I'm feelin' RANTY
Nov. 22nd, 2004 12:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
crazyfurriesYou’ve heard the hype about manga, a.k.a. Japanese comic books as well as the age-old hype about American comic books. And it’s a growing change, in the early 90’s Japanese comics were somewhat of a rarity in the US, not to mention severely outdated by at least a decade in most cases before they came to the US. But I degress.. time to hit the major fact sheets about Manga and American comics.
The firs thing most folks run across in your common manga is the way they READ. Japanese text reads right to left and downwards, a hard way of reading to adapt to if one isn’t open-minded. But don’t think that this hasn’t had attempts to correct it, some publishes will “flip” pages so that they read left to right, which often skews the perspectives and layout of the Manga itself. Another major difference between Manga and American Comic books is the way they are drawn. Manga comics get away with lines art, clever tones and the use of conceptual art, using things like flower petals, soft bubbly backgrounds and a smiling girl to represent romance, there are very few full color Manga books and the line art in this books is often very tight and tense. My final note upon Manga is how often it is printed and what kinds of stories are often used, with an average Japanese manga you have a story arc focusing on 5 maybe 6 characters in one spot for 3 months, but you get a 24 page comic EVERY FREAKING WEEK. …I have admire the tenacity of the guys who DO this kind of stuff on a regular basis, not to mention probably shave years off their life on doing line work and toning. And when you get the collected sets of ISSUES for these it’s usually worth every single penny you spend, because the books are THICK, we’re talking one inch, sometimes an inch and a half with the grander ones.
And now we come to American comic books, reading left to right. It’s the way we grew up right? And The American comics don’t get taken seriously these days, mostly because “we were all young and stupid” is the common excuse among adults. I don’t blame them much either, the early comic books had low levels of plotlines, sometimes just ending a story in one book. I want EPICS damnit, not the little drama-concentrate you feed me once a bloody month! Then I have to get to two other things. One, the artwork in American comic books varies a lot more so than the art in Manga books, it’s usually a lot more loose and flowing, even distorted at times, though I think it over-does the who human-body aspect a bit, just to shorten time and not bother DRAWING BLOODY CLOTHES. … Second Ticker on this little time bomb is the fact that almost everymonth it a color comic, sometimes though.. you ain’t lucky, you get stuck with some guy who does a crappy job of coloring or inking, or worse the story, which happens all too frequently. More often in American Comics they are used as $3 advertisementss for toys, games, and movies. …yeh I get enough of that from the IDIOT BOX thank you very much.
The firs thing most folks run across in your common manga is the way they READ. Japanese text reads right to left and downwards, a hard way of reading to adapt to if one isn’t open-minded. But don’t think that this hasn’t had attempts to correct it, some publishes will “flip” pages so that they read left to right, which often skews the perspectives and layout of the Manga itself. Another major difference between Manga and American Comic books is the way they are drawn. Manga comics get away with lines art, clever tones and the use of conceptual art, using things like flower petals, soft bubbly backgrounds and a smiling girl to represent romance, there are very few full color Manga books and the line art in this books is often very tight and tense. My final note upon Manga is how often it is printed and what kinds of stories are often used, with an average Japanese manga you have a story arc focusing on 5 maybe 6 characters in one spot for 3 months, but you get a 24 page comic EVERY FREAKING WEEK. …I have admire the tenacity of the guys who DO this kind of stuff on a regular basis, not to mention probably shave years off their life on doing line work and toning. And when you get the collected sets of ISSUES for these it’s usually worth every single penny you spend, because the books are THICK, we’re talking one inch, sometimes an inch and a half with the grander ones.
And now we come to American comic books, reading left to right. It’s the way we grew up right? And The American comics don’t get taken seriously these days, mostly because “we were all young and stupid” is the common excuse among adults. I don’t blame them much either, the early comic books had low levels of plotlines, sometimes just ending a story in one book. I want EPICS damnit, not the little drama-concentrate you feed me once a bloody month! Then I have to get to two other things. One, the artwork in American comic books varies a lot more so than the art in Manga books, it’s usually a lot more loose and flowing, even distorted at times, though I think it over-does the who human-body aspect a bit, just to shorten time and not bother DRAWING BLOODY CLOTHES. … Second Ticker on this little time bomb is the fact that almost everymonth it a color comic, sometimes though.. you ain’t lucky, you get stuck with some guy who does a crappy job of coloring or inking, or worse the story, which happens all too frequently. More often in American Comics they are used as $3 advertisementss for toys, games, and movies. …yeh I get enough of that from the IDIOT BOX thank you very much.
