Text in comics

[cerusee]

A brief summary and discussion from Neil Cohn of an article on eye-movements reading comic pages, for those interested in that sort of thing. One thing noted: participants in the study were more likely to skip past a panel if the next panel contained a block of text; modifying the page so that the text was farther away from the skipped panel resulted in less skipping. Cohn wonders what level of "comic fluency" the participants possessed, since it's not discussed in the article, and comments, "The desire to jump towards panels with dense text insinuates a focus more on text than on the visuals, which was characteristic of a naive comic reader's eye-movements compared with an expert reader in Nakazawa's eye-tracking study."


I find this all very interesting in relation to some observed differences between stateside readers of American comics vs. Japanese comics. For close to two years, I've been involved in running a (very small) graphic novel club for adolescent girls, all of whom read manga, none of whom had any experience reading American comics of any variety until the club. For them, the comics experience is manga, mostly popular shoujo and shounen series. My co-host and I are ginormous manga fans, and that's what we tend to stick to, but every now and then, we try to push their boundaries a little--we've done Dramacon, Megatokyo, Usagi Yojimbo, Runaways, and most recently, Bone. Dramacon was an unqualified success. In our discussion of the book, my co-host and I expounded at length on the similarities and differences between Dramacon and Japanese-origin comics, and we found that the likenesses of Dramacon to conventional shoujo style helped them enormously in accepting the departures. The biggest successes otherwise were Megatokyo and Usagi Yojimbo, which are fairly significant departures from shoujo & shounen manga in terms of form and storytelling style, but had appealingly familiar subject matter. Runaways was liked for the story (it's one of those rare Marvel comics actually intended for younger, newer readers, which is why we tried it), but all the girls found it immensely confusing in every respect, from the artwork, to the superhero conventions (even though Runaways plays down those conventions quite a bit), to the overall storytelling style. Bone, much to my surprise, was mostly panned. They didn't dislike it by any means, but they found it so uninteresting that we couldn't really keep them on topic.

(Bone is the most popular graphic novel series sold to kids in my store, after the general category of manga, and I had assumed there would be some overlap between the readers of Bone and the readers of manga--as of yet, though, I have no evidence that there actually is any overlap; heaven knows, no one ever buys them together. Right after Bone in popularity is Tintin, by the way. I have never, ever, even once seen a superhero trade sold to anybody younger than me in that store, and most superhero trade buyers have ten to thirty years on me.)

Anyway, I have for quite some time had a theory that part of the growing popularity of manga in the US, and its appeal to new readers who not only have never read an American comic in their life, but maybe never will, is the fact that manga is usually less text-dense than American comics. I'm speaking obscenely broadly right now, and I myself could easily cite a few dozen contradictory examples from memory--but I have read a lot of comics over the years, and really, stuff from my side of the Pacific has expodentially more text.

The more cynical assumption I might make is that manga is more appealing to unskilled or lazy readers, folks who like pictures but skip the words. It's probably true for some people, although I can't really bring myself to dismiss a twelve-year-old girl who easily reads manga but struggles with text captions; if she can read manga well, it is making reading easier and more pleasant for her, and she will get better at it.

A less cynical take on the appeal of more lightly-worded comics is that with less text, the marriage of words and pictures is a more natural and harmonious thing, easier to read, easier to understand, and more emotionally affecting. I grew up reading American comics--old stuff, too, with densely lettered narrative captions, giant white thought bubbles and speech balloons always carefully tucked away in corners, where they wouldn't cover up the art--and I'm pretty well versed in the language. Learning to read manga took quite a bit of effort. The stylistic and thematic differences are many and significant, and I started out with contempt for things I've since learned to love, like the cleanness of black and white art, or the fluidity of page layouts. Once I learned to make the adjustment, and starting reading manga with an easier eye, I began to find that I preferred it. I can still read and parse superhero comics, but I often find them jarring and awkward in ways I hadn't noticed before--they're too wordy, or trying to ape the experience of watching television (and yes, there is a difference between feeling like a TV show and being cinematic); the text and the pictures are often in competition with each other for attention, and not working together to create meaning. It's not always that way, but it is too often.

I was a relatively sophisticated, adult comics reader when I picked up manga, and I still found it a very difficult leap from one set of artistic traditions to the other. I really only made it because I have a large enthusiasm for comics art (and a mad, life-long, instinctive draw to Japanese stuff. Whence it comes, I will never know). It'd be a very dedicated reader of comics indeed to do it the other way around--to go from the lively art and broad subject matter of manga to the arcane world of superhero comics. Superhero comics are an acquired taste--who's going to acquire them now? Not the girls in my club. We've found out by trying that it's not that easy to go from manga to non-superhero American comics; almost impossible--and really, rather pointless--to try to go from manga to superheroes.

There's a lot that's wrong with the American comics industry, and it's mostly to do with superhero comics. Better informed and more intelligent people than I have expounded on its flaws at length; I am left with the morbid belief that it will eventually collapse in on itself because it can't draw in new readers. I don't know what will happen to American non-superhero comics if cape comics fold, because I don't know to what extent they are either hindered or supported by capes. Indy comics like Dramacon that appropriate styles and themes from manga evidently can draw in new readers from the existing manga audience, if they want to; the dispirited reaction of my club to Runaways suggests that it takes more than a low price-point and a tankoubon-sized digest to reach the manga audience.

Comments

[retsuko.livejournal.com]

(Here via manga_talk.)

