mello hates you

Hello! If you've come here looking for essays on manga layout and art and links to other sites that talk about it, you're in the right place. I've written some articles for Tokyopop, and these are the essays that started me out in this strange business of being a Web pundit.

Feel free to add me to your friendslist without asking - I don't get offended by that. :D Please excuse me if I don't add you back - it's not because of you, it's because I've got too many journals on my friendslist to keep up with right now and adding more would completely overwhelm me (I do try to at least go and look at your LJ occasionally). You're perfectly welcome to come in, hang out, read, and comment as you choose.

One request: if you comment and you're not a Livejournal member and don't have an OpenID to identify yourself with, please leave a name. I get lots of anonymice making comments on these, and some sort of name or nickname separates your anonymous comment from all the other anonymous comments and makes all of us take you a bit more seriously. ETA: Anonymous commenting is now off, thanks to anonymous commenters who never leave any way for someone to reply to them. It's easy enough to create an LJ for commenting purposes, and if you don't want to, my email address is posted on my LJ profile page.

I, and the other people who comment here, do tend to reply to comments because we're interested in talking about manga with other people, and presumably you are also. Leaving a way for us to discuss with you is common courtesy.

( Click here for the manga analyses and other links )


I'm willing to listen to suggestions for future essay topics, but you'll have a better chance if you ask a question about the process or techniques involved instead of asking for a particular series, since I tend to pick a series that serves as a good example for the subject and not the other way around.


 

Manga analysis - Matt Thorn explains why a page drawn by Paul Pope didn't work as manga here.

ETA: Check the comments for the rest of the commentary by Thorn.

A quick-and-dirty experiment on a couple of covers from the previous post. You'll want to read that post first for this to make sense.

( On to the pics )

Stemming from this afternoon's discussion of cover colors, I got the desire to see if I could see any difference in the top-selling manga and less well selling manga. I couldn't find any numbers for a full year anywhere, but the admin of Love Manga loves to crunch numbers and posts a Top 50 list every month. So these ratings swiped from his Top 50 Manga for November 2005.

I swiped the images from Amazon.com, and since Amazon was running slow for me, instead of comparing the top 10 versus the bottom 10 in this list, I'm just doing the top 5.

Caveats: we all know the cover isn't the only thing that causes book sales (word of mouth is actually the #1 selling point), so you don't need to tell me that the cover is only part of that and there's all these other aspects that go into it. (Anyone posting to tell me that gets directed up to this sentence. :D) Also, looking at one month's sales don't really tell us much - I'd need to look at the sales month-by-month for an entire year or more, and frankly you'd probably need to pay me to do that. XD So we can't draw any real conclusions from this, but it might provide something to think about. Or it might not. Let's see, shall we?

( On to the cover images )




 

OK, I have NOT uploaded any examples of what I was originally talking about - amateur artists - because of that whole "not wanting to look like I'm ripping someone apart when they didn't expect it" thing.

So this is a slightly different question - what similarities and differences do we see between Japanese shoujo and OEL shoujo?* The pool of candidates I have here is a slightly biased one, being books that I have on my shelves currently, because I recently took all the manga whose art I didn't like and put it in a box to go to Half-Price Books. :D

* We're ignoring that purists will claim it's not true shoujo if it's not Japanese. Maybe not, but it's borrowing heavily from Japanese shoujo, and thus I'm using the term. So, bleeah.

( Aaaaaaaaaand away we go! )

Going to bed now. Eagerly await morning and the flood of OMG U DUN NO WUT UR TALKIN ABOUT LJ notifications. XD no, really, I loved all of the comments on yesterday's posts - they were *all* thoughtful and informative


 

This post is mostly a reply to some discussion going on in the comments in kate_nepveu's post here, where at one point we get into differences between American and Japanese comics and how manga is often designed so that the visual flow of the page drags you across important parts of the art, like characters' faces, while that's not such a strong concern in American comics.

