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Part 4 - Action Jackson - Controlling Time (Hiroaki Samura, BLADE OF THE IMMORTAL)
And Part 4 of my three-part series (why am I feeling like Douglas Adams here?) analyzing manga. Starting in on action scenes here, because I'm working on laying out an action scene myself and I need all the help I can get.
Again with the image warning for slow modems. And another warning this time: I'm using Hiroaki Samura's BLADE OF THE IMMORTAL here. It's violent. It's got some gore, with people getting limbs lopped off and such, but part of the point of the story is to take the samurai ethos that we're all familiar with and point out: hey! For every honorable, strict, controlled, proper heroic samurai following bushido out there, there's a million nasty, loutish, violent sons-of-bitches. But the story, while dark and violent, has humor to leaven it, and delves into some pretty interesting philosophical questions on the nature of honor, what the point of martial arts really is, and how far people will go to achieve their desires. For the type of story that it is, the violence is justified, I think.
Plus, the art's stunning and Manji is a badass.
There is also language. There's a big FUCK in one of the panels, so if I just offended you, you might as well go back to the FRUITS BASKET essays and do your best not to think about how the characters who turn into animals when hugged by the opposite sex engender children.
(Oh, please. Don't tell me you weren't wondering about that.)
BLADE OF THE IMMORTAL is a shounen manga - one aimed at boys and young men. [ edit: Actually, it's seinen, as![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
_ri tells me. More info on that in the comments here. ] It stars the immortal swordsman Manji and takes place in a feudal-era (post-Portuguese contact) Japan that's not quite our world. Manji has been promised that he'll get his curse of immortality taken off of him if he kills a thousand evil men, so he's hanging around Rin, a 16-year-old girl on a quest to avenge her father's death at the hands of Anotsu Kagehisa, and her mother's rape and killing by Anotsu's followers.
As you can tell, there are a *lot* of fight scenes in this, and they last for several pages each. I'm going to concentrate on one important aspect of action, which is the control of time. Fights are complex events that happen quickly and the artist has to remain in control if the reader is going to figure out what's going on. One of the tools in the artist's toolbox is to slow down action with panel structure and layout, which allows the tension to build slowly so the reader can get the full impact of the events.
Slowing down also allows the reader to see how the characters are experiencing the scene. It would be emotionally flat if you didn't know how the characters were reacting - fear, anger, excitement, glee, sadness, resignation, surprise - and we as readers tend to take cues from the characters as how we should react to the situation - are we rooting for the characters? Do we want one or the other to win? What's at stake and who has the most to lose? Why should we care? Unlike prose, we can't get inside the person's head and read their thoughts, so we have to actually *see* their reactions.
A word about the panel layout here -- this is not the way it is in the Japanese original. Dark Horse started publishing BLADE OF THE IMMORTAL before the current craze for unflipped manga, and Hiroaki Samura requested that they *not* flip his artwork, that they instead cut the panels apart and rearrange them. So they did that, and occasionally, when a sequence could not be cut apart without destroying meaning, they flipped it. So Manji's missing right eye tends to wander from one side to the other, and occasionally the flow of action seems to go backwards. Samura is so good, though, that it doesn't destroy the readability.
In this scene from volume 8, The Gathering, Manji's opponent (you may find the shape of his glasses familiar if you're a comics fan :) doesn't believe that Manji is immortal, and during the course of the fight has staked him in the head. THe page previous to this was spent with him gloating over having killed Manji and making fun of the immortality thing. And then he reaches down to retrieve his blade. Read from left to right, the Western way.
I think I can hear the soundtrack going BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. as I read this. Hanada, Manji's opponent, is given plenty of time to realize that something is not right.
Panel 1, he reaches down. Panel 2 - Manji starts getting up and Hanada is taken aback, and there's a little starburst of realization.
Panel 3 zooms in close on Hanada so we can see his furrowed eyebrows and his "OMGWTFBBQ??" reaction. The sweatdrop on his forehead isn't here as a manga affectation, which is out of place in a manga as realistic as this one - the characters have been complaining about the heat for some pages now, and Hanada just finished (he thinks!) a strenuous fight, so it's not out of place for him to be sweating. But the sweatdrop still works as one in a less-realistic manga does, because most of the readers are acquainted with the symbolic language of the sweatdrop of confusion and embarrassment. It's just not appearing out of nowhere.
