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Order out of Chaos (Kazuya Minekura, SAIYUKI)
Part 2 of what looks to be three posts about manga art and how and why it works, as instigated by ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
coffee_and_ink. Two big pictures, about 130K each.
This time ... SAIYUKI!
SAIYUKI, a ... shoujo? shounen? It's aimed at girls and has lots of prettyboys in it, which makes it shoujo, but it's got lots and lots of action and combat in it, which is pretty shounen. I'm landing on the side of shoujo, however, since it's got a big focus on the emotional lives and relationships of the characters and that's not usually the primary concern of shounen.
So, let me start again. SAIYUKI, a shoujo (ish) series by Kazuya Minekura, has a style that's almost the diametric opposite of Akira Toriyama, as I explained it in the previous post. Minekura crams as much line and texture as possible into her panels, revels in confusing, tumultuous artwork which mirrors the emotional lives of the characters, and has a positive aversion to empty space. But it works. Why?
Here are pages 44 and 45 of book 7. Despite the English translation, they are printed in the Japanese fashion, which means you read from right to left.
In these pages Gojyo (the one with the headband and the long, dark hair) and Sanzo (the angry blond) have just been challenged by a group of toughs, but get distracted from the fight at hand when their irritation with their situation (their friends have been previously attacked by a mysterious kid and are in a coma-like state) and each other flares up. At first glance, they're confusing and detailed, but once you start reading it, the internal structure sorts itself out and you can make sense of it.
The first thing to notice is that while the artwork is tangled, the text isn't. The speech balloons are larger than they need to be, and the extra white space sets the text off and allows you to read it. If you go look at the comparison of Toriyama's and MacPherson's pages in the previous installment you can see how this works -- MacPherson fills his speech balloons to the edges, while Toriyama leaves plenty of space. Which one is easier to read? :)
Yes, Toriyama and Minekura are originally Japanese, but there's plenty of space in the balloons in the original Japanese versions. The only difference is that Japanese reads up-and-down, so the balloons have more of a vertical shape than horizontal, which forces us to break English in weirdly unnatural places to fit into the balloons properly at times.
The next thing to note is the size and shape of the panels. The most important panels are the largest. This is panel 1 on page 45, the left-hand page. It the panel where Gojyo and Sanzo take out the toughs, and it is the punchline of the joke that has been set up, with Sanzo and Gojyo starting to fight with each other instead of their real opponents. This sort of situation has come up more than once in SAIYUKI, because the characters have rocky relationships with each other. It underscores the fractious nature of the relationships while at the same time providing comic relief to lighten the tension.
The panels are also shaped and placed off-square - they have borders that are slightly slanted, they run off the page, they leave different amounts of space between them. This adds a feeling of movement and visual interest to the page, and indicates things to the reader - the full-bleed (off the page) panels are either more important than other panels (Gojyo and Sanzo's heads on the bottom of page 44), or they're leading the eye off the page (last panel on page 45).
More traditional shoujo manga plays with the panels even more, breaking them and using them as suggestions more than rules, but Minekura's art is so detailed that she needs the structure of the white spaces between the panels to impose some sort of order on the visual chaos.
Individual panels
Now, we go to the individual panels. Panel 1 on page 44 - the right-hand page - has no pictures in it. It's filled with a tone.
Tone, short for 'screentone,' is a transparent sticky sheet with some sort of pattern created by black dots and lines printed on it, which you cut out and stick into place on your artwork to use for shading and to fill space. It's used because in the past, printers weren't that good and couldn't reproduce greyscale very well on the cheap paper used for manga and comics, so the method of using patterns of small and large dots to fake grey tones was developed. Japanese manga, especially shoujo manga, took that a step further and started using lots of different shapes and patterns to help convey information about the emotional states of the characters. Manga that are digitally produced can use digital screentone, and even when modern printers and papers are capable of handling flat greys, people still use tones. The pages I scanned are all toned - where it looks flat grey, it's because the low resolution I used to save the pictures flattened teeny tiny dots into a solid grey. Most of the better printers today can handle greyscale, but the technique of tones is still a very good one and it can add a lot to the art, so people still use it.
