Saiyuki commentary: art (volumes 1-3)

[kate_nepveu]

I was going to have an "art" section in the whopping big Saiyuki post, but decided to break that out into multiple posts so that I could inline the images without killing people's connections. No deep thoughts here, just stuff I noticed in re-reading volumes 1-3, from an incredibly newbie perspective. Spoilers, naturally, particularly for volume 3. Also, I'm trying not to repeat things said by coffee_and_ink's three posts on Saiyuki, or telophase's Manga Analysis series post, or snowyheart's grid structure post, because they said it better and more helpfully.

Finally, I haven't read Reload or Gaiden yet. Do not spoil me for those volumes, or I will kill you with my brain.

Page numbering convention (which I, umm, made up): volume.chapter.page. All images are from the scanlations.

Characters:

Someone, possibly coffee_and_ink, remarked that Minekura's art style improves over time. I hadn't realized it, but going back to volume 1 really makes it clear how this is true. I mostly noticed it in the faces, which are somewhat weirdly pointy around the jaws. Consider Gojyo and Hakkai in the prologue (1.0.28):

By the end of volume 3, there is still some pointiness, but it's getting better (3.17.184-185):

 

The other character thing I want to remark on in these volumes is on 2.6.17, where we see little baby Gokus scampering about the text balloons, I believe to indicate who's talking (as if it weren't obvious). This is the only time we see this technique in these first three volumes, at least. I find it a little cute for my tastes.

Page layout:

You've already read the links above the cut, right? Right.

Panel flow:

When I first starting reading Saiyuki, I paid a lot of attention to panel flow and direction. Mostly I had no problems with this, which is why 1.1.54 gave me such trouble, and continued to do so on re-read (original size):

As far as I can tell, the most natural path for your eye on this page is . . . a circle, which was disorienting for me when I was trying so hard to remember to read right-to-left. I've marked it up below to show what I mean:

*shrug* A minor point, but one that caught my eye.

Here's something that's so basic that I'm almost embarassed to mention it, but everyone knows I'm a manga newbie. I found myself surprised at how easily that I picked up the right-to-left—but more than that, at how easily I didn't keep going right-to-left when I was supposed to drop down a line, even though the drop came before the edge of the page. I realized that Minekura (and probably everyone else) makes this easy by using the panel edges as cues and barriers. Here's a better example edited shortly after posting (2.6.39) (original size):

Instead of going across the top to "She's not thinking, right?", my eye follows the path drawn in red, because the panel edges (highlighted in blue) automatically redirect my eye. Like this:

Also note how the speech ballons draw the eye in the right direction. Like I said, so very basic that I almost didn't mention it.

Other panel flow things:

One of my favorite layouts in volume two is this double-page spread (2.9.114-115) (original size):

I first noticed the way that Hakkai and Kougaiji's eyes meet, and the way that the connection pops off the page, even with all the other things going on. Then I noticed how the sword to the right of Hakkai sets up a line that's followed through in Hakkai's eyes and the mountains in the background; and how Kougaiji's leap sets up the other two sides of a triangle, with his legs and Hakkai's head, like so:

I dunno, I just think it's neat.

Oh, speaking of panel layouts—we all know that Minekura loves the two-panels-across, one-person-per-panel thing, yes? For parallelism, emotional emphasis, or other punctuation? Okay. There are so many examples of these that I'm afraid to start on that for fear I'd never finish.

Foregrounds and backgrounds:

telophase pointed out the use of "tones", and thanks to her post, I noticed that Minekura really makes a lot of use of tones of a wide variety. Here are four examples from within just six pages of one chapter (3.12.24, 3.12.26, 3.12.29, and 3.12.30):

     

This is a slightly different use of tones: the people in the foreground aren't interesting, so they're faded out (2.8.78):

Finally, and again this is so basic I hate to mention it, but I liked the occasional use of backgrounds that had different events than the foregrounded panels. Sometimes this is to show other locations in the present (2.6.9) (original size):

But more (and more interestingly), it seems, it's used to indicate events that the foregrounded character is thinking of, like when Goku flashes back to Gaiden (presumably; remember, I haven't read it yet) and then goes beserk (3.12.13) (original size):

Or the last scene between Sanzo and Rikudo (3.14.91) (original size):

It takes a little more parsing for me as a reader, because I have to notice that we're not progressing linearly between panels any more, but it's worth it.