Panels 1-3 have the action moving from right to left, subtly. In the Japanese non-cut-up version, this would help push you along in the correct direction, but since Samura didn't rely heavily on visual cues to push you along, it's not too distracting to be backwards. FRUITS BASKET wouldn't survive a cut-and-paste job like this; you'd have to publish it in the original format or flip it.
Panel 4 pulls back to look over Hanada's shoulder, from the point of view of one of the other characters in the scene (otherwise unseen on these pages), so we can see that Manji is getting up, and we can see Hanada's posture, signifying amazed disbelief.
Panel 5 finally brings us in close on Manji's face, the side without an eye. Up until now, Hanada has been the dominant character in the scene, and this is where control passes from Hanada to Manji.
The next page gives us a shot looking up at them, so we get a worm's-eye view of Manji unfolding upwards, and Hanada sputtering in disbelief. Manji is still curled up, but we know he's standing up, and if he were to straighten, he'd be much bigger than Hanada from this angle. We can also tell what Manji's emotions are, despite not seeing his face, because his clenched fingers are prominent. In the Japanese version, his arm and hand would be pointing the way your eyes should go, but in this verision, not. Then we close in on Hanada, greyed out as he's totally lost control of the scene and so we can see his frightened eye through his glasses. The sweat pouring off of him is highlighted, and this time it's the sweat of fear.
Panel 3 has Manji starting to slowly turn towards Hanada. We still don't see his one working eye. The camera is looking up a littel bit at him, to show us that he's dominating Hanada at this point.
Panel 4 has a tight close-up on Manji's face and we finally see his eye, as he parts his lips about to speak.
Note, please, an interesting bit of character here - the expression on Manji's face *isn't* rage, it's resignation, and a bit of confusion. His lines on the next page are "Been... a long time... ages... since somebody... punched a hole in the old brainpan... Heh... Eyesight's sorta... cloudy. But... doesn't hurt as much as a stab through the guts. Weird, huh?" You can see through the pauses in his dialogue that he's healing quickly but not instantaneously. You can also see that he's not fighting out of rage, hate, or revenge. He fights because he's good at it and it's what he knows, and as long as his opponent puts up a good fight, that's what matters. This is orthogonal to what fights usually are - you usually see characters raging and screaming at each other because they have a lot at stake if they lose. Manji and his opponents aren't like that - they don't really have anything or any attachments to this world, and if they lose, then nobody else gets hurt.
Anyway, so why did Samura spend two full pages on this? I'm sure you've all seen comics where this sort of thing would be taken care of within 3 or 4 panels panels - the character gets up, you see the reaction shot of the opponent, and then the fight continues. But that's not very memorable or dramatic, and it's certainly not cinematic. Manga tends to be a lot more cinematic than American comics - if you were filming this, these two pages would probably be just like the storyboards.
This sequence, if it were filmed, would be taken slowly, to milk it for all the dramatic tension you can get. And it needs that respite - the *twenty-two* pages previous to this were spent on the fight. (Er, you get characterization and plot in there, too, it's not solid strike/parry for 22 pages, which would drive me nuts.) These two pages and the two after it are the eye of the hurricane, before Manji resumes the fight, which makes the following fight sequence even more dramatic, because now the three guys attacking Manji have new information - that their opponent can't be killed by normal means - and they're fighting for their lives.
Now on to the other two pages I chose, in which there is actual fighting! Er, maybe not. It's showing the slowing down of time during an action sequence
These two pages are from volume 12, Autumn Frost, a couple of days later than the previous fight (all 13 volumes so far take place over the course of 2 or 3 weeks). Manji is healed up from the fight and has hit the road again with Magatsu, another swordsman (if you've only read the first few books, just trust me that they're traveling together for the moment). An enemy of Manji's has hired a group of bandits to attack Manji on the road.
This is again very cinematic - you get the bowstring sloooooowly aimed, you hear the creak of the arrow, and you can almost hear the heartbeat and breathing that would get thrown into a soundtrack at this stage in a film. This builds anticipation - you know that Manji and Magatsu have no idea that the bandits are there. There's no background at all, and the design here is very stark, very graphic. This ups the threat level of the arrow.