Back to panel 1. It's got a tone in it, but it doesn't look weird compared to the panels with art in them because the tone isn't a flat greyscale. It's got texture and pattern to it, and it's got a scratchy texture which emphasizes the two different fights going on. It's also got sound effects in Japanese slapped on the top of it and breaking the panel barrier, which fills in the space with even more texture. Amateur manga artists often don't realize the value of texture, and use flat grey fills or flat gradients in spaces like this, and that leaves it sort of ... empty, for want of a better word. The space needs texture, and you might as well use one that complements the emotional undercurrents.
What emotional undercurrents? The Japanese sound effects translate to "BANG! BANG!" and indicate that Sanzo has just fired his gun at Gojyo -- in the previous panel on the previous page Gojyo's just insulted Sanzo. Sanzo shoots at him in this panel, and there's no need to show Gojyo dodging - the previous page has Sanzo leveling his gun at Gojyo, then this panel just shows the scratchy-background indication of Sanzo's anger, and the gun going off - the effects bursting out of the panel borders show how loud the gun is. The very next panel has Gojyo boasting of dodging the bullets, and we all fill in the blanks ourselves.
[A note I left in the comments on part 1 about two characters talking or arguing, exactly like this.]
Next panel - Sanzo and Gojyo fighting. The lines of the ceiling, the way Gojyo is facing, and the speech balloons with the one on the right higher than the one on the left show you the direction in which to read the panel, so you're not confused about how to look at it. Then you go down to the bottom right (because Japanese reads right-to-left, so starting again from the right is automatic to Japanese, like starting from the left is automatic for us), where you see the first prominent whitespace aside from the text balloons on the page. It's a tight closeup on Gojyo and the white makes your eye rest on his face for a second, and you can see that he's so angry he's almost literally spitting nails, thanks to his cigarette. Note that he is facing to the left, and he is still in the same position that he was in in the previous panel. If he were facing the other way, it'd be a bit confusing, plus your vision would go off the page, because you naturally look where the character is facing. Follow his gaze up to Sanzo, who has the next bit of prominent whitespace. He's just as pissed off. He's facing backwards from the direction you're reading, towards Gojyo. This is because he's facing the same way he's facing in the panel above, for consistency, also so that he and Gojyo are face-to-face despite being in different panels, and also to make your eye stop on the two for a bit longer than a regular panel. The lines of Sanzo's hair and face point directly to the next speech balloon, which is broken into two balloons to lead your eye out to the next panel, which has two random punks - greyed out with tone because their identities are not important while theie background has a white burst to show their anger and to add visual interest to the panel - and the faces of the punks lead you to the final speech balloons, which leads you off to the next page.
Here's that path, in a much easier format to see:
I've explained the function of the big panel on page 45 earlier, and I'll come back to it shortly, so I'll just point out the lack of text other than "Can it!" and some sound effects -- you don't want to overfill big panels, because then you totally lose their impact. The natural tendency of the writer is to want to fill that space with words but ... don't. If you're going to do that you might as well just go write a short story, because you will completely negate the point of having art. Work with the art, not against it. Yes, your most emotionally tense moments needs to have less text than other moments.
Panel 2 on page 45 - this is a small establishing shot to let you know that the fight is over and Sanzo and Gojyo have walked outside. The scene break is also signaled by the space between the top panel and the bottom two - see how it's bigger than the other spaces? That gives a visual break in continuity. Anyway, panel 2 not only shows you that they're outside, but it makes the mountain they're referring to in the text seem ominous, looming up as a flat black shadow behind the town. It also shows you that it's night - the mountain is dark and the lights in the house are on.
The final panel shows you that they've actually gone outside - they're not standing in the doorway or looking out the window. It also confirms the fight is over, because they're calm and still. You can get away with showing just the feet because the character designs are so distinct. If you've got two people wearing jeans and sneakers talking to each other, it's more confusing unless you use speech tags or other props to indicate who's who. Gojyo - wearing the jodhpur-like pants with the dorky boots - is deep in an ominous shadow, and the ground is dark, but there's a burst of light behind him, which is partly the burst of light from the bar they just stepped out of, but also partly a way to keep the entire panel from turning dark and muddy. This is another sign of the pro mangaka as opposed to the amateur - the amateur might make the full panel dark to show night, and it would turn muddy - or they might put in a gradient, which would completely lose the indication of the bar door and would look ... well, weird. A gradient has no logical sense at all, while a burst of light quickly fading into shadow does. It's an unconscious thing.
