Age and Art

In a single manga, drawings of characters can vary. This is, in fact, one of the inviting things about drawn comics as opposed to photonovels.

What drawn images mean, however, is that a character in a single manga or graphic novel can vary in appearance. Marriage counselor Serizawa from The Love Guide by Ayano Yamane looks his assigned age in the first panel (20-ish), somewhat younger in the second. Out of curiosity, I examined multiple panels closely to figure out the difference.

Close examination is how cartoonists, mangaka, graphic artists, and anime artists work. With Gollum, for example, from day 1, Jackson et al. used minute details plus Andy Serkis's facial expressions to give Gollum a personality. (Of course, this type of thing can create the uncanny valley.)

In the case of Serizawa, what makes a person older? How do we humans age?

1. Longer chin
2. More defined nose
3. Not quite so large eyes
4. Wider mouth proportionally

For example, here is Harry Potter younger and Harry Potter older over the first two films. In the Chronicles of Narnia, Skandar Keynes on occasion appears to be aging on screen (growing teenagers must cause havoc with director continuity).

I took a young image of Serizawa and aged it. Below is the result.

Which basically means that I'm no artist. But the result is interesting--this image does look older than its original, which has taught me something about how people age and how people see and how much we take for granted with what we see. Most of the time, we readers think, "Oh, he looks younger," not, "Why does he look younger?"

Collection Review: Until the Full Moon

Until the Full Moon and @ the Full Moon take me back to Sanami Matoh (Fake). I read them because of Fake. Matoh has also written a number of fantasy manga full of high jinks and ADHD characters. These latter manga are cute but rather too frantic for my tastes. Fake has its own moments of over-the-top antics and scenarios, but it is grounded in the "case" structure. There are also plenty of reflective moments in Fake, especially for the series' couple.

Until the Full Moon and its sequel @ the Full Moon fall between Fake and Matoh's more high energy manga. The premise is delightful (and common to Japanese manga): a character, Marlo, is male except during the full moon when he becomes female. His change makes it possible for his family to marry him to his childhood friend, David, who is totally fine with the whole wacky world of Marlo (and happens to love both male and female Marlo equally although the ostensibly shojo manga is quite coy about the sexual relationship between them and implies at the end that Marlo will now be female most of the time and only male during the full moon, which will make having a baby possible since Marlo can hide during the full moon to stay female).

The manga is fun, mostly due to Marlo's female persona; although entirely female and downright cute, she is still rather tomboyish. Taken together, she/he is absolutely darling. The first volume has a stronger set of stories and the first set (Until the Full Moon) is better plotted than the second (@ the Full Moon), but both are engaging.

My favorite part is the short story at the end of Volume 1: the fairy tale explanation for Marlo's condition that takes place in a Stephen Sondheim-like past. It's sweetly romantic with a decent pay-off.

@ the Full Moon is fascinating because Matoh's art changes; the top and bottom image are from Until the Full Moon while the middle images are from the later @ the Full Moon. In one of her afterwords, Matoh argues that her art didn't change that much--it was always developing in a single direction. And I think she has a point. But it is noticeably different. I didn't care for the difference at first, not because I didn't like the art itself but because I'm such a huge admirer of Fake, which resembles her older style more than her recent one.

However, Matoh still manages to capture motion, which is a powerful and admirable skill for a mangaka.

Fumi Yoshinaga: The Jane Austen of Manga

What Did You Eat Yesterday? also deals

amusingly and pragmatically with getting older.

If  Jane  Austen was alive today, I'm sure she would write manga. And she would likely write manga like Fumi Yoshinaga's.

I'm a huge fan of the delightful What Did You Eat Yesterday? which is tender, ironic (though not as much as some of Yoshinaga's other material) as well as engagingly informative about Japanese culture and cooking habits. I have a similar reaction to the wonderful movie Bread & Tulips, although in that case, I learn more about Venice.

I commented on What Did You Eat Yesterday? on Eugene's blog:

My favorite slice-of-life manga is What Did You Eat Yesterday? in which the "problem" of the local supermarket going out of business comprises an entire vignette. A vacation to Kyoto becomes a longer vignette but is so comparatively unusual that romantic Bingley-like Kenji is convinced that practical Darcy-like Shiro is only taking him on vacation because Shiro is dying.

There is precious little angst (thankfully), not because Shiro and Kenji's lives are ideal but because they are relatively ordinary. And that's okay! Getting up and going to work and buying food and visiting a friend and complaining about one's health is what most of us go through most of the time. And because What Did You Eat Yesterday? focuses on food, whenever something a little upsetting does occur, well, that's what cooking and eating a good meal is for: to reset a person and that person's companion for the next day.

I love the reference to Anne of Green Gables!

Yoshinaga is comparable to Austen because she focuses on everyday life; she is also comparable to Austen because she adjusts her characters, content, and style to a series' particular tone. Austen has been accused--then and now--of not including sex in her novels due to spinsterish-social-repression. The truth is that Austen chose to write as she did (other novels of the time period plumbed the depths of intimacy). In addition, while Austen's family were not more melodramatic than any other family of the time period, they certainly weren't less. If Austen had wanted to write emotionally overwrought stories filled with steaminess and sin, she could have. She deliberately confined her view and her tone to a specific milieu and purpose.

Yoshinaga--who writes everything from steamy romance to sci-fi--is similar to Austen in the sense that whatever she is writing/illustrating stays within the bounds of what it is supposed to be for that genre/series/audience. So Antique Bakery (scene below) remains the surprising psychological drama/comedy that it is; What Did You Eat Yesterday? remains the utterly clean and sweet-tempered slice-of-life that it is. Flower of Life remains the high school teenage drama (utterly natural teenage drama) that it is meant to be.

Oddly enough, the one type of manga I don't much care for from Yoshinaga is steamy romance. Her yaoi is well-plotted and amusing but almost too much so. "Oh, Lord, what fools these mortals be!" pretty much sums up the narrator's perspective. I like a little more affection in my romance mix.

Appropriately, however, Yoshinaga is the only mangaka I've encountered where the intimate scenes in her steamy romances are in and of themselves funny. I don't mean that characters (only) make jokes. Or even that the characters (just) behave in slapstick ways. Other manga do this. Rather, in Yoshinaga's work, the characters' interactions highlight that, in the end, we are all kinds of odd and funny creatures, no matter what we are doing.

Just as Jane Austen believed!