And . . . that's it. Hope I haven't embarrassed myself too much.

[ more Saiyuki art commentary ]

9:58: okay, I'm done having better ideas about the images and formatting and such. Sorry if anyone was reading during the edits.

Comments

[desdenova.livejournal.com]

I apologize in advance for my excessive rambling, and posting graphics in your comments.

The non-linear progression of panels thing, using minor or background panels to refer to inner thoughts, or to do mood-setting, or to draw your eye to important details, is a common technique. You see it way, way more in manga than in Western comics, and more often in "shojo" (girl-oriented) manga than in "shonen" (boy-oriented) manga. Saiyuki is interesting in that Minekura is using shojo-type techniques to tell what would otherwise be a shonen-type story (action-adventure questy stuff). She's a bit of a Roger Zelazny, that way. (The extensive use of screen-tones to convey mood and emotional states is another standard shojo technique.)

Have you read Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud? If you found those posts by coffee_and_ink and telophase interesting, I recommend it. He does a really thorough job of dissecting and analyzing all the different aspects of sequential-art storytelling, including what techniques are commonly used by creators from different cultures. It's really good stuff.

Back to the subject matter at hand:

Re: page 1.1.54 and panel-reading order, the visual clue that tells us which order to read them in is the extra-wide margin around the two upper-right panels. The big margin indicates a scene change from the street to the inn, and once that division is made, the order of reading flows naturally:


You're right; that layout with Hakkai, Kougaiji, and Yaone is really neat. Thanks for pointing it out! It's been a long while since I've looked at the earlier volumes (they have been on loan).

[kate_nepveu]

_That's_ excessive? You should see my notes on the non-art portions of volumes 1-3. I'm almost scared to start volume 4 because it's going to get exponentially worse.

Anyway--yes, I know it's *supposed* to be a scene change, but the speech ballons override panel whitespace to me. And even with the division you have--it's basically impossible to read 4 & 5 in right-to-left order.

It's not a big deal, it's just that Minekura is usually so easy to follow, and it was so early in my Very First Manga, that it stuck in my head.

[desdenova.livejournal.com]

Heh. I hadn't noticed that this was only vol. 1-3. You poor dear.

About that page, I think panels 4&5 are supposed to be read left-to-right. Or, more precisely, the text balloon (Goku talkingyelling) which spans 4&5 comes before the one which is entirely in 5 (Gojyo). (Not that it's really important whose dinner-time bitching comes first.) It's the jump up to panel 2 (after 5) which seems counter-intuitive to me. But, over the last several years, I have trained my brain up to read comics effectively (I used to just read the text w/o paying much attention to the pictures at all), so the first thing I notice is the white space.

[kate_nepveu]

I think panels 4&5 are supposed to be read left-to-right

Which is what broke my poor trying-to-be-conscientious brain! Anyway.

I think that I'll possibly have less to say about the art in subsequent volumes, which is all to the good since my characterization and plot notes . . . eep.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Yeah, 1.1.54 fails because of that speech balloon that overlaps the border. I can see why she put it in there - because the border is otherwise too big and would divide the page visually in a rather too-obvious way - but since she otherwise conforms to the convention of having overlapping speech bubbles signify the path you're supposed to follow, it doesn't work right. She tried to fix that - the bubble only goes partially into the space and doesn't overlap that other panel - but the convention is too strong.

[kate_nepveu]

Do you think that moving the speech balloon inside the border, and making the border smaller, would have helped at all?

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Most probably. I flipped into Photoshop and did a quick, subtle redesign:



I cut off the balloon in both of these, and shrank panel 3 down from the top to emphasize its difference from the first two. The difference between the above two is the size of the first two panels, just to see what enlarging them does. I ahd to shrink part of that inset below panel 3 down so it wouldn't overlap panel 2.

[kate_nepveu]

Thanks--this is fascinating. Either of those works much better for me than the original. Moving the top of 3 down helps also--I should've noted that something of the same happens in the panel-edge example I posted, 2.6.39 (which perhaps makes it not as good an example on the sheer power of panel edges).

[telophase.livejournal.com]

No, I think it makes it a good example, because it's something else that indicates you're not supposed to read directly across the page from right to left until you hit the border - the whitespace makes your eye look down a little bit and then the diagonal captures it, and you're reading correctly.