The fourth panel pulls back behind the bandits as he looses the arrow, so we can see how close they are to Manji and Magatsu. The bandits are in the foreground and looking down on the swordsmen, so they seem threatening. Note that this is the only panel with a real background - Samura is seizing the chance to take a momentary rest and give you a look at their surroundings, because there's not going to be much of a chance for the next few panels to do any background - he needs to fill that space in with speedlines and bursts, to show the arrow and people's reactions.
The fifth panel is from the POV of the arrow - the burst lines show how fast it's traveling and who it's aimed at.
The next page, first panel - very tight close-up on Manji's eye as it widens in realization. I haven't completely sussed out why it's totally greyed out, but I think part of it is to negate the picture of a giant eyeball staring at you, Sauron-like, from the page when you first open it. Humans tend to fix on eyes, and an eye that big that wasn't greyed out would dominate the page to an unwanted extent, but it's still necessary because it shows that Manji realizes the arrow's coming a fraction of a second before it hits.
The second panel shows Manji swinging his arm up to block, with Magatsu blithely unaware of what's happening. Note the force of the arrow driving Manji back, and how the black lines emphasize the speed and force of the arrow. Man, that's gotta hurt.
Panel 3 and time is still going slow -- Magatsu is cluing in, and Manji is staring at the arrow in his arm in consternation. It's that moment of clarity that gets burned into your memory in stressful situations, even though it only lasts for a fraction of a second.
The next panel shows Manji doubling over in pain as Magatsu lets go of the bundle he's carrying to start a grab for his sword. Magatsu is shaded all in dark so that he frames Manji, and the dark on the left side of the panel pushes your eye to the right. I have no idea how this is set up in the original Japanese pre-cut-and-paste version, but it works for us. :) Manji's hat even forms an arrow pushing on on to the next panel, which is a closeup of Magatsu's bundle hitting the ground, to show you that the past three panels have all happened in a fraction of a second - you took longer to read them than they took in real life. See how precisely Manji's shape slots into Magatsu's in this panel? It looks like South America slotting into Africa, doesn't it? I interpret this as showing that Manji and Magatsu are working together and are united against the bandits, but it could also just be an affectation on Samura's part. It's not accidental, though - it's quite deliberate.
Magatsu's bundle in the last panel is on a background with a gradient. THe gradient creates a sense of three dimensions, but it also pushes your eye out of the panel, on to the next page, as you go from dark to light.
I know it's Magatsu's bundle dropping and not Manji's, because the previous two pages focused on Magatsu's bundle, with Magatsu dropping it and picking it back up in exhaustion. Magatsu also gets the focus on the next two pages, as he takes five panels to draw his sword in a fraction of a second, and then starts charging up the slope towards the bandits.
It is probably not a coincidence that the arrow on the first page on the bow and the arrow on the second page in Manji's arm are so precisely lined up. I have no idea how it would read in the Japanese version, but it looks really good in the English version, providing a straight line dragging the eye from one page to the other and collapsing time between the two pages. The four panels between them take longer to read than the actual arrow would to travel the short distance, but this is again a cinematic thing that we're familiar with. These two pages probably cover about 3 or 4 seconds of time, but the dramatic tension is pulled as tight as it can be. You wouldn't get the same feeling of threat from the bandits, or learn how fast Manji is if the arrow was loosed and hit Manji in the next panel.
Besides the slowing of time, another characteristic of these two spreads I've showed you is the lack of lots of dialogue. Dialogue would get in the way - and besides, they're really only a few seconds each. There's no *time* to say anything. Magatsu doesn't yell, he gets a speech bubble with "!!" in it, which I interpret as a wordless grunt of surprise.
Anyway, that's it for now. Samura's artwork is a lot closer to traditional pen-and-ink sketching than it is to your typical manga art, and he fills his pages densely with speedlines and lots of detail, which forces you to slow down and take each panel as it comes and really look at the art, especially in the action sequences. If you try to skim through the action sequences you'll have *no* idea what's going on.
That's it for now - I'm probably going to do another one on action, because I haven't done any actual *combat* yet. And I'll probably be doing NARUTO, out of popular demand. ;) See ya then!