Backgrounds
Now on to backgrounds!! If yousuffered through read my rantings on Sakura Pakk and Rumble Pak, then you're probably screaming "telophase! Why are you not complaining about the lack of backgrounds here? You railed about it in the reviews!"
Simple. Minekura does not need to put a detailed background on these two pages because she spent two full pages establishing a detailed background at the beginning of the scene. Witness:
You also get a really good shot of the ceiling with those characteristic beams on page 42, so you'll recognize them again on page 44.
Amateur manga will often show only one panel with a detailed background, and won't have any really good indications in any other panels. It also won't show the characters interacting with the environment -- note that Sanzo's actually holding a glass of whisky and that Gojyo's sitting on a barstool and resting his hand on the bar and smoking a cigarette. You'll notice in lots of amateur manga that if this sort of scene is drawn, the two primary characters will be standing in front of the bar, not actually touching anything, although there maybe a couple of glasses on the bar, and that the barman will be standing behind it, not touching anything. In this one, he's leaning on the bar itself. You also see a shoulder of another patron, so it doesn't feel like the bar was conjured into existence simply to give Sanzo and Gojyo information - it has other patrons in it.
Note also that the biggest panel on page 40 is the establishing panel, and it is also the opening panel of the scene. If Minekura had waited until the next page to pull back and show the bar, you'd have no mental idea of where Gojyo and Sanzo were, which is a rather unsettling feeling. This was the problem with one of the Sakura Pakk stories - there were some nice detailed establishing panels that didn't show up until halfway through the scene.
Establishing panels don't necessarily need to be big - note that the one that showed they'd stepped out of the bar is small ... but it is the very first panel of the next scene - you need to indicate somehow right away when the scene changes and this is one way - and the next page (not shown) has a much larger establishing panel with more detail of the town.
Back to backgrounds - ok, we've got some small indication of setting in the backgrounds of the panels. The rest of them are filled with tones or speedlines to indicate the emotional states of the characters. The closeup of the angry Gojyo and Sanzo fill extra space with vertical speedlines to show how angry they are. And the big panel on page 45 is filled with a texture, not a flat grey or gradient, and the empty space on top of Sanzo and Gojyo is filled with Japanese sound effects, because the emptiness would look weird in Minekura's style. She usually leaves the big empty spaces for poignant moments. In page 45, the characters are kept from blending into the textured background by a thin white outline around them, which pops them out.
Which leads us into ...
Linework and shading
Minekura has linework that varies in width more obviously than Toriyama. She needs it because it's so detailed - if all her lines were the same width, the pictures would look like a tangled mass of spaghetti. The darker, thicker parts create order from chaos. She also uses areas of pure black to help - Gojyo's hair, the inside of the characters' mouths, shadows under necks and arms. Darker tones also provide areas of dark for the eye to rest (the opposite of the areas of white that allow the eye to rest in Toriyama's work). It's no coincidence that Gojyo's dark vest and Sanzo's dark breastplate are the dark areas near their faces - they help frame their faces and make them prominent. Gojyo has dark hair, a dark headband, and a dark vest that frames his face. Sanzo has blond hair, but his hair is drawn with many, many very fine lines with serve to visually darken it and frame his face. His shaggy bangs that cast a shadow over his eye area assist with this - if his bangs were shorter, the light of his face would blend into the light of his hair.
[ edit ] Be sure to read this comment bykeraha a little furhter down - she points out some things I COMPLETELY missed about Minekura's use of anatomy and posture.
INFORMATION OVERLOAD! TOTAL INFORMATION OVERLOAD FROM JUST TWO PAGES! AAAAAAASGGGGGHGHGHGHGHGHGHHHHH!!!!!!
Aaagh! So much typing! So little organization! I have NO CONCLUSION that will bring this all together except to shriek ORDER OUT OF CHAOS! ORDER OUT OF CHAOS! like some sort of demented parrot. And I shall be hitting FRUITS BASKET tomorrow or Friday to round out this little series, because it's thoroughly traditionally shoujo and COMPLETELY DIFFERENT from either Toriyama or Minekura. I'll leave you to ponder on what I consider the true genius of Natsuki Takaya, the Furuba mangaka.
