What does 漫画家 Mangaka mean?

Mangaka is the ordinary Japanese word for a person who makes manga. English usually renders it manga artist, which is not wrong about the drawing and is wrong about almost everything else.

The suffix is doing the work

漫画 is manga. 家 (ka) is the interesting part: as a suffix it marks a practitioner of a discipline, and it generates a whole family of occupations. 作家 (sakka) is an author. 画家 (gaka) is a painter. 音楽家 (ongakuka) is a musician.

The character on its own means house or household, and the extension to a person who has made a discipline their house is old and productive. It carries a sense of vocation rather than employment: a 家 is what someone is, not what they were hired to do this month.

What the job actually is

In the standard case one person originates the story, writes the dialogue, designs the characters, breaks the pages down into panels, and draws them, with assistants handling backgrounds, tones and finishing under direction. Serialisation is weekly or monthly and the schedule is punishing.

Where the roles are split, and they sometimes are, Japanese says so: a credited writer working with a credited artist is described with different terms. The unmarked case is that one person did both.

Why the English translation misleads

Anglo-American comics evolved a division of labour and a vocabulary to match it: writer, penciller, inker, letterer, colourist, each a distinct credit and often a distinct career. There is no common English job title for the single person who is both the author and the artist of a serialised comic, because the industry that shaped the vocabulary rarely produced one.

So the word arrives and gets filed under the nearest available role, artist, which quietly demotes the authorship. Calling a novelist a typist would be the same species of error.

The consequence for how the work reads

It explains a quality readers notice without being able to name. Manga panels frequently carry decisions that in Western comics would be split across a writer's script and an artist's interpretation, resolved instead by one person holding both at once, which is why pacing and layout so often carry the emotional argument directly.

A page that spends four wordless panels on a character's hands is a decision nobody had to negotiate. That is a structural feature of the job, not a stylistic preference.

The accurate short version

Mangaka means something closer to comics author than comics artist, with the drawing included in the authorship rather than separated from it. English has no single word for that, which is a fact about English publishing history rather than about Japanese.