Index to the Series
Again with the image warning for slow modems. And another warning this time: I'm using Hiroaki Samura's BLADE OF THE IMMORTAL here. It's violent. It's got some gore, with people getting limbs lopped off and such, but part of the point of the story is to take the samurai ethos that we're all familiar with and point out: hey! For every honorable, strict, controlled, proper heroic samurai following bushido out there, there's a million nasty, loutish, violent sons-of-bitches. But the story, while dark and violent, has humor to leaven it, and delves into some pretty interesting philosophical questions on the nature of honor, what the point of martial arts really is, and how far people will go to achieve their desires. For the type of story that it is, the violence is justified, I think.
Plus, the art's stunning and Manji is a badass.
There is also language. There's a big FUCK in one of the panels, so if I just offended you, you might as well go back to the FRUITS BASKET essays and do your best not to think about how the characters who turn into animals when hugged by the opposite sex engender children.
(Oh, please. Don't tell me you weren't wondering about that.)
BLADE OF THE IMMORTAL is a shounen manga - one aimed at boys and young men. [ edit: Actually, it's seinen, as
_ri tells me. More info on that in the comments here. ] It stars the immortal swordsman Manji and takes place in a feudal-era (post-Portuguese contact) Japan that's not quite our world. Manji has been promised that he'll get his curse of immortality taken off of him if he kills a thousand evil men, so he's hanging around Rin, a 16-year-old girl on a quest to avenge her father's death at the hands of Anotsu Kagehisa, and her mother's rape and killing by Anotsu's followers.As you can tell, there are a *lot* of fight scenes in this, and they last for several pages each. I'm going to concentrate on one important aspect of action, which is the control of time. Fights are complex events that happen quickly and the artist has to remain in control if the reader is going to figure out what's going on. One of the tools in the artist's toolbox is to slow down action with panel structure and layout, which allows the tension to build slowly so the reader can get the full impact of the events.
Slowing down also allows the reader to see how the characters are experiencing the scene. It would be emotionally flat if you didn't know how the characters were reacting - fear, anger, excitement, glee, sadness, resignation, surprise - and we as readers tend to take cues from the characters as how we should react to the situation - are we rooting for the characters? Do we want one or the other to win? What's at stake and who has the most to lose? Why should we care? Unlike prose, we can't get inside the person's head and read their thoughts, so we have to actually *see* their reactions.
A word about the panel layout here -- this is not the way it is in the Japanese original. Dark Horse started publishing BLADE OF THE IMMORTAL before the current craze for unflipped manga, and Hiroaki Samura requested that they *not* flip his artwork, that they instead cut the panels apart and rearrange them. So they did that, and occasionally, when a sequence could not be cut apart without destroying meaning, they flipped it. So Manji's missing right eye tends to wander from one side to the other, and occasionally the flow of action seems to go backwards. Samura is so good, though, that it doesn't destroy the readability.
In this scene from volume 8, The Gathering, Manji's opponent (you may find the shape of his glasses familiar if you're a comics fan :) doesn't believe that Manji is immortal, and during the course of the fight has staked him in the head. THe page previous to this was spent with him gloating over having killed Manji and making fun of the immortality thing. And then he reaches down to retrieve his blade. Read from left to right, the Western way.
I think I can hear the soundtrack going BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. as I read this. Hanada, Manji's opponent, is given plenty of time to realize that something is not right.
Panel 1, he reaches down. Panel 2 - Manji starts getting up and Hanada is taken aback, and there's a little starburst of realization.
Panel 3 zooms in close on Hanada so we can see his furrowed eyebrows and his "OMGWTFBBQ??" reaction. The sweatdrop on his forehead isn't here as a manga affectation, which is out of place in a manga as realistic as this one - the characters have been complaining about the heat for some pages now, and Hanada just finished (he thinks!) a strenuous fight, so it's not out of place for him to be sweating. But the sweatdrop still works as one in a less-realistic manga does, because most of the readers are acquainted with the symbolic language of the sweatdrop of confusion and embarrassment. It's just not appearing out of nowhere.