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I don't have time at the moment to write a long essay about the differences, but I took the time to scan in an assortment of pages from various American comics I own. Fairly bad quality, making some unreadable, but that's beside the point. :) If anyone wants to use any of these scans for their own purposes, essays, whatever, be my guest. :)

The only one of that group that really pushes you through the art is the first Transmetropolitan page. I didn't notice it at first, but the cigarette smoke and business with the cigarette makes you look at the art more. The other Transmet page is less obvious, but there's some areas where you're forced to look at the art as you read the text - most especially panels 2, 4, and 5. Panel 3 sort of loses it because they were trying to cram too much in, and the long tail on the balloon in 1 pulls you through it to Spider Jerusalem, but panel 4 relaly pushes you down to panel 5 by the kids face and it leading right into his changed expression in 5.

(The XXXenophile page is worksafe; all the art in all of them is worksafe, although the text in some - Transmetropolitan especially - is discussing unsavory things and there may be the occasional bit of language.)

No real spoilers for Saiyuki book 7 (or 8), but cut Just In case.

( Momentary thought... )

Prompted by a thought from coffeeandink in the post on manga stories and cliches, I've just registered the community manga_talk for discussion and analysis of manga. It may or may not go anywhere - I did this on impulse and will think for a while on exactly what it should cover. homemade_manga is more geared towards the act of making manga, mostly with art posted and getting crit for it, so I'm thinking straight art crit posts should be directed over there, although I can see where they could become springboards for discussion. But, heck, I'm open to anything.

I've started throwing a few interests into the profile. Anyone wanna be a mod? You get issued with a shiny new modstick and banhammer, more because I like saying "modstick" and "banhammer" than because I think they'll be necessary. (I figure anything gets too heated, I'm pointing it out to fandom_wank or i_wank and letting the mockery do its thing.)

Thoughts? Ideas? Bueller? Bueller?

And oh yeah - I started fic_sans_pareil quite some time ago for recs of outstanding fic, and it promptly leapt into obscurity. I wandered over there for the first time in ages and saw that a number of you had joined the comm - does anyone feel like rescuing it from oblivion? :) My original idea was for it to feature recs more like reviews, where the poster spent a little bit of time talking aobut why they found the fic so good (or at least pointed to links elsewhere where they did that), but if anyone wants to take over or be a mod or whatever, they're welcome to change it to whatever they want.


Heading to the grocery store and home now - will wait and see if anyone makes any comments by the time I get home. :)

One of my DeviantArt watchers asked me about plot cliches and storylines to avoid. That's a bit harder to do an essay on for me, since I'm more focised on the visuals and how they carry a story along than on the story itself Plus, we all know the real answer is something like "Nothing, if you've got a fresh take on it."

But I figured that it might be a decent springboard for discussion, what with all the writers and manga readers (and sometimes manga-reading writers) who occacionally hang out here, so I figured I'd throw it open for discussion, with maybe a few general questions: so what do you think should be avoided? What constitutes a new take on things? What are examples of manga that you think avoid cliched storylines and why, and what are manga that you think take these same types of cliches and storylines and handle them well? Or how about - when is a well-known cliche or trope someting you want - perhaps to give readers something familiar to hang on to?

And I'm crashing now, but I shall be interested in seeing what, if anything, has been posted by tomorrow morning. :) Digressions quite welcome.





Index to manga analysis essays.

matildarose was kind enough to scan some images out of her copy of Drawing the Human Head by Burne Hogarth, showing the (male, white, as per usual) human head at various ages.

( Pictures below here )

Index to the Series

And now for the last essay in this series, where we get to look at some differences between male and female aging, and at the differences between shounen and shoujo art styles.


( Cut for lots of small pictures )



Index to the Series

Obata gets an essay all to himself, because I am a squee-ing fangirl for his work. My flimsy justification is that I'm focusing on more complexly drawn, more realistic characters than in the previous one, but we all know that's a sham. So, on to ogle study Obata's work.

On to How to Age Characters - Part 2.