Hm. This idea really only hit me with these posts about shrinking the panel down - that is another trick I'll have to put in my arsenal.

[kate_nepveu]

Yes, I'm beginning to think that the panel edges by themselves aren't as strong as I first thought, without additional whitespace or speech balloons. This might have something to do with the fact that, in volume 4 at least (which I have to hand), the space between panel borders is much smaller horizontally than vertically, even when you're supposed to be reading down instead of continuing across.

This puzzles me.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

They certainly all work together as a system.

The strongest difference that I've noted between manga layout and American comics layout is that often in manga - not all the time, of course - the visual flow is designed to drag your eye across the art as well as the text. In the American comics I read, you ahve to make an effort to look at the art in the panel as well as the text balloons. Look up at 2.6.9 - you're forced to look at the expressions on Goku's and Gojyo's faces as you go from Goku's lines to Gojyo's. Then you go across the foot, then you have to look at the Jeep. I've been reading a couple of Fables graphic novel collections, and while the art is detailed and worth looking at, there's quite as much visual interaction between the text and the art that way.

Of course, I go searching on GoogleImages to find pages that illustrate that, and there's no full Fables pages out there and all the pages I find of Hellblazer have that visual line. Erg.

Wait -- here's a good example. This is a page (http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v209/telophase/wolvie4.jpg) from some issue of Wolverine.

Here it is with the Red Line o'Doom. (http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v209/telophase/wolvie4-red.jpg) You can see that in the top panel, you completely skip the right half of the panel - even though the gun's pointing at Wolverine's silhouette - because that bright white speech balloon sucks attention away as soon as you hit the end of the gun. The second panel has too many lines leading away - you might go from the top speech balloons along to the gun and then back down the arm to the bottom speech balloon into panel 3, which is what I think is supposed to happen, but that bright white sucks you in, at which point you've got 2 strong lines out - the arm and Panel 3. Panel 3 is confusing at the bottom - you're supposed to jump up to Panel 4, but look -- after you read the seech balloon, the guy's arm with the gun continues into panel 6, completely bypassing panel 5! *And* there's a speech balloon close to the edge there, in the line your eyes travel to get to panel 4, which hijacks your gaze.

Here's another potential path (http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v209/telophase/wolvie4-blue.jpg). Forgive the shakiness of the line - I was using my trackball on that, and it's less-than-precise. But there's still problems with the path there, too. The artist who laid this page out is relying almsot entirely on you knowing how to read comics panels - first right-to-left, then up-to-down - resulting in way too many lines to follow if you're trying to read it following manga conventions.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

* there's not quite as much visual interaction between the text and the art that way.

I got a bit distracted in Wolverine from my original point, which was how much of the art is missed. Looking at those, there's big areas on the right that the eye misses unless you make a specific effort to look at it.

And I know, from much expereince with sking people and with seeding HUGE HONKING clues into art and having them missed - most people don't make a special effort to look at the art.

[kate_nepveu]

This is great--you're right about Minekura. There's a page in vol. 4 that I was planning to mark up and post anyway, and it does exactly this, putting faces in the line of visual flow. And you're also right that most people have to force themselves to look at the art--I do, and part of this exercise is to see what I've been missing and try and train myself otherwise.

I agree with your comments about the Wolverine pages, especially the Red Line o'Doom on the bottom--the arm almost-but-not-quite continuing across panels is very distracting. Also, I found the constant switching of which direction we're looking disorienting--possibly we're supposed to, since these appear to be twitchy nervous types, but it still made it hard for me to figure out where I was and was supposed to be next.

[desdenova.livejournal.com]

Dude. I never noticed that before about placing the word balloons in such a way as to force the reader to look at the art as they're reading, but you're totally right! I am at work right now so I can't check my entire comics collection, but conveniently, I do have Tokyopop's "Takuhai" magazine with me, which conveniently has sample chapters of 4 Japanese manga, and 6 OEL (Original English Language) manga[*]. Every one of the five Japanese artists (the 4, plus the Japanese artist for Princess Ai) uses this technique, while only one of the American artists does (Felipe Smith in MBQ). The American artists seem to place the text so as to avoid obscuring the artwork, instead of using it to guide the eye.

Fascinating!

