welcome to camp 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.

Stemming from this afternoon's discussion of cover colors, I got the desire to see if I could see any difference in the top-selling manga and less well selling manga. I couldn't find any numbers for a full year anywhere, but the admin of Love Manga loves to crunch numbers and posts a Top 50 list every month. So these ratings swiped from his Top 50 Manga for November 2005.

I swiped the images from Amazon.com, and since Amazon was running slow for me, instead of comparing the top 10 versus the bottom 10 in this list, I'm just doing the top 5.

Caveats: we all know the cover isn't the only thing that causes book sales (word of mouth is actually the #1 selling point), so you don't need to tell me that the cover is only part of that and there's all these other aspects that go into it. (Anyone posting to tell me that gets directed up to this sentence. :D) Also, looking at one month's sales don't really tell us much - I'd need to look at the sales month-by-month for an entire year or more, and frankly you'd probably need to pay me to do that. XD So we can't draw any real conclusions from this, but it might provide something to think about. Or it might not. Let's see, shall we?

( On to the cover images )

 

Back in one of my shoujo art posts a week or so ago, prettyism volunteered her art for comparison purposes of amateur vs. pro work. This isn't a post about layout, however, it's about art. prettyism asked about her work in her LJ, and I answered a few things there, and then started thinking about poses and flow and anatomy, and that kinda exploded into this.

This is actually a very long version of the sort of crit I occasionally do over on Deviantart. And prettyism knows I'm doing it. :D I also want to point out that this chick has drawn several hundred pages of her stories, which shows far more stick-to-itiveness than 99% of the wannabe artists out there, and we should all give her a round of applause for that, as well as having the guts to let me do this in public. XD *golf claps*

I am using Kazuya Minekura's work in comparison, because she has excellent examples of the sort of thing I'm talking about. Minekura's work is drawn from traditional figure-drawing techniques, and although her anatomy is exaggerated, it's exaggerated in such a way that it makes it easier to see the muscles and bones beneath the skin, and she has movement and flow in her images, even when the figures are standing still.

( On to the art! Lotsa images below the cut )

This got way long - I'm going to publish it to LJ now and do the anatomy in a separate entry.