Index to the Series
coffee_and_ink. Two big pictures, about 130K each. This time ... SAIYUKI!
SAIYUKI, a ... shoujo? shounen? It's aimed at girls and has lots of prettyboys in it, which makes it shoujo, but it's got lots and lots of action and combat in it, which is pretty shounen. I'm landing on the side of shoujo, however, since it's got a big focus on the emotional lives and relationships of the characters and that's not usually the primary concern of shounen.
So, let me start again. SAIYUKI, a shoujo (ish) series by Kazuya Minekura, has a style that's almost the diametric opposite of Akira Toriyama, as I explained it in the previous post. Minekura crams as much line and texture as possible into her panels, revels in confusing, tumultuous artwork which mirrors the emotional lives of the characters, and has a positive aversion to empty space. But it works. Why?
Here are pages 44 and 45 of book 7. Despite the English translation, they are printed in the Japanese fashion, which means you read from right to left.
In these pages Gojyo (the one with the headband and the long, dark hair) and Sanzo (the angry blond) have just been challenged by a group of toughs, but get distracted from the fight at hand when their irritation with their situation (their friends have been previously attacked by a mysterious kid and are in a coma-like state) and each other flares up. At first glance, they're confusing and detailed, but once you start reading it, the internal structure sorts itself out and you can make sense of it.
The first thing to notice is that while the artwork is tangled, the text isn't. The speech balloons are larger than they need to be, and the extra white space sets the text off and allows you to read it. If you go look at the comparison of Toriyama's and MacPherson's pages in the previous installment you can see how this works -- MacPherson fills his speech balloons to the edges, while Toriyama leaves plenty of space. Which one is easier to read? :)
Yes, Toriyama and Minekura are originally Japanese, but there's plenty of space in the balloons in the original Japanese versions. The only difference is that Japanese reads up-and-down, so the balloons have more of a vertical shape than horizontal, which forces us to break English in weirdly unnatural places to fit into the balloons properly at times.
The next thing to note is the size and shape of the panels. The most important panels are the largest. This is panel 1 on page 45, the left-hand page. It the panel where Gojyo and Sanzo take out the toughs, and it is the punchline of the joke that has been set up, with Sanzo and Gojyo starting to fight with each other instead of their real opponents. This sort of situation has come up more than once in SAIYUKI, because the characters have rocky relationships with each other. It underscores the fractious nature of the relationships while at the same time providing comic relief to lighten the tension.
The panels are also shaped and placed off-square - they have borders that are slightly slanted, they run off the page, they leave different amounts of space between them. This adds a feeling of movement and visual interest to the page, and indicates things to the reader - the full-bleed (off the page) panels are either more important than other panels (Gojyo and Sanzo's heads on the bottom of page 44), or they're leading the eye off the page (last panel on page 45).
More traditional shoujo manga plays with the panels even more, breaking them and using them as suggestions more than rules, but Minekura's art is so detailed that she needs the structure of the white spaces between the panels to impose some sort of order on the visual chaos.
Individual panels
Now, we go to the individual panels. Panel 1 on page 44 - the right-hand page - has no pictures in it. It's filled with a tone.
Tone, short for 'screentone,' is a transparent sticky sheet with some sort of pattern created by black dots and lines printed on it, which you cut out and stick into place on your artwork to use for shading and to fill space. It's used because in the past, printers weren't that good and couldn't reproduce greyscale very well on the cheap paper used for manga and comics, so the method of using patterns of small and large dots to fake grey tones was developed. Japanese manga, especially shoujo manga, took that a step further and started using lots of different shapes and patterns to help convey information about the emotional states of the characters. Manga that are digitally produced can use digital screentone, and even when modern printers and papers are capable of handling flat greys, people still use tones. The pages I scanned are all toned - where it looks flat grey, it's because the low resolution I used to save the pictures flattened teeny tiny dots into a solid grey. Most of the better printers today can handle greyscale, but the technique of tones is still a very good one and it can add a lot to the art, so people still use it.