Panels 1-3 have the action moving from right to left, subtly. In the Japanese non-cut-up version, this would help push you along in the correct direction, but since Samura didn't rely heavily on visual cues to push you along, it's not too distracting to be backwards. FRUITS BASKET wouldn't survive a cut-and-paste job like this; you'd have to publish it in the original format or flip it.
Panel 4 pulls back to look over Hanada's shoulder, from the point of view of one of the other characters in the scene (otherwise unseen on these pages), so we can see that Manji is getting up, and we can see Hanada's posture, signifying amazed disbelief.
Panel 5 finally brings us in close on Manji's face, the side without an eye. Up until now, Hanada has been the dominant character in the scene, and this is where control passes from Hanada to Manji.
The next page gives us a shot looking up at them, so we get a worm's-eye view of Manji unfolding upwards, and Hanada sputtering in disbelief. Manji is still curled up, but we know he's standing up, and if he were to straighten, he'd be much bigger than Hanada from this angle. We can also tell what Manji's emotions are, despite not seeing his face, because his clenched fingers are prominent. In the Japanese version, his arm and hand would be pointing the way your eyes should go, but in this verision, not. Then we close in on Hanada, greyed out as he's totally lost control of the scene and so we can see his frightened eye through his glasses. The sweat pouring off of him is highlighted, and this time it's the sweat of fear.
Panel 3 has Manji starting to slowly turn towards Hanada. We still don't see his one working eye. The camera is looking up a littel bit at him, to show us that he's dominating Hanada at this point.
Panel 4 has a tight close-up on Manji's face and we finally see his eye, as he parts his lips about to speak.
Note, please, an interesting bit of character here - the expression on Manji's face *isn't* rage, it's resignation, and a bit of confusion. His lines on the next page are "Been... a long time... ages... since somebody... punched a hole in the old brainpan... Heh... Eyesight's sorta... cloudy. But... doesn't hurt as much as a stab through the guts. Weird, huh?" You can see through the pauses in his dialogue that he's healing quickly but not instantaneously. You can also see that he's not fighting out of rage, hate, or revenge. He fights because he's good at it and it's what he knows, and as long as his opponent puts up a good fight, that's what matters. This is orthogonal to what fights usually are - you usually see characters raging and screaming at each other because they have a lot at stake if they lose. Manji and his opponents aren't like that - they don't really have anything or any attachments to this world, and if they lose, then nobody else gets hurt.
Anyway, so why did Samura spend two full pages on this? I'm sure you've all seen comics where this sort of thing would be taken care of within 3 or 4 panels panels - the character gets up, you see the reaction shot of the opponent, and then the fight continues. But that's not very memorable or dramatic, and it's certainly not cinematic. Manga tends to be a lot more cinematic than American comics - if you were filming this, these two pages would probably be just like the storyboards.
This sequence, if it were filmed, would be taken slowly, to milk it for all the dramatic tension you can get. And it needs that respite - the *twenty-two* pages previous to this were spent on the fight. (Er, you get characterization and plot in there, too, it's not solid strike/parry for 22 pages, which would drive me nuts.) These two pages and the two after it are the eye of the hurricane, before Manji resumes the fight, which makes the following fight sequence even more dramatic, because now the three guys attacking Manji have new information - that their opponent can't be killed by normal means - and they're fighting for their lives.
Now on to the other two pages I chose, in which there is actual fighting! Er, maybe not. It's showing the slowing down of time during an action sequence
These two pages are from volume 12, Autumn Frost, a couple of days later than the previous fight (all 13 volumes so far take place over the course of 2 or 3 weeks). Manji is healed up from the fight and has hit the road again with Magatsu, another swordsman (if you've only read the first few books, just trust me that they're traveling together for the moment). An enemy of Manji's has hired a group of bandits to attack Manji on the road.
This is again very cinematic - you get the bowstring sloooooowly aimed, you hear the creak of the arrow, and you can almost hear the heartbeat and breathing that would get thrown into a soundtrack at this stage in a film. This builds anticipation - you know that Manji and Magatsu have no idea that the bandits are there. There's no background at all, and the design here is very stark, very graphic. This ups the threat level of the arrow.
