I’ve never been able to pinpoint the exact causes for why drawing “manga” style typically doesn’t look quite right, but there’s some things I’ve noticed that I think point towards why this tends to be the case.
The artists did not grow up in the culture. I had a Japanese teacher who one day as part of a vocabulary exercise brought into class a drawing she made of a “handsome guy.” Now, my teacher was not an artist, but the picture she drew was clearly that of a manga-style character and nothing seemed out of place. It was just, when drawing a cartoon character who’s supposed to look stereotypically handsome, this is how it turns out. While I don’t think not growing up in Japan or Japanese precludes an artist from developing that style, I think you can see how growing up in different environments with different artistic influences can change how even a normal person draws or sees drawings, let alone a professional.
But what then are those stylistic differences? Why is it that a manga artist who draws super realistically can still feel naturally like manga? Why is it that even a lot of the non-Japanese artists who get the basic visuals right (i.e. understanding that it’s not just big eyes and small mouths) still tend to produce works that jar you out of the illusion?
The first big one is the different philosophies in paneling. Traditionally in manga, the flow of panels is very important to the story, with emphasis on the concept of “flow.” That’s not really an official term or anything, but it’s one I like to use. Manga are typically designed to have the readers’ eyes be guided smoothly through the page, from one panel to the next, with everything in the panel, art and word bubbles and all, facilitating this flow. While American comics for example also take care to utilize word bubbles in strategic areas to help move the reader along, traditionally the American comic has been about having self-contained panels, each of which encapsulates everything going on at the time, a perfectly stilled moment. I’m reminded of when Grant Morrison in an interview after Final Crisis said, “We talk about events all the time. Well, why can’t every panel be an event?” In a way, he’s not far off from the tradition of Western-style comics, whether it’s indie, superheroes, or newspaper gag strips. It’s also what I think is the real difference between “compressed” and “decompressed” storytelling.
Basically, think of manga as a river, and American comics as a series of ponds. While of course there’s more to comics than just America and Japan, I’m simplifying for the sake of what little claims to brevity I have left. And while there are exceptions on both sides, take note how a manga with not as much “flow” such as Space Adventure Cobra or Nausicaa do well in the west, particularly Europe where highly illustrative backgrounds tend to be emphasized, or how an American comic with a strong sense of visual “flow” in Little Nemo could be seen fondly in Japan (at least I believe it is, if someone can correct me, please do so).
And then there’s other smaller things. Scott McCloud in Understanding Comics for example talks about how back when romance stories in American comics were more common, they still tended to compose scenes as if all of the characters were figures placed in a room. Contrast this with shoujo manga, which tends to emphasize the emotional over the physical; it’s not as important that you know where characters are standing.
But that only applies to manga, right? What about all those cartoons that try, but don’t quite get it. Your Teen Titans and Totally Spies and what-not. There, I’m not as certain about it, but I think it just has to do with what’s considered common in Japanese Animation to the point of it being ingrained into the system. I think the most prominent example of this might be animating on the 3’s, which means changing the image on every third frame instead of every second one as is common with American cartoons. This was originally one of many necessary money-saving techniques for anime on limited budgets as far back as Astro Boy, and what ended up happening was that stuff like animating on 3’s and using lots of stills and closeups, stuff which had its origins in having scarily low budgets, began to be embraced and improved upon and mastered until it in essence became the style anime is known for. What’s important here is the way in which factors such as these influenced the sense of timing that anime tends to have, and if you don’t understand that sense of timing then it becomes difficult to replicate it. Anime has a unique sense of timing.
To summarize, what makes manga seem like manga and what makes anime seem like anime goes deeper than how the characters or backgrounds look, all the way to how the story is told through the visuals. Another important thing to remember is that this is less about quality, or why one is “better” or “worse” than the other, and more about why things are the way they are from the worst comics to the best ones. If you were to compare X-Men: Misfits, an American comic trying to be manga, and that Japanese X-Men manga I posted about a while back, a Japanese comic trying to be American, you’d see that neither one is able to fully escape their origins. Whether these are the most significant factors, I don’t know, but that’s what I’ve seen.