[*] Of the titles sampled in this little zine, I've only read one, CLAMP's Legal Drug; I'm assuming that the sample pages in the magazine are representative of the various artists' work.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I just posted a bit of an answer (http://www.livejournal.com/users/telophase/203071.html) in my journal, which isn't much but a pointer to some scans of American comics and a small bit about Transmetropolitan. :)

[greenapple2004.livejournal.com]

Part of the reason for this discrepancy in American art vs. Japanese is that traditionally, manga is drawn with balloons fully integrated into the art, from the rough thumbnail stage all the way through finishes, so their design is physically part of the artwork. American comics typically add balloons on top of the finished art during the lettering process, and so are much more likely to make them small and unobtrusive, and not part of the actual structure of the page.

The TP artists so far do a mix of things, depending on what their art background is. Felipe Smith is by far the most grounded in manga out of the previews in Takuhai 1, whereas the rest run the gamut from mostly American comics training, to barely any formal training at all. I look forward to hearing what people think of issue 2 in a month or so. :-) There's gonna be some sweet stuff in there.

[kate_nepveu]

Thank you for the information. Does this have anything to do with the artist and letterer often being different people on Western comics? I'm guessing so, but I know very little about the process.

[desdenova.livejournal.com]

I wondered that at first, too, but then I looked at single-creator American comics, and saw the same thing. (And similarly in Japanese comics with separate writers/artists--the Japanese technique prevailed.) So, there might be some historical/traditional basis, but it's not purely a function of separate artists/writers.

[greenapple2004.livejournal.com]

Not directly connected, no. Actual lettering in Japanese manga is also done by a separate person, usually the editor, who prints the text out and then tapes it on to the balloons. :-) For such a high-tech country, manga-making is still pretty primitive. They don't even keep digital files of a lot of older things.

I think it might be that because Western comics, with a few exceptions, tend to have much more regular panels and fewer wacky reading patterns, ballooning hasn't developed up to the level it has in Japan. Using balloons to make the eye move the right way is inherent in the structure of manga far more than it is for your average superhero book. A good manga artist makes it easy to read, and a great manga artist actually uses the balloon placement to help the storytelling.

[kate_nepveu]

Taping it onto the balloons! Wow. I can just imagine the opportunities for error that can provide if things are really rushed. =>

Yes, I can see that if the visual path through a path is well-understood by everyone, by convention, balloons might not be put to that use. I need to come back to this after I've had time to look at the pages telophase posted--the extent to which Western conventions might not help people new to the genre, or not visually inclined.

[kate_nepveu]

Also, I haven't read _Understanding Comics_, and I hadn't realized it dealt with non-Western comics. I will check the library for it, thanks for the information.

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

I think you're both right--that is, I read it the way you do, desdenova, but I see why Kate's confused, and I think it's why we don't see Minekura use the same kind of layout later on: it's an experiment, and the experiment fails. It's not a layout with a clear enough flow of action.

I was frustrated by how little McCloud dealt with manga when I went back to Understanding Comics after reading manga for a few months (I'd read him years before when I was into Sandman), but it's possible to figure out some things by the way he describes what Western comics do that manga -- especially shoujo -- doesn't. So I second the rec, but in a more qualified way.

I liked the occasional use of backgrounds that had different events than the foregrounded panels.

I've been calling these "borderless panels" instead of backgrounds to avoid confusion with the backgrounds of individual panels. But this is one of my favorite manga effects -- it makes for this richer psychological experience, incorporating memory and emotion into sequences of actions. desdenova is right that this is a shoujo technique, but I don't think the shoujo/shounen combination is unique to Minekura -- I think a lot of shoujo techniques have filtered over to shounen, even if they're not used as heavily. You can see some of the same combinations at work in Bleach, for example, which is about as shounen as you can get.

[desdenova.livejournal.com]

My brain tends to not make a clear distinction between "comics" and "manga" (when I started getting into the medium a few years back, it was through both Western and Asian comics), so I didn't read Understanding Comics with an eye towards manga-specific bits. Much of what he writes about in there is generally applicable. There is one bit in there where he talks about various types of panel-to-panel transitions (with graphs!) which I think Kate would find particularly interesting.