Back to panel 1. It's got a tone in it, but it doesn't look weird compared to the panels with art in them because the tone isn't a flat greyscale. It's got texture and pattern to it, and it's got a scratchy texture which emphasizes the two different fights going on. It's also got sound effects in Japanese slapped on the top of it and breaking the panel barrier, which fills in the space with even more texture. Amateur manga artists often don't realize the value of texture, and use flat grey fills or flat gradients in spaces like this, and that leaves it sort of ... empty, for want of a better word. The space needs texture, and you might as well use one that complements the emotional undercurrents.
What emotional undercurrents? The Japanese sound effects translate to "BANG! BANG!" and indicate that Sanzo has just fired his gun at Gojyo -- in the previous panel on the previous page Gojyo's just insulted Sanzo. Sanzo shoots at him in this panel, and there's no need to show Gojyo dodging - the previous page has Sanzo leveling his gun at Gojyo, then this panel just shows the scratchy-background indication of Sanzo's anger, and the gun going off - the effects bursting out of the panel borders show how loud the gun is. The very next panel has Gojyo boasting of dodging the bullets, and we all fill in the blanks ourselves.
[A note I left in the comments on part 1 about two characters talking or arguing, exactly like this.]
Next panel - Sanzo and Gojyo fighting. The lines of the ceiling, the way Gojyo is facing, and the speech balloons with the one on the right higher than the one on the left show you the direction in which to read the panel, so you're not confused about how to look at it. Then you go down to the bottom right (because Japanese reads right-to-left, so starting again from the right is automatic to Japanese, like starting from the left is automatic for us), where you see the first prominent whitespace aside from the text balloons on the page. It's a tight closeup on Gojyo and the white makes your eye rest on his face for a second, and you can see that he's so angry he's almost literally spitting nails, thanks to his cigarette. Note that he is facing to the left, and he is still in the same position that he was in in the previous panel. If he were facing the other way, it'd be a bit confusing, plus your vision would go off the page, because you naturally look where the character is facing. Follow his gaze up to Sanzo, who has the next bit of prominent whitespace. He's just as pissed off. He's facing backwards from the direction you're reading, towards Gojyo. This is because he's facing the same way he's facing in the panel above, for consistency, also so that he and Gojyo are face-to-face despite being in different panels, and also to make your eye stop on the two for a bit longer than a regular panel. The lines of Sanzo's hair and face point directly to the next speech balloon, which is broken into two balloons to lead your eye out to the next panel, which has two random punks - greyed out with tone because their identities are not important while theie background has a white burst to show their anger and to add visual interest to the panel - and the faces of the punks lead you to the final speech balloons, which leads you off to the next page.
Here's that path, in a much easier format to see:
I've explained the function of the big panel on page 45 earlier, and I'll come back to it shortly, so I'll just point out the lack of text other than "Can it!" and some sound effects -- you don't want to overfill big panels, because then you totally lose their impact. The natural tendency of the writer is to want to fill that space with words but ... don't. If you're going to do that you might as well just go write a short story, because you will completely negate the point of having art. Work with the art, not against it. Yes, your most emotionally tense moments needs to have less text than other moments.
Panel 2 on page 45 - this is a small establishing shot to let you know that the fight is over and Sanzo and Gojyo have walked outside. The scene break is also signaled by the space between the top panel and the bottom two - see how it's bigger than the other spaces? That gives a visual break in continuity. Anyway, panel 2 not only shows you that they're outside, but it makes the mountain they're referring to in the text seem ominous, looming up as a flat black shadow behind the town. It also shows you that it's night - the mountain is dark and the lights in the house are on.
The final panel shows you that they've actually gone outside - they're not standing in the doorway or looking out the window. It also confirms the fight is over, because they're calm and still. You can get away with showing just the feet because the character designs are so distinct. If you've got two people wearing jeans and sneakers talking to each other, it's more confusing unless you use speech tags or other props to indicate who's who. Gojyo - wearing the jodhpur-like pants with the dorky boots - is deep in an ominous shadow, and the ground is dark, but there's a burst of light behind him, which is partly the burst of light from the bar they just stepped out of, but also partly a way to keep the entire panel from turning dark and muddy. This is another sign of the pro mangaka as opposed to the amateur - the amateur might make the full panel dark to show night, and it would turn muddy - or they might put in a gradient, which would completely lose the indication of the bar door and would look ... well, weird. A gradient has no logical sense at all, while a burst of light quickly fading into shadow does. It's an unconscious thing.