It's a shame about Bone not going over well. Jeff Smith wanted to recreate the feeling of the comics he read as a kid, most notably the large compilations of Pogo, which would probably seem "foreign" to younger readers today; newspaper comics and superhero comics are largely heading towards a half-obscurity, half-limbo. (Although a visit to the San Diego Comic Con may say otherwise about the cape comics.) Pogo and other serialized strips, like Little Nemo or Terry and the Pirates wouldn't be printed today, as far as I can see, and the reading public tends to reflect this.

I would be curious to hear what the club thinks of more indy Western titles (Hopeless Savages or any of Chynna Clugston Major's works come to mind), or of a story like Persepolis, but I understand that the reading list is probably already set in advance. For years, the title that I used to get non-comic book readers into graphic novels was Brian Talbot's The Tale of One Bad Rat, which is decidedly comic-booky, but not a superhero story and very emotionally rendered.

In any case, thanks for a thought-provoking essay! :)

[cerusee.livejournal.com]

They're young--the oldest is sixteen, I think, but the youngest is eleven, so we've mostly tried to steer away from anything with adult material (knowing that that particular girl independantly picks out manga with adult material--f'r instance, Hot Gimmick--I might have been willing to chance it, but my co-host has always been very insistent on only doing all-ages material). Dramacon was, in fact, kind of pushing it in terms of the material, with cursing and a gratuitous attemped rape. I would love to someday run a club with older members and do a broader range of stuff (and even just some more mature manga), but this is the crowd we've got. I actually won't have any say in future material, since I'll be leaving the store before the next meeting. Once I'm gone, I expect it will probably morph into a comics workshop, since my co-host is an amateur artist, and doesn't possess the same breadth of comics knowledge I have, and several of the girls are interested drawing as well as reading.

I was floored by the poor reception of Bone. Personally, I loved it, because it's really well-done, but more importantly, it's something you should be able to read without any preliminaries--if you can read and make sense of the Sundays comics page, Bone ought to be pretty accessible. I didn't know about the intention to recreate an old comics feeling, but I'm not surprised, because I so often got that sense when I was reading it.

[retsuko.livejournal.com]

I heard Jeff Smith speak at a small gathering and he talked about how he loved reading comics as a kid; the Sunday comics, all spread out on the floor, or the giant compilations of his favorites and he wished that he could write something like that. (In fact, he was said he was super proud of the big, thick compendium volume in particular.) He was a very funny and charismatic speaker. (Hearing him speak spurred my Mom's decision to attend Comic Con with me, which was akin to the earth suddenly spewing forth cotton candy. But that's another story. ^_^;;)

It's too bad they didn't like Bone. I love how it starts off so simply and morphs into a huge, meaningful epic of (well) epic proportions. And with strong characters like Thorn and Rose are a definite plus, too. Perhaps it was too fantastic for them--it sounds like this group enjoys their everyday shoujo quite a bit.

Dramacon is so cute! But the attempted rape in Book 1 did bother me a lot, and the plot detail that she rode home in the same car as her ex-boyfriend really creeped me out the first time I read it. On the other hand, there were so many funny and well-observed moments, like the dispute at the Convention between Bethany and the little boy who says that only Japanese people can draw manga, or the discovery that the Creative Idol (whose name I've forgotten) is as human as any of them.) I'm rather looking forward to Volume 3.

I would love to run a manga reading group, too. There are so many interesting titles for mature readers, and a surprising amount of depth in manga dismissed as "kiddie fare". Ah, I can dream, right?

May I friend you?

[cerusee.livejournal.com]

You've pretty much said everything I liked about Bone...I wonder if we'd tried it later, with some other things in between, if they might have been ready to accept it then. It is, in fact, a very different animal from our other titles. We kept trying new things, and the new things didn't really have that much in common with each other--maybe the problem is that we weren't building on what we'd given them before, and so they couldn't get used to the new styles.

I quite like Dramacon. I grudge it its occasional moments of awkwardness precisely because it's so strong otherwise, and one of the best bona-fide manga-influenced OEL titles I've ever seen. Chmakova is a very talented artist and writer and it's a successful fusion of different comics traditions. I've been underwhelmed by almost every Tokyopop OEL title I've seen, even the ones I enjoyed. Dramacon is the first one I've read with a recognizable shoujo manga legacy, and that doesn't feel like an indy western comic that happened to be made under a TP contract (nothing against them that signed with TP, and power to those who can get published. But manga really is more than a label and a price point).

You are certainly welcome to friend me. :D Mostly I talk piffle and complain about work, though.

[retsuko.livejournal.com]

Who knows, maybe Bone will grow on 'em? A few years from now, what you remember reading is an interesting list.

I agree with you on the bulk of TP's OEL stuff. When it comes to American style manga, I've been very impressed at the Minx line so far, except for Clubbing, the ending of which was completely counter to everything the plot had led up to.

As for me, I talk about books and movies and comics a lot. You seem cool and I would love to read your stuff more, and here your opinions on the things I've read. *goes merrily off to hit the friend button*

[cerusee.livejournal.com]

The list of things I want to read is nothing next to the list of things I want to reread, now that I'll finally understand them. You percieve the world so differently as a child that there's no real comparison between the reading experiences.

I think the only thing I've read from the Minx line is The Re-Gifters, which was excellent. I keep meaning to check out some of the other titles, because I'm all about American comics actually putting out a hand to a new audience, particularly a new audience of people who happen to be the same gender as me. (An American comics fan can get kinda lonely if she happens to be female.)