the series, though he strives to one day become a professional mangaka in his own right. These plans are interrupted by an ill-timed Zombie Apocalypse, however.
- Rohan Kishibe of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure Part 4 is a mangaka. His struggles as an artist are shown in his own spinoff chapters, and he also very briefly cameos close to the end of Part 6. Hirohiko Araki says that Rohan isn't meant to be his Author Avatar, but fans have their suspicions anyway.
- Monthly Girls' Nozaki-kun has Umetaro Nozaki, the eponymous "Nozaki-kun," who writes under the Pen Name of Sakiko Yumeno.
- Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei, Harumi Fujiyoshi specifically is a Yaoi Doujin artist with an obsession with pairings. First seen drawing by hand but by season 2 she upgrades to digital.
Comic Books
- Angel and the Ape: Sam Simeon is an intelligent comic book artist who happens to be a talking gorilla.
- Steve Rogers (aka Captain America) is a professional illustrator and cartoonist, and at one time was the writer/artist for the in-universe Captain America comic book.
- Green Lantern Kyle Rayner is a professional comic book artist and writer. If he's fighting alongside other Lanterns, this tends to be shown as influencing his style of combat.
- Scribbly, the main character in what would later become the Golden Age Red Tornado strips, was a young boy who wandered around his neighbourhood drawing cartoons of what was happening. In the later DC mythos, Scribbly went on to work for a newspaper as a cartoonist. Granted, the strip was meant to be semi-autobiographical...
- Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, who started out as an Author Avatar (but was NOT actually meant to be Jhonen Vasquez), was once a talented artist now fallen to drawing the deranged stick figure comics of Happy Noodle Boy. The worse Nny's mental condition deteriorates, the less sense his comics make. Meanwhile, Nny's ex-girlfriend Devi gets a job painting illustrations for Nerve Publishing's books, which is an absolutely horrible place to work at that actively tries to break creativity. Naturally, the latter was written when Vasquez was still working for Nickelodeon.
- After Alan Moore retooled Supreme as a homage to Superman, the Clark-Kent-equivalent character was a comic book artist, and the Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen equivalents were comic book writers.
Film
- In Secondhand Lions Walter grows up to be a comic strip artist, with a strip called "Walter and Jasmine", about a boy and his pet lion, which he based on his own experiences as a child.
Live Action TV
- Caroline in the City focused around the life of cartoonist Caroline Duffy.
Newspaper Comics
- The father in the somewhat-autobiographical family in The Family Circus is a cartoonist.
- Jon Arbuckle from Garfield is officially a cartoonist, but he's almost never shown doing his job.
Webcomics
- Sequential Art focuses on Art, a Sequential Artist.
