telophase | Mangatalk: American comics

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.)

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Perhaps there's something to be said as to why manga is making big gains in the western comics industry, but American comics don't seem to feature much in Japanese. The American comics put a lot more focus on what's being said in the text (at least, that's how I see it) with each of the panels tending to stand alone a lot more, like cut scenes from a film. Manga seems to put more of a visual flow into the story which just seems to be able to hop that cultural divide a little easier. Having said that, though, I'm aware that the earliest forms of (modern) manga were heavily influenced by (and even based around the flow of) western comic strips.

That's not to say the American tradition in comic art doesn't have its merits, but somehow, it seems to have developed a more rigid set of visual rules.

That's not to say the American tradition in comic art doesn't have its merits,

Absolutely - they just have different visual languages, basically, and it's interesting to see the different emphases. For the most part, American comics seem to be more tightly focused on the writing and using the art to enhance the writing, while manga seems to view the art and writing in a more integrated fashion.

I've definitely noticed the emphasis on writing in American comics--or I should say, when I started reading manga, I noticed that there was a lot less text with the art. In fact, it was the thing I had the most trouble with, at first, because I mentally equated less text with less content.

I suspect that the drastic difference in how much text you see on the average page of manga is part of what makes it more popular and accessible to people who don't already read comics. Text-heavy pages are much harder to read. To people whose pastimes already include reading, that's fine--you get some pretty pictures with your story. To people who don't read for pleasure, something like that Fables page probably doesn't look worth the effort-it'll take you what, five minutes to plow through all that? Whereas a page of Fruits Basket takes you thirty seconds.

(I've heard several anime fans say that they don't like to buy manga because they read it so fast that it feels like a waste of money. I once felt the same way--until I realized that it might take me only half an hour to read a hundred and seventy pages, but that I would read it over and over again.)

Basically, if you're going to tell most of your story through text and not art, you need to be a damn good writer to make it worth reading. Conversely, if you're going to rely on art etcetera to tell the story, you'd better be a damn good artist...

I followed your link over here from Kate's journal...

Looking at your assortment of pages there, two things jump out at me:

1. The extremely regular page lay-out of many of the U.S. comics (Fables, Hellblazer, Lenore, Powers, Xmen) obliviates the need for any other visual cues on how to read the pages. It's interesting (to me, at any rate) that most the American artists who do use more varied layouts (mixing up panel size, shape and configuration) still do not make an effort to use art & word-balloon placement to guide the art.

2. Transmetropolitan isn't the only sample which uses the words and art to guide the eye. The Elfquest page does it, too, although not as effectively as what I see in most manga. The word balloons sit on top of the art, and bridge panel borders, instead of being tucked off in uninteresting corners. The fight scene is not really effective (putting all the words in the middle draws atttention away from the art), but in the conversation at the bottom, the placement of the word balloons really does drag one's eyes across the pictures.

Yeah, I forgot about the Elfquest one when I was typing it up. I seem to recall that Wendy Pini has acknowledged the influence of manga on her sequential work - it's obvious in the character designs of the elves, but it seems to go into the layout as well.

Maybe that's why I had so little trouble getting into manga - I cut my teeth on Elfquest as a kid. It was the first comic I ever read. XD

And because I never remember to reply to *all* points before posting...

The Lenore example shows something important -- because of the regular structure, the artist has to point out, literally, with an arrow, the key that Lenore has just lifted, because otherwise most readers are going to completely blow by the action. Even in, say, superhero comics, if there's a pattern of closeups, the key could be shown in Lenore's hand in closeup, but the artist here prefers to stay back at a more formal distance in the two panels dealing with it.

In fact, I read the buckgodot.jpg the wrong way, completely missing the bottom-left panel at first, because all the text was across the top. (Top Ten is also slightly weird, because the first text balloon slants down and left; for a minute I wasn't sure if I was supposed to read it from the top down or the bottom up (since that would make it more left-to-right.)

Elfquest also has that honkin' big sword pointing the way to the next text balloon.

Randomly--my goodness, but _Fables_ is text-intensive, isn't it? And the art doesn't seem to be adding anything but scenery.

I kind of like the Powers layout, except the last speech balloon might use a longer, umm, thingie, trail pointing to the left.

Fables comes across as more of an illustrated novel to me. Transmetropolitan can at times, but the artist usually puts enough worldbuilding detail into the art that it's worth spending a while looking at it. Powers goes for that stark noir effect through most of it.

I haven't reread Buck Godot in a while - Foglio does cartoony facial expressions wonderfully, but the hand lettering throws me off. Same for Desert Peach - I only have the one book of that, and I want to get more, but it's a bit more effort to read because of the variation in sizes of the letters.

I've gotten so used to all the whitespace in manga balloons that densely-packed balloons are offputting to me most of the time. Transmet doesn't bother me as much, because the writing is so central to it - Spider Jerusalem is a journalist, for one thing, and the writing itself is excellent.

Elfquest and XXXenophile...I always knew you had good taste.

XD The above is representative of teh majority of my current comics collection - I went to my shelves and grabbed one book of almost everything I had. That's my only current Elfquest book - my old, beat-up issues are in a box at my mother's place.

Mangatalk: American comics

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