( Cut for lots of small pictures )



Index to the Series

Full title, since LJ cut it off: Part 6 - Aging Characters (Hiromu Arakawa, FULLMETAL ALCHEMIST, Ashinano Hitoshi, YOKOHAMA KAIDASHI KIKOU)


Taking a slight departure from the usual essay this time. My previous ones all concerned page layout and flow, but not the actual drawing.This is mostly because there's plenty of How to Draw Manga books and websites out there, and very few How to Lay Out Manga books and websites. The few books that deal with it only give it a few pages, and concentrate on the drawing. Drawing is important, of course, but you can have a beautifully drawn but still unreadable comic page if you screw up the layout.

That being said, this time I'm going for a classic drawing-only analysis. Well, a teeny bit of layout at some point, but mostly drawing.

On to How to Age Characters.

( Cut for lots of small pictures )

This is it for Part 1. I'm working on Part 2, featuring Death Note and Hikaru no Go.

(Thanks to ninjashira for getting me the scans of older-Ed from a recent chapter of Fullmetal Alchemist!)


Index to the Series

Since the memories feature is currently not working, I thought I'd point the people who read me for my manga essays to this one on the grid structure in Saiyuki by snowyheart. Good stuff.

I just have to post a few panels here to explain why I love how CRACK-ADDLED the writer and artist for Death Note are.

This is a little bit of characterization for Near, spread out over chapters 63 and 64. No spoilers because I erased all the dialogue and deleted any panels that might be the least bit spoilery.

( CRACK THIS WAY )

Part III of the Characterization essay, using the intro panels of DEATH NOTE characters. Read Part I for the introduction to DEATH NOTE, why the names I'm using differ from the names in the panels, and why the image quality's bad. Panels are from Chapter 59, but no plot spoilers.

And this is the essay that finally clears up my comment in the first character essay about lamps growing out of people's heads not being a mistake. You were just dying to know that, weren't you?

( Would you mind spelling your name for me? )



Index to the Series

Part II of the Characterization essay, using the intro panels of DEATH NOTE characters. Read Part I for the introduction to DEATH NOTE and why the names I'm using differ from the names in the panels. Panels are from Chapter 59, but no plot spoilers.

( And now for Near )



Index to the Series

Let's hear it for part  8  5 of the ever-more increasingly innaccurately named three-part manga analysis series.

This one, I'm looking at how mangakas Obata Takeshi and Ooba Tsugumi, respectively the artist and the writer for DEATH NOTE, introduce a couple of characters in chapter 59. No spoilers, unless the mere fact of knowing what Obata and Ooba tell you about the personality of these characters in four panels is enough to send you into conniptions. Certainly no plot spoilers. As usual, heavy use of images. Pictures taken from the scanlations done by We, the Fans, and if you're interested in DEATH NOTE after this (and well you should be), go join the death_note community and check the memories for an archived post by sub_divided which lists the various sites you can download it. And then go order the Japanese tankoubons because it's JUST THAT GOOD and you want to tell the company publishing it that YES there is a market for it.

So. The Characterization Post in which we learn that for these pages at least, it's all about the triangles, that a lamp growing out of someone's head really isn't the mistake it ought to be, and that you can learn a lot about a person without ever seeing their face.

( On with the show )


Index to the Series

For the people reading this for the manga stuff, Elin Winkler has a take on the gender issues in manga thing that's been hitting the blog world[1] in recent days[2] here.

[1] I can't use 'blogosphere' in a truly serious way yet. Like 'podcast.' But I will allow you blogosphere and podcast if it means I NEVER EVER EVER have to use the word 'Webinar' -- Signed, telophase, IT Librarian, NEVER a 'cybrarian' (ugh).

[2] Here to start with, and an agreement here, with a dissenting response here and a response to that response here. The comments on all of them are worth reading, and, I think, show how much everyone is arguing from their own personal experience. While I don't doubt the existence of the misogynist things that people say they've witnessed in anime and manga fandom in the past and still do, I've yet to experience or witness anything of that magnitude in the fandom circles I run in.

[ edit ] Fixed links and footnote numbers. :)

[ edit ] For anyone coming here from the She Was Asking For It article - I have a series of essays on manga layout and other things here.

And here we go again, an analysis of action scenes based on scenes that contain actual action this time! And it's close to 3AM so my typoes will probably be even worse than usual.

6 images, up to 200+K each.


( For better or for worse )



Index to the Series