Category: Editorials

December’s Final Denouement: Swan and the Godliness of Page Design

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It has been said that sometimes great design is great because you don’t notice it. It brings you the information you need without you having to struggle but doesn’t impress itself upon your mind, unless of course you are looking for it. Design, when it is good, can be an unsung hero that enhances your experience but for the most part goes unrealized. This is no less true when it comes to manga page layout. There are a lot of approaches to page layout to be sure, but I’m choosing to focus on Swan because it accentuates manga design so well and is an amazing sight to behold. (I apologize for the crease in my scans; all images can be enlarged)

The most basic function is obviously to lead the reader’s eye through the story. But page design can do so much more. Using the above image you can see the calm of the right page contrast with the chaos of the left. This chaotic feeling is achieved through the angles of the boxes and the way they fit together. From this a momentum starts to build up. Then the way the dancer is swept into the air where her toe points into the negative space your eye follows through the action. You literally might find yourself taking a breath like the gasp the audience utters as the movement leads you to the next page. Moving on to another example, the following spreads come one after the other.

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One Piece: Nakama are Stronger than Justice

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When I think of One Piece, the first thing that comes to mind is the humor. It’s what stands out to me when comparing it to many of the other popular shonen fighting titles. But it does a lot of things right in its pages, and sometimes far beyond the scope than you expect. In this case we are looking at that gray zone of right and wrong and even beyond into the idea of doing the “right” thing vs. feeling like it is the right thing.

One Piece is undeniably a kids manga with the standard Shonen Jump editorial themes of  friendship, effort, and victory. Every arc has the righteous Straw Hat pirates defeating clearly wicked villains through a combination of never say die spirit and teamwork. But to simply view it as a flat children’s story would be doing the manga a disservice as well. There are some deeper undercurrents of gray morality and the examination of righteousness. I’m not going to argue that One Piece is a deep philosophically gray masterwork that is a seinen manga masquerading as a shonen manga but I will argue there are deeper themes than one might at first realize.

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Even America’s Next Top Models know what anime is.

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While watching a recent episode of America’s Next Top Model, something unexpected occurred. “Ann drew the last supper, anime version, on a napkin that we taped to the wall.”

Talk about words I never thought I’d hear on this show. This means that not just one, but two of the girls know what anime is; the girl who drew it, Ann (below, bottom), and the girl making the comment, Jane (below, top).

When thinking about what I’ve learned about these two over the course of the show, I am less surprised. Ann is a self-proclaimed shy nerd, who is slowly coming out of her shell, so I find it easy to believe she might be an anime fan. As for Jane, she is probably the most worldly of the bunch having attended Princeton, so again perhaps not too shocking that she has an idea of what anime is. But that it was brought up on a widely popular show, even for a brief moment, must say something.

So is this another instance of anime having come into the mainstream and making itself known, at least on a basic level? I’m not sure, but damned if that short moment between Ann and Jane didn’t surprise me.