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Manga Bookshelf

Discussion, Resources, Roundtables, & Reviews

August 6, 2011 by MJ 2 Comments

Saturday Spotlight: revisiting NANA

There are a couple of factors influencing my choice for this week’s Saturday Spotlight. First, following last week’s news regarding the return of Wild Adapter and today’s announcement that CLAMP is resuming Legal Drug, Michelle asks on Twitter, Can we hope for NANA?

Secondly, as some of you may know, I moonlight as a singing/acting coach, and this week I had the unique pleasure of experimenting with some cross-discipline learning while coaching a group of very talented young women. As part of a week-long acting intensive, we spent a day working with scripts pulled from some of my favorite manga—beginning with dialogue only, and then later studying the ways in which the mangaka used the artwork to “direct” the scenes, from one emotional beat to the next, emphasizing the importance of body language and the spaces between the dialogue.

One of these scenes came from the fourth volume of NANA, reawakening my love for the series, and inspiring me to recommend it, at least to the 17+ crowd. Of course, even today, the best tool I have for this is an older post from 2008, Why you should read NANA.

Still the most-viewed post on the site, this “persuasion post” was responsible for my introduction to quite a number of folks in the manga blogosphere, and my feelings for the series have remained mostly unchanged since that time. If you’ve never been sold on NANA, check it out!

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Filed Under: Saturday Spotlight Tagged With: nana

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Sara K. says

    August 6, 2011 at 9:42 pm

    “… we spent a day working with scripts pulled from some of my favorite manga—beginning with dialogue only, and then later studying the ways in which the mangaka used the artwork to “direct” the scenes, from one emotional beat to the next, emphasizing the importance of body language and the spaces between the dialogue.”

    Cool.

    Reply
  2. Travis says

    August 7, 2011 at 5:19 am

    I really hope Nana will come back someday! Out of curiosity I checked wikipedia and it’s now been on hiatus for over two years. D:

    Reply


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