Coming up with this story-within-a-story was pretty effortless, because I used to watch so many anime shows when I was a kid, like Albator (the androgynous space pirate), and Goldorak (the badass gundam robot), or Ulysses 31 (on his quest to get back to, you know, space-station Ithaca, or whatever)... But now that the manuscript is in the process being copyedited, it's time to deal with the spot illustrations, and this might require a bit more sweat because I've decided it would be cool if there were some credible "exerpts" from the manga in the novel — so I'm now in the process of teaching myself how to draw in the manga style.
I have to say, before studying it carefully and discovering some of its charm from the inside, I was not really crazy about this drawing style. Coming from a background in French/Belgian comic books and American comic strips, I was always put off by what I felt were ugly, generic characters and a kind of clutter or noise on the page that often made reading mangas a bit of a baffling experience for me.
I also felt that manga characters were oddly static, despite all the effects meant to signify speed and motion in the action sequences. I thought that it was all much less effective than the comic book art ultimately derived from Disney animation techniques (the slinky line dynamics, the emphasis on the "gesture", the careful study and exageration of attitudes and expressions...). Stuff like the work of Franquin (Spirou, Gaston Lagaffe) or Bill Watterson (the Calvin & Hobbes comic strip).
Mangas, I discovered, have much more abstract conventions to signify emotions — for example, by using graphic symbols, or intermittently transforming realistically represented characters into their "super deformed" emotive caricatures. It feels a bit jarring before you get used to this kind of graphic shorthand. There's less "acting" in mangas than in Western comics or animation and more "signaling" — conventional symbols or "masks" indicating what the emotion meant to be conveyed is. I suppose this comes from the Japanese theatrical tradition, and also from writing with a visually expressive ideographic system.
The compositions do tend to be very dynamic. And I can understand why so many people — especially younger illustrators — have really gotten into this style. I think it's because it offers such a rich and coherent language for story-telling... A structured language that one doesn't have to "invent" but simply adopt, whole, and conform to. One can join the club and be part of something — a cultural movement maybe. Just follow the detailed instructions...
Plus there's this whole business of mixing over-the-top sexiness (behold the bosomiest of bosomy babydolls), wanton violence, and true wide-eyed innocent childishness... It's quite a potent cocktail. A toy reality, a safe framework within which to project our heady longings for sex or vengeance or childhood certainties or brutality or transgression or enlightenment or simply the respite offered by a clean, well-lighted place... (Unlike Hemingway, with manga, you can just show it.)
Speaking of which, in the pile of mangas I borrowed from the library to get familiar with the form, I found one series called Amanchu! by Kozue Amano, which I found totally charming. It's a story about two young women between whom a friendship blossoms, as they train to become ace scooba divers. There isn't much action to speak of — just a series of gentle slice-of-life vignettes drawn with great skill and sensitivity. The reader accompanies the characters, as they make their way around the lazy seaside resort town where they live and also practice diving.
Here are some images:
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