Re: shojo/shonen, it is true that there is a trend towards shojo techniques in shonen manga; I remember reading an article about it a few years back. (I wish I'd saved a copy, now. Ah, the ephemeral Internet.). I do think that the melding is more extensive in Saiyuki than it is in Bleach, although I am not about to go through all the books and draw up McCloud-esque graphs. CLAMP is also big on the style-mixing; most of their work I can't even tell whether a particular title of theirs is supposed to be shojo or shonen, or what. (Tsubasa is technically shonen, yes? What about xxxHolic?)

[kate_nepveu]

Graphs! Hah. I'm sold. Thanks.

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

Tsubasa is technically shounen. Maybe more than "technically." There's the whole CLAMP issue--but it's got what I think of as the stereotypical marker of shounen, which is that about 75% of the plot is fighting.

Nobody seeems to know what XXXholic is; I remember reading an interview with one of the CLAMP members where she called it "uncategorizable." Odd little horror fantasy story with shounen-ai hints, I guess, but hardly enough for those hints to be the hook for people who look for that. Like a lot of the manga I have a hard time categorizing as shoujo or shounen, it makes more sense when I think of it in terms of Western genres, oddly enough. I mean, the medium's manga (plus some Beardsley), but the content is pure Saki or M.R. James.

[mistressrenet.livejournal.com]

Straight-out horror Saki, or is there some humor?

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

There's lots of humor, actually. As of volume 5, it seems like one of their happier works.

[mistressrenet.livejournal.com]

One of my campfuckudie friends has gotten me curious about it, but I've been hesitant because CLAMP is so up-and-down.

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

Well, I think the art's among their best, wasn't won over by the story at first, and have been more persuaded by recent volumes. I like it, but I seem to like CLAMP better than a lot of people do and/or to be more forgiving of uncompleted stories.

[mistressrenet.livejournal.com]

The people-who-all-look-alike get to me after a while. But I'll hve to check it out.

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

I don't think the main characters of XXXholic look much like each other or even any other CLAMP characters. Huh.

[mistressrenet.livejournal.com]

I meant CLAMP in general. I haven't seen anything of XXXholic other than my friend's icons in Camp Fuck You Die, which are hardly representative. XD

[desdenova.livejournal.com]

it's got what I think of as the stereotypical marker of shounen, which is that about 75% of the plot is fighting.

Hah! Not a bad metric.

I generally use the terms in reference to whom the comics are marketed towards in Japan, i.e. what sort of magazine they're published in. It's an artificial classification system, to be sure, and sometimes you've got to wonder how a particular manga ended up in a magazine full of an entirely different type of story, but it provides a baseline for discussing artistic decisions and such.

What xxxHolic reminds me most of, manga-wise, is Petshop of Horrors, which is squarely in the shoujo camp. But, xxxHolic is just enough less girly, and just enough more action-oriented, to pull it into genre-busting land.

I'm pretty sure I had a point, somewhere, but I seem to have lost it. Oh well.

[kate_nepveu]

You're right, "borderless panels" is more accurate than "backgrounds" or "page backgrounds"; while I'd still like a term that indicates their relation to the other panels, "bottom-layered borderless panels" (or whatever) is probably too much of a mouthful.

WRT techniques, I think this is another reason why _Saiyuki_ was easier for me to start with than _Fruits Basket_, say--less techniques that immediately tried my "arrgh, need insulin" reaction, but enough differences from Western comics to perhaps be a gateway drug into more shoujo things later.

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

You should post a link to this to manga_talk, by the way. I think you're much too modest about the visual stuff you're picking out, or at least I can't find people talking about it and want to see more.

[kate_nepveu]

Thanks, I will. I wasn't intending to be modest, truly--I don't feel like I'm noticing anything particularly subtle--but I'm having fun doing it, regardless.

[kate_nepveu]

a "bleed", because the image bleeds beyond the restrictions of a panel

Huh. That makes sense, thanks.

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

I thought "bleed" was reserved for pictures that went past the margins of the page?

[kate_nepveu]

We're talking about the last three images posted on the main post, what to call the images that are sort of in the background to the panels with borders: the footstep; the person with long hair in the bottom half; and the non-gun panels.

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

In something like 3.14.91, Kate was calling the flashback/memory images of Rikudo and young Sanzo and young Sanzo's smile "backgrounds" and I suggested "borderless panels" instead, to distinguish between picture backgrounds and different kinds of panels. It sounded like you were saying "bleed" was the technical term for them, even though they're restricted to one page and don't run into the margins.