Manga Bookshelf

Discussion, Resources, Roundtables, & Reviews

let's get visual

New Let’s Get Visual: Funny Pages

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After taking March off, Michelle and I are back with a new installment of Let’s Get Visual, our monthly discussion of manga artwork.

For this month’s theme, to quote Michelle, “We examined intensely emotional moments in our last column, so this time we’re going in the opposite direction by highlighting pages that make us laugh.” Michelle begins first, bringing us a charming scene featuring Koh, the talking snake from Shiho Sugiura’s quasi-BL series, Silver Diamond (TOKYOPOP). I take my own selection from Kiyohiko Azuma’s Yotsuba&!.

As always, the point of the column is to help us develop our ability as manga critics, so please join the discussion, especially if you have something new to teach us!

Find the column here at Michelle’s blog, Soliloquy in Blue.

Behold the power of emotional peril

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Once again, it’s time for Let’s Get Visual, a monthly column in which Michelle Smith and I take a stab at analyzing manga art.

This month, we look at two scenes with heavy emotional impact, one from Ai Yazawa’s rock n’ roll soap opera, NANA, and another from Eiichiro Oda’s shounen epic, One Piece.

What both of us found extraordinary is just how powerful subtle details like body language can be in conveying the emotional resonance of a scene, even with the author’s dialogue completely stripped away.

“And while one might think that it’s the dialogue that makes it romantic (Nobu does say “I love you” right at the end, of course), I think the real testament to Yazawa’s skill here is that, even if you take all the dialogue away, the scene reads the same.”

Check out this month’s column to see what we have to say, and please let us know how you think we’ve done!

Let’s Get Visual: Tricks of the Trade

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It’s time once again for Let’s Get Visual, a monthly feature co-written with Michelle Smith, hosted at her blog, Soliloquy in Blue.

In this month’s installment, Michelle and I take a closer look at some of the tips handed out by the editors at Hakusensha in their book, How To Draw Shojo Manga, published recently in English by TOKYOPOP. To get us started, Michelle pulled out a list of some of the book’s suggested techniques, and then we each turned to our bookshelves for examples of those in action.

To offer up some contrast in style, Michelle chose pages from Julietta Suzuki’s Karakuri Odette (Hana to Yume, 2005-2007), and I picked out some pages from CLAMP’s Tokyo Babylon (Wings, 1990-1993).

This was a particularly illuminating exercise for both of us, so please join us in conversation and let us know what you think!

New Let’s Get Visual: Of Sakura and the Sea

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It’s the last Saturday of the month, which means time for a new installment of Let’s Get Visual at Michelle Smith’s Soliloquy in Blue!

My subject this time around comes from Daisuke Igarashi’s Children of the Sea, published in English by Viz Media. My point of discussion revolves around panel size, and how Igarashi uses it to influence the reader’s experience, up to and including how we feel about the characters and what they’re telling us.

In a series that is known for its beautiful (and unusual) artwork, I found it fascinating to analyze the way the artist uses structure as a tool as well.

Following that, Michelle leads us into a wonderful discussion about the way a mangaka can use art as a kind of emotional shorthand, demonstrated in several scenes from Mari Okazaki’s Suppli.

As always, we’re seeking input from those more knowledgeable about these things than we. So please come along and let us know where we’ve gone wrong!

Let’s Get Visual: Speechless

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Once again, it’s time for Let’s Get Visual, a monthly art-focused exercise with Michelle Smith, hosted at her blog, Soliloquy in Blue.

This month, we respond to a request for discussion of nonverbal storytelling. My choice for the exercise is a scene from the fourth volume of Fumi Yoshinaga’s Antique Bakery. Though the scene does contain some minimal dialogue, I provided scans from the Japanese book in order to illustrate how profoundly the artwork does the talking.

Though we discuss only the scene as presented, and never reveal what is said between the two characters, thinking about this series made me want to start handing it out to gay teens as my version of an “It Gets Better” video. The way that Ono moves on from this moment to discover a new life, while Tachibana hangs on to his guilt for years after… it’s so close to the stories of many of my own friends who left high school to move on to things much, much greater, while their tormentors stayed behind, still mired in the world of our high school social scene.

As always, please remember that we’re asking for your help. We want to improve our ability to analyze visual storytelling and we’re anxious for feedback from those who know more than we. Though we’d prefer you be gentle, we’ll take what we can get!

So head on over to the latest Let’s Get Visual and let us know how we’re doing!

Let’s Get Visual: Action Edition

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Every day I’m reminded as I browse the manga blogosphere just how much I have to learn about reading and criticizing manga. So, last month, Michelle Smith and I launched a new feature, Let’s Get Visual, where we let our weaknesses show with a view towards growing as critics.

In comments to last month’s column, David Brothers asked if we might talk about more action-oriented scenes the next time around. Since Michelle and I aim to please, we decided to give it a go! The result? Let’s Get Visual: Annnnnd Action!

With Akimi Yoshida’s Banana Fish on the brain (for obvious reasons) I chose a few pages from volume eight of that series, while Michelle picked a sequence from Tsutomu Nihei’s BLAME!

Before you head on over let me remind you that we’re genuinely looking to improve our comprehension of and ability to analyze the visual aspects of manga, so if you know a lot more than we do (and I know many of you do), please teach us! We’d prefer a gentle touch, but we’ll take what we can get! Also, if you have particular requests, as David did, you can see we reward those who indulge us with comments.

So check out our brand new Let’s Get Visual and let us know how we’re doing!

Introducing Let’s Get Visual!

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A bit of news on this Saturday evening: It’s time to head over to Soliloquy in Blue where Michelle Smith and I have posted the first installment of our new monthly feature, Let’s Get Visual!

Inspired by our own lack of background and training in the visual arts, Michelle and I decided to take some time each month to choose a few panels from our favorite manga to analyze and discuss.

Are we really just embarrassing ourselves by revealing our ignorance in public? Perhaps. But by making ourselves think harder about how to express what we see in the manga we read every day (and with, hopefully, some gentle guidance from more knowledgeable readers) we hope we’ll become better manga critics!

My choice for our inaugural column is four pages from volume fifteen of Hikaru no Go, one of my favorite series, drawn by an artist I admire quite a bit. …

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