Tania del Rio’s newest column is up at Buzzscope, and this month she writes about teaching manga classes and what makes manga manga:
I remain convinced that what makes manga manga is really 70 percent storytelling and only 30 percent visual. You can take any American comic book and swap out big eyes for spandex, but you’ll still have an American comic book. But take a manga script and draw realistic characters with small eyes, or even stick figures, and it’s still manga—all because of the specific layout, narrative choices, and pacing that the creator chooses to use.
She points to Death Note as an example—no big eyes or sweatdrops, but you’d never mistake it for an American comic. (Of course, the giant shinigami is a dead giveaway.)
If you haven’t seen it yet, this is a good time to pull up Chris Arrant’s article on this topic from last month’s Comic Foundry. It goes way beyond most writing on this topic by showing how American comics artists absorbed manga techniques and styles, even when the result was far from what we would call manga:
1983’s “Ronin “by Frank Miller was clearly inspired by Kazuo Koike’s “Lone Wolf and Cub” (which wasn’t officially published in America until 1987, but available much earlier), mostly clearly though the use of strong emphasis on visuals and character interaction over more plot-oriented pacing that was commonly seen in American comics.
In the end, Arrant concludes that labeling comics as manga is too narrow; he’d prefer to see them simply classed by genre.
If Ozuma Tezuka, Bryan Lee O’Malley and Frank Miller each wrote a fictional novel about the same subject, no matter how differently they’d write it, it could all be filed in the same section: fiction. Instead of filing by the subjective parameters of style, origin or publisher (that’s another subject), it could be done in a more concerted fashion to make it more inclusive (instead of exclusive) to readers and potential readers.
Would it work? Only if you think the story is more important than the way it is told. For comics, that’s a huge difference, and this comes back to Tania’s point—it’s not just the way the characters look, it’s the pacing and structure and even the type of story. It’s true my library puts all the mystery novels in one section and doesn’t differentiate between cozies and hard-boiled—but it would be more useful to me if they did. So I’m not ready to throw away the labels just yet.