New Let’s Get Visual: Duds

We’ve arrived again at the third Saturday of the month, which means of course it’s time for a brand new Let’s Get Visual with Michelle Smith at her blog, Soliloquy in Blue. For those new to the feature, each month, Michelle and I turn our rusty brains towards analyzing manga (or manhwa) artwork, in an attempt to improve our understanding of visual storytelling.

Up until now, we’ve always focused on artwork we think works especially well at telling the intended story. For this month, we decided to go the opposite direction and try our hand at discussing artwork that fails. Uh. Way to get into the holiday spirit?

For my “dud” selection, I chose two pages from Ellie Mamahara’s Baseball Heaven (sorry, BLU), a standard BL seduction scene, but one that unfortunately lacks heat.

“… there’s simply no passion in it … absolutely no sexual tension between them conveyed through the artwork … Even when their faces are so close together, Mamahara is unable to provide any magnetic reaction between them. I should feel that they *want* to touch each other. It should feel painful for them not to. Instead, it leaves me completely cold.”

Read the entire discussion here, or check out all our entries in the series so far!