According to Wikipedia *looks around shiftily* the kind of comic strip called yonkoma (which I recognize from magazines and webcomics) "(These comic strips ) appear in almost all types of publications in Japan, including manga magazines, graphic novels, *the comics section of newspapers*, game magazines, cooking magazines, and so forth. " (my emphasis) I don't know what that means. Of course, a lot of Western comics also use assistants (Herge, for instance) but nothing probably compares to a manga studio. However, a daily comic strip would probably need about the same work in Japan as in the US, so who knows...?