Backgrounds
Now on to backgrounds!! If you
telophase! Why are you not complaining about the lack of backgrounds here? You railed about it in the reviews!"Simple. Minekura does not need to put a detailed background on these two pages because she spent two full pages establishing a detailed background at the beginning of the scene. Witness:
You also get a really good shot of the ceiling with those characteristic beams on page 42, so you'll recognize them again on page 44.
Amateur manga will often show only one panel with a detailed background, and won't have any really good indications in any other panels. It also won't show the characters interacting with the environment -- note that Sanzo's actually holding a glass of whisky and that Gojyo's sitting on a barstool and resting his hand on the bar and smoking a cigarette. You'll notice in lots of amateur manga that if this sort of scene is drawn, the two primary characters will be standing in front of the bar, not actually touching anything, although there maybe a couple of glasses on the bar, and that the barman will be standing behind it, not touching anything. In this one, he's leaning on the bar itself. You also see a shoulder of another patron, so it doesn't feel like the bar was conjured into existence simply to give Sanzo and Gojyo information - it has other patrons in it.
Note also that the biggest panel on page 40 is the establishing panel, and it is also the opening panel of the scene. If Minekura had waited until the next page to pull back and show the bar, you'd have no mental idea of where Gojyo and Sanzo were, which is a rather unsettling feeling. This was the problem with one of the Sakura Pakk stories - there were some nice detailed establishing panels that didn't show up until halfway through the scene.
Establishing panels don't necessarily need to be big - note that the one that showed they'd stepped out of the bar is small ... but it is the very first panel of the next scene - you need to indicate somehow right away when the scene changes and this is one way - and the next page (not shown) has a much larger establishing panel with more detail of the town.
Back to backgrounds - ok, we've got some small indication of setting in the backgrounds of the panels. The rest of them are filled with tones or speedlines to indicate the emotional states of the characters. The closeup of the angry Gojyo and Sanzo fill extra space with vertical speedlines to show how angry they are. And the big panel on page 45 is filled with a texture, not a flat grey or gradient, and the empty space on top of Sanzo and Gojyo is filled with Japanese sound effects, because the emptiness would look weird in Minekura's style. She usually leaves the big empty spaces for poignant moments. In page 45, the characters are kept from blending into the textured background by a thin white outline around them, which pops them out.
Which leads us into ...
Linework and shading
Minekura has linework that varies in width more obviously than Toriyama. She needs it because it's so detailed - if all her lines were the same width, the pictures would look like a tangled mass of spaghetti. The darker, thicker parts create order from chaos. She also uses areas of pure black to help - Gojyo's hair, the inside of the characters' mouths, shadows under necks and arms. Darker tones also provide areas of dark for the eye to rest (the opposite of the areas of white that allow the eye to rest in Toriyama's work). It's no coincidence that Gojyo's dark vest and Sanzo's dark breastplate are the dark areas near their faces - they help frame their faces and make them prominent. Gojyo has dark hair, a dark headband, and a dark vest that frames his face. Sanzo has blond hair, but his hair is drawn with many, many very fine lines with serve to visually darken it and frame his face. His shaggy bangs that cast a shadow over his eye area assist with this - if his bangs were shorter, the light of his face would blend into the light of his hair.
[ edit ] Be sure to read this comment by
keraha a little furhter down - she points out some things I COMPLETELY missed about Minekura's use of anatomy and posture.INFORMATION OVERLOAD! TOTAL INFORMATION OVERLOAD FROM JUST TWO PAGES! AAAAAAASGGGGGHGHGHGHGHGHGHHHHH!!!!!!
Aaagh! So much typing! So little organization! I have NO CONCLUSION that will bring this all together except to shriek ORDER OUT OF CHAOS! ORDER OUT OF CHAOS! like some sort of demented parrot. And I shall be hitting FRUITS BASKET tomorrow or Friday to round out this little series, because it's thoroughly traditionally shoujo and COMPLETELY DIFFERENT from either Toriyama or Minekura. I'll leave you to ponder on what I consider the true genius of Natsuki Takaya, the Furuba mangaka.
Index to the Series
no subject