Stylistic Aspirations: Avoiding Manga like the Plague

It's part of the world we live in, it is unavoidable. But if you take a few sensible precautions you can avoid catching 'manga' style. Sure there's always a risk something you draw will look like it belongs in a manga.

Manga is aweful because it's prescriptive, manga is good because it is prescriptive.

Manga as distinct from western comics has lacked the 'deconstructionist' to revolutionise the industry. That's just in terms of writing, in artwork its even worse.

Tezuma, creator of astro boy copied the big-eyed, bean-head look from Walt Disney and adapted it to his characters. Advantage has a strong tendancy to accumulate in Japan, culturally almost every artform has lead to a school and schools mean standardisation and prescriptive techniques.

As such now manga is fettered with rules in both how they are written and how they are drawn. Rules like 'thou shalt draw cute girls with a small-small nose and as big a set of eyes as possible without distorting the head' and 'movement must be conveyed with the use of speed lines'.

When you pick up a manga you can feel pretty confident you will be reading a pretty standard light hearted romp with some titillation and soapy style romance back story and some violence.

Manga is probably the largest industry (outside of pornography) that goes to such pains to not be about anything.

I have never read an essay on what Dragonball taught us about life, ourselves, or even fighting. I don't know the point of Doraemon, Tezuma wrote about stuff and it is probably why he is a startling exception. It seems though that as a general rule, the more experimental a manga artist is the less likely they are to succeed.

The difference between popular titles 'Naruto' and 'One Piece' is essentially the difference between a sausage in bread with sauce and a sausage in bread with tomato sauce. In the satirical booklet 'How Not To Draw Manga' the various archetypes and cliches of manga are explored thoroughly. They point to how their are only 6 character in manga. They would describe the main characters of both One Piece and Naruto as 'Kid Spritely' a hungry young boy that wants to take over the world.

Then you simply have weekly build ups to a fight that culminate in about a monthly biff-o and that's it. Surely it isn't that simple?

The redeeming point in manga is that with such prescriptive barriers, the innovators like Eichiro Oda and Takehiko Inoue find subtle but powerful ways to distinguish themselves in a sea of 'me-too' manga. Namely Takehiko uses both superior pacing and storytelling along with zen painting techniques to create quite powerful compositions. Eichiro makes conflict interesting by making his characters increasingly silly and exagerated, so there is always distorted perspective in the action thanks to the protagonist being made out of rubber.

But it remains that as popular as manga is, it doesn't make it right, good, or valuable. In fact manga's popularity amplifies the problem, the prescriptions get reinforced.

Whereas western comics are experiencing a relative 'Golden Age' in the past two decades. Thanks to the pioneering work of deconstructionist writers like Alan Moore, whom puts the very traditions of western comic heroes like Superman and the JLA under the microscope in 'Miracleman' and 'Watchmen' respectively.

The equivalent would be reading a manga story where some bright young kid set out on an adventure only to have his life ruined by teen-pregnancy and the social stigmas surrounding it or become paraplegic through ambitiosly taking on a rival beyond him. It seems instead though the manga fan is doomed to repititious 'false tention' where just as your hero seems beat god pops out of the machine and saves the day.

There will be no Miracle Man solving the worlds problems only to find his alter ego suicidal, his wife despondent and himself increasingly detached and disillusioned by his own power. Nor Rorschach asking to be obliterated as his moral absolutism is pushed aside by the popularity of consequential-ism.

Manga serves a role, for sure, the same role that 'The Lord of The Rings' and 'The Lion King' and other family favorites serves. 'Escapism' is the answer. Think about how morally shallow a piece of literature like Lord of The Rings is, Sauron is bad because he just is. He lives in a desert wasteland called Mordor, where a race of beings called orcs and the Nazghul seem to sustain themselves despite the infertile status of Sauron's nature. Sauron gets defeated by the returning king, and then all is well! everyone's happy. It seems that who is king simply magically transforms the economic wellbeing of everyone. No need for policies or any of THE HARDEST PART. Children don't learn how the world can be right and good or how the world can be bad and toxic, they simply learn that there is good and bad and the author (or any other authority) will tell you out of the goodness of their own heart who is good and who is bad.

Thus most fantasy/escapist writing is simply a travelogue through which one can think of bubblegum mountains and candy floss trees. Obviously such patent escapist writing would be dismissed as childrens stuff, yet most Manga is not and enjoyed well into adulthood in it's home culture Japan.

JRR Tolkein is on record as saying that the purpose of fantasy (as a genre) must be purely escapist and thus would hate writers like China Mieville for trying to take a political angle in his fantasy writing. (like a socialist alternative meeting they almost all end in 'armed revolution') Micheal Moorcock wrote an essay refuting this position called 'Epic Pooh'. As such whilst people may remain with JRR or against JRR the fact is that the western world has benefited greatly from the schism.

But it hasn't made significant impact on manga yet. It remains purely escapist. Structures are useful for writing, they are useful for roughing out proportions in drawing too. But to progress you have to abandon such firm reassuring structures and break all the rules and you may, just maybe come up with something else that works.

As such I've been following Brett Whiteley's advice and taking what I see in front of me and distorting it. Not only is it tremendous fun, but it also allows me to learn a lot about form, I will certainly not be picking up one of the 27 books available under the title 'How To Draw Manga' not because manga is necessarily bad but because I can't really tell one artist apart from another in manga, not without looking really really hard. In much the same way Jim Lee is my least favorite western comic book simulator because he is the most manga-esque artist.

I can name at least 5 comic book artists that would have close to nothing in common - Ben Shepherd, Tim Sale, Greg Capullo, Frank Miller, David Mack etc...

If you asked me whether to take the secure predictable fun of manga over the sometimes shite, mosttimes average and rarely brilliant western comic I'd refuse profusely. I'd rather take a machine that churns out the rare pearl than one that fills truckload after truckload of sand.