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ETA: GAH but I've got to re-adjust my new monitor! Those looked almost white on it. The brightness and contrast is obviously way the hell off. I'll fix that and redo the pages tonight, when I get home.Much, much better now. Not perfect, but muuuuch better. You may need to force a reload if your browser's cached the original, awful, images.
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ETA yet again: Just posted a
followup-type entry, coming out of some comments down below.
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I've been musing on various things - the differences between the current crop of OEL manga and Japanese manga, backgrounds and the lack of same, detail vs. no detail, and it hit me when I cracked open
Fruits Basket 12 that maybe I should just post something and see what comes of talk about it.
This is page 18 from Fruits Basket 12 (no spoilers), once normally and once with as much of the text and text balloons cleaned out as I could do (and sketchily-fixed-up pictures, just to give a rough idea). This should be the page as it looks after inking and toning and before the text balloons are drawn in (well, ok, so I expect that the mangaka draws the balloons in the pencils, and inks the balloons at the same time the rest of the panels are inked, really).
Anyway. This page has many of the same characteristics as a lot of amateur manga out there on the Web that I see - lots of empty space with tone thrown in to fill space, almost no background whatsoever, figures drawn in profile (because it's easier than 3/4 view), very little variation in line width. The question, then, is...
( WHY DOES IT WORK? )