The best comparison to how Manga is structured and created would be American Newspaper Comic Strips. Creator controlled and owned, but distributed via an aggregate publisher.
And to answer
@Jetpack Himmler question, the ownership with Manga will depend on the contracts between the creator and the publisher. But generally the creator holds a key piece of it. The point where the creator may lose creative control is when it is optioned for animeor film, and committee rule takes over. Manga is almost never a publisher hiring MangaKa as work for hire to create IP for the publisher in house. Rather Manga contracts with the creator to publish hisor her IP and work.
I actually think the best comparison to manga is the original Hellblazer run.
For those not in the know, Hellblazer was the John Constantine book. John originally appeared in Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing, but he proved popular enough to be spun off into his own book. It lasted for 300 issues, being moved over to DC’s Vertigo imprint (the original real Vertigo, not whatever Frankenstein abomination it is now) before issue 100. That meant John was more or less in his own seperate continuity and that if you wanted to follow his story, there was just one book you had to pick up every month. Sure it wasn’t all just one writer, but each new writer actually provided a new spin on the story, meaning it never got too stale. The Vertigo imprint allowed the story to feature mature elements, and basically allowed the writers to tackle whatever screwed-up shit they felt like.
The story actually advanced, too. Characters came into John’s life, and then moved out of it again. His girlfriends died and got damned to hell over and over again, and that actually weighed on him as a person. John faced consequences for his actions. When he got a scar on his face, it didn’t get removed, he just had a scar now. And most importantly, he actually aged as a character just like the readers did, going from a young Sting look-alike to a haggard middle-aged man. All of this made the story feel so much more real and impactful than pretty much any story of this length I had ever experienced.
Hellblazer was cancelled in 2013 as part of an effort to bring John Constantine into the main DC universe, and this was a huge turning point in my personal comics fandom. When John moved to the main universe again, he started having to play by the rules that everyone else did. He was reverted to his late-20s/early-30s, and he transformed from an evolving “real” character into an unchanging icon who could never change, just like Superman or Batman. He joined a Justice League spin-off team. And all the mature elements were stripped away to make sure John could be sold in books with that T for Teen lable.
John Constantine is more popular now than ever. He has his own on-again-off-again Hellblazer book in the mainline DC continuity, he’s starred in his own failed TV show and an animated movie, and you can catch him every week on the CW in Legends of Tomorrow. (God, what a fucking stupid name for a show) But I think it’s telling that in order to reach that popularity, Constantine had to be reduced from a developed mature character into a brand.