Text in comics
Nov. 26th, 2007 12:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ceruseeA 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.
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.
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no subject
on 2007-12-01 05:59 am (UTC)About Bone, it occurs to me non-manga-style "children's comics" or "all-ages comics" may have the "most to lose" when pitted against manga. Almost all the boom in manga publishing has been due to material aimed at tweens, the "13+" market. That age group has totally absorbed manga. On the other hand, there are very few translated manga in the indy-comix, underground, art-comics mode, very few translated equivalents of Eightball or Maus (Barefoot Gen, sure, but not quite...) or the Acme Novelty Library. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that even American superhero comics are much more concerned with Grappling with Big Issues than most manga, however superficial and awkward that grappling may be. I suspect that many American comic artists, even mainstream ones, have some interest in the whole "indy-comix, creator-owned" pool of comics which is more open to political subject matter (look at just about any superhero comic in the Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Grant Morrison, Warren Ellis age!) or experimentation for experimentation's sake, and even when they're doing superhero genre exercises, they feel the urge to throw some of that in there.
(Or maybe I'm just talking about the superhero books *I* like? I dunno... what do you think?)
pt 1
on 2008-02-18 08:55 am (UTC)If I recall correctly, they were thrown by the superheroes who show up in the first chapter (the superhero RPG Alex plays in), the concept of supervillains (not villains, just the specific supervillain concept as it relates to superheros), the secret identities, and all of Molly's discussion pertaining thereto, and the discussions among the kids about how to use their powers, and should they fight crime, and so on--and yes, given the extent to which Runaways tries to avoid tapping into that stuff, I was amazed it still didn't process, but it didn't.
I thinking, maybe crime-fighting vigilantes don't serve the same function in manga as they do in American comics? In manga, you certainly get people with superhero powers, and you get powered people with spectacular costumes, and you get powered people working for crime-fighting organizations, but whenever it's the latter, there's invariably some element of the institutional about it. Sometimes you have your ronin loners, and they'll fight for justice, but they don't patrol the streets, looking for thugs, and they definitely don't get paired off against Galactus.
Oh yas, manga has its own conventions. In truth, even when we did manga titles, we'd often spend a fair amount of time explaining some of those conventions, or cultural context, because someone would get confused. The superhero thing might have seemed more exceptional to me because I was, for all intents and purposes, the only translator for that in the room--I was explaining as much to my co-host as to the kids.
I'd always thought all-ages non-manga and kids' manga could co-exist peacefully; now I wonder. I really hope they can, and I will do my damndest to cross-sell them to people.
On the other hand, there are very few translated manga in the indy-comix, underground, art-comics mode, very few translated equivalents of Eightball or Maus (Barefoot Gen, sure, but not quite...) or the Acme Novelty Library.
Yeah, there's some, but not a lot. It's so hard for me to really know, because as a monolingual English speaker on this side of the Pacific, everything I know about untranslated manga has to come through interested third parties, and I can't get an accurate gauge on what the bookshelves look like from that. I know there's not much of that type in translation. I don't know what exists to be translated (definitely some) or when, if ever, the American market will be ready for it. (Here's the million dollar question: how will the manga audience age? What will they want when they get older? I will set fire to anyone who opines they'll grown up into Batman, but I'd be happy to listen to anyone with a thoughtful take on that. God willing, the answer will be, "enough josei titles to support a magazine.")
pt 2
on 2008-02-18 08:55 am (UTC)I also know I lack the context to be able to pick up on much in the way of existing satire/commentary in manga as it pertains to Japanese politics, and if it's not too blatant, even commentary as it pertains to global politics, so I'm not entirely comfortable saying it's not there at all.
Even as I type all this, I can think of titles in translation that contradict all this, but not very many, and mostly older, and therefore not really relevant to the point.
It's kind of hard for me to examine contemporary American comics with an eye towards "big issues" because when I think about the part I know best, superhero comics, I'm mostly blinded by rage and disgust, and that naturally does not lend itself to making thoughtful observations. I see what you mean about giving them credit for trying, no matter how badly they do it, but if they're trying and they keeping screwing it up, maybe that says something about the wisdom of making the effort. Can comics handle intellectual rigor and depth and big issues? Absofuckinglutely. Can superhero comics? I don't know. There have been some wonderfully readable results from attempts made over the decades, but you have to consider context as well--if a political superhero comic works as a political discussion by subverting the superhero part, it's not really succeeding on all the levels it's trying, and it's not proof of success, even if it's good. And vice versa.
As for the non-superhero stuff, I don't think I know the field of possibilities well enough right now to be making sweeping generalizations about content. I've been slowly broadening my horizons for years, but I feel like I'm in a body of water where I still don't know the depth.
Re: pt 2
on 2008-02-18 09:39 pm (UTC)However, about "Big Issues," I guess what I'm saying is that when I think of the "most critically acclaimed" American comics, even among superheroes, I tend to think of works that have a fairly high amount of political content and intentional "high-culture" references. Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, Warren Ellis... to some extent, they all play around with politics and religion and art movements and history and other obscure, weird, intellectual things which you would not in a million years see in Shonen Jump. Even in Death Note.
Now, admittedly, I guess all the authors I've mentioned are all British dudes who got their start in the '80s and '90s and perhaps my ideas of the big-name creators are out of date, when we compare to other modern superhero comic authors like Rob Kirkman and Brian Wood and Garth Ennis (a great writer, I think, but not as artsy and high-faluting as the other ones I've mentioned), or even J. Michael Straczynski. It's possible that my idea of the Really Awesome Superhero Comic Authors is just 15 years out of date (sob). Also, all these people are clearly writing for a "seinen" audience and not a "shonen" (let alone shojo) one.
But still, they *did*, or *do*, represent the "high-end mainstream" of American comics, and they all have great visibility, winning Eisner Awards and so on, being recognizable to all but the stupidest fanboys, while also selling lots of copies. Does it make any more sense to compare them to seinen authors like Kaiji Kawaguchi and Naoki Urasawa, rather than comparing them to Masashi Kishimoto? I dunno. Or perhaps I'm being blinded by the fact that these comic authors, perhaps partly because they're British and grew up with the super-dense British anthology comic magazines, all create very "information-heavy" comics, which is the exact opposite of manga, in which ideas (if there are any ideas at all) tend to percolate slowly over the course of hundreds of pages.
But yeah, that's what I mean when I say that American superhero comics ("American" despite the fact that all my favorite creators are British :/ ) tend to be more idea-driven than Japanese comics.