The fourth panel pulls back behind the bandits as he looses the arrow, so we can see how close they are to Manji and Magatsu. The bandits are in the foreground and looking down on the swordsmen, so they seem threatening. Note that this is the only panel with a real background - Samura is seizing the chance to take a momentary rest and give you a look at their surroundings, because there's not going to be much of a chance for the next few panels to do any background - he needs to fill that space in with speedlines and bursts, to show the arrow and people's reactions.
The fifth panel is from the POV of the arrow - the burst lines show how fast it's traveling and who it's aimed at.
The next page, first panel - very tight close-up on Manji's eye as it widens in realization. I haven't completely sussed out why it's totally greyed out, but I think part of it is to negate the picture of a giant eyeball staring at you, Sauron-like, from the page when you first open it. Humans tend to fix on eyes, and an eye that big that wasn't greyed out would dominate the page to an unwanted extent, but it's still necessary because it shows that Manji realizes the arrow's coming a fraction of a second before it hits.
The second panel shows Manji swinging his arm up to block, with Magatsu blithely unaware of what's happening. Note the force of the arrow driving Manji back, and how the black lines emphasize the speed and force of the arrow. Man, that's gotta hurt.
Panel 3 and time is still going slow -- Magatsu is cluing in, and Manji is staring at the arrow in his arm in consternation. It's that moment of clarity that gets burned into your memory in stressful situations, even though it only lasts for a fraction of a second.
The next panel shows Manji doubling over in pain as Magatsu lets go of the bundle he's carrying to start a grab for his sword. Magatsu is shaded all in dark so that he frames Manji, and the dark on the left side of the panel pushes your eye to the right. I have no idea how this is set up in the original Japanese pre-cut-and-paste version, but it works for us. :) Manji's hat even forms an arrow pushing on on to the next panel, which is a closeup of Magatsu's bundle hitting the ground, to show you that the past three panels have all happened in a fraction of a second - you took longer to read them than they took in real life. See how precisely Manji's shape slots into Magatsu's in this panel? It looks like South America slotting into Africa, doesn't it? I interpret this as showing that Manji and Magatsu are working together and are united against the bandits, but it could also just be an affectation on Samura's part. It's not accidental, though - it's quite deliberate.
Magatsu's bundle in the last panel is on a background with a gradient. THe gradient creates a sense of three dimensions, but it also pushes your eye out of the panel, on to the next page, as you go from dark to light.
I know it's Magatsu's bundle dropping and not Manji's, because the previous two pages focused on Magatsu's bundle, with Magatsu dropping it and picking it back up in exhaustion. Magatsu also gets the focus on the next two pages, as he takes five panels to draw his sword in a fraction of a second, and then starts charging up the slope towards the bandits.
It is probably not a coincidence that the arrow on the first page on the bow and the arrow on the second page in Manji's arm are so precisely lined up. I have no idea how it would read in the Japanese version, but it looks really good in the English version, providing a straight line dragging the eye from one page to the other and collapsing time between the two pages. The four panels between them take longer to read than the actual arrow would to travel the short distance, but this is again a cinematic thing that we're familiar with. These two pages probably cover about 3 or 4 seconds of time, but the dramatic tension is pulled as tight as it can be. You wouldn't get the same feeling of threat from the bandits, or learn how fast Manji is if the arrow was loosed and hit Manji in the next panel.
Besides the slowing of time, another characteristic of these two spreads I've showed you is the lack of lots of dialogue. Dialogue would get in the way - and besides, they're really only a few seconds each. There's no *time* to say anything. Magatsu doesn't yell, he gets a speech bubble with "!!" in it, which I interpret as a wordless grunt of surprise.
Anyway, that's it for now. Samura's artwork is a lot closer to traditional pen-and-ink sketching than it is to your typical manga art, and he fills his pages densely with speedlines and lots of detail, which forces you to slow down and take each panel as it comes and really look at the art, especially in the action sequences. If you try to skim through the action sequences you'll have *no* idea what's going on.
That's it for now - I'm probably going to do another one on action, because I haven't done any actual *combat* yet. And I'll probably be doing NARUTO, out of popular demand. ;) See ya then!
Index to the Series
nice
Re: nice
I think the key to rmember is that these are cinematic. We've all seen lots of movies and TV shows and we hardly ever think of them when plotting out a manga - but it's exactly a storyboard sequence.