Manga story structure

[telophase]

If you don't read the manga blogs, right now you're missing a go-round on story structure and books vs. serials sparked by a post by Johanna Draper Carlson at Comics Worth Reading and Christopher Butcher's review of tentopet's Fool's Gold.

Chronologically:

1. Johanna Draper Carlson's essay about reviewing serialized chapters, in response to someone challenging her reading of Mail Order Ninja.
2. Christopher Butcher's review of Fool's Gold.
3. Queenie Chan is asked by Newsarama to write a bit on the state of OEL/global manga, and responds to the above two by detailing the story structure she followed in The Dreaming.
4. Butcher responds, challenging Chan's perception of the three-act structure she used.
5. Heidi Macdonald at The Beat jumps in also.

Comments

[elfiepike.livejournal.com]

how interesting! (i find that perhaps i am the only person intrigued by steady beat enough to own it. possibly it is the hint of gay i sense? that and east coast rising are the only OEL releases from tokyo pop that i'm interested in, really.)

i think christopher butcher has an especially good point when he says that they need better editors. seriously, the first chapter of naruto has you totally introduced to everyone and into the story in twenty pages; that kind of pacing is necessary.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Yeah... contrary to that very peculiar digression on TV pilots, in fact one of the things you learn if you write for TV is how to get a story going very quickly. (Which tends to give me the opposite problem, which is trying to cram 300 pages of story into 150 and having moments go by too quickly, as opposed to the more common one of spending 148 pages slowly and carefully setting everything up, and then beginning the actual plot two pages before the end of the first volume.)

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Speaking of which, I bought Scott McCloud's Making Comics the other day. I'm still reading the introduction, and I already highly recommend it. :D

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Tina Anderson and I have been talking about critics etc over on the manga_talk entry. :)


And what this whole thing has really been making me want to do is to fit a Shakespearean five-act structure into a three-book series. Or to pull a Boogiepop Phantom and tell the entire thing completely out of sequence as if it were Slaughterhouse-5.