Commentary on manga

Oh, manga. My old vice.

It was delightful to have an excuse to delve back into Rumiko Takahashi’s work for this class. I used this week as an opportunity to finally try reading Maison Ikkoku, as I was already very familiar with Ranma and Inuyasha from my formative middle school years. One of the things that I’ve noticed from our studies this semester is that her work is much more iconic than I realized, but in a way that presents a bit differently from some of the American icons that I’m familiar with. Rather than the dot eyes and lines for mouth that I usually read as being universally relatable, Takahashi’s work (and the work of many manga artists) relies on facial ’types’ to communicate story. The beautiful idealized faces and bodies of the main youths in the stories she makes are nearly identical to each other, making identification by external factors such as hair and clothing more necessary than ever. This is a skill that I take for granted, but it finally makes sense to me how my parents would say that they could never tell any of the characters apart. Then you have the ‘eccentric old person’ archetypal face with giant eyes and a nearly incomprehensibly tiny nose and/or mouth flap? I’m not sure exactly how to describe it, but the grandmother in the first volume of Maison Ikkoku fits this exact structure that I’ve seen her repeat in Myoga from Inuyasha as well as the underwear-stealing old gremlin from Ranma. Character types become more recognizable than individual characters, and the events of the stories are what sets them apart more than anything else.

This use of idealized icons in place of unique features for the ‘beautiful’ characters is something that I saw echoed in Tezuka’s work. His Buddha comic features a lot of characters that are shown to be classically pretty by all having nearly identical eyes, noses, and mouths, though the distinct cultural differentiators in the clothing help the reader to easily differentiate between characters. As such a landmark artist in Japanese comics history, it’s fascinating to see how far back these stylistic conventions go, and relatively how many of them have stuck around. One of the most humorous of these is the continued use of hyper-exaggerated features to show extreme emotion. Tezuka’s seem especially goofy to me now since some of them didn’t stick later on (the melting face of the slave boy when he develops a crush is one of my favorites), but there are many stylistic exaggerations to communicate emotion that I don’t question now, such as characters suddenly going ‘chibi’ and utterly changing all of their physical proportions to show anything from childish cuteness to increased slapstick. It’s a delightful trick, and one of the main strengths of drawing as a medium is the very fact that we can draw literally anything we want and express internal realities through such abstracted forms.