The artists did not grow up in the culture. I had a Japanese teacher who one day as part of a vocabulary exercise brought into class a drawing she made of a “handsome guy.” Now, my teacher was not an artist, but the picture she drew was clearly that of a manga-style character and nothing seemed out of place. It was just, when drawing a cartoon character who’s supposed to look stereotypically handsome, this is how it turns out. While I don’t think not growing up in Japan or Japanese precludes an artist from developing that style, I think you can see how growing up in different environments with different artistic influences can change how even a normal person draws or sees drawings, let alone a professional.
But what then are those stylistic differences? Why is it that a manga artist who draws super realistically can still feel naturally like manga? Why is it that even a lot of the non-Japanese artists who get the basic visuals right (i.e. understanding that it’s not just big eyes and small mouths) still tend to produce works that jar you out of the illusion?
The first big one is the different philosophies in paneling. Traditionally in manga, the flow of panels is very important to the story, with emphasis on the concept of “flow.” That’s not really an official term or anything, but it’s one I like to use. Manga are typically designed to have the readers’ eyes be guided smoothly through the page, from one panel to the next, with everything in the panel, art and word bubbles and all, facilitating this flow. While American comics for example also take care to utilize word bubbles in strategic areas to help move the reader along, traditionally the American comic has been about having self-contained panels, each of which encapsulates everything going on at the time, a perfectly stilled moment. I’m reminded of when Grant Morrison in an interview after Final Crisis said, “We talk about events all the time. Well, why can’t every panel be an event?” In a way, he’s not far off from the tradition of Western-style comics, whether it’s indie, superheroes, or newspaper gag strips. It’s also what I think is the real difference between “compressed” and “decompressed” storytelling.
Basically, think of manga as a river, and American comics as a series of ponds. While of course there’s more to comics than just America and Japan, I’m simplifying for the sake of what little claims to brevity I have left. And while there are exceptions on both sides, take note how a manga with not as much “flow” such as Space Adventure Cobra or Nausicaa do well in the west, particularly Europe where highly illustrative backgrounds tend to be emphasized, or how an American comic with a strong sense of visual “flow” in Little Nemo could be seen fondly in Japan (at least I believe it is, if someone can correct me, please do so).
And then there’s other smaller things. Scott McCloud in Understanding Comics for example talks about how back when romance stories in American comics were more common, they still tended to compose scenes as if all of the characters were figures placed in a room. Contrast this with shoujo manga, which tends to emphasize the emotional over the physical; it’s not as important that you know where characters are standing.
But that only applies to manga, right? What about all those cartoons that try, but don’t quite get it. Your Teen Titans and Totally Spies and what-not. There, I’m not as certain about it, but I think it just has to do with what’s considered common in Japanese Animation to the point of it being ingrained into the system. I think the most prominent example of this might be animating on the 3’s, which means changing the image on every third frame instead of every second one as is common with American cartoons. This was originally one of many necessary money-saving techniques for anime on limited budgets as far back as Astro Boy, and what ended up happening was that stuff like animating on 3’s and using lots of stills and closeups, stuff which had its origins in having scarily low budgets, began to be embraced and improved upon and mastered until it in essence became the style anime is known for. What’s important here is the way in which factors such as these influenced the sense of timing that anime tends to have, and if you don’t understand that sense of timing then it becomes difficult to replicate it. Anime has a unique sense of timing.
To summarize, what makes manga seem like manga and what makes anime seem like anime goes deeper than how the characters or backgrounds look, all the way to how the story is told through the visuals. Another important thing to remember is that this is less about quality, or why one is “better” or “worse” than the other, and more about why things are the way they are from the worst comics to the best ones. If you were to compare X-Men: Misfits, an American comic trying to be manga, and that Japanese X-Men manga I posted, a Japanese comic trying to be American, you’d see that neither one is able to fully escape their origins. Whether these are the most significant factors, I don’t know, but that’s what I’ve seen.
OGIUE MANIAX 
Your treatment of the manga aesthetic as less of a “style” and more of a “language” is far more helpful advice than most books, which basically just give the average artist a slightly different canon of proportions to work with.
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Well…practice makes perfect…
But I would like to comment on the fact that: the style itself can be very versatile and I would encourage people to tinker with the small things (especially in character design) to find what’s aesthetically pleasing to the artist…also, if you tend to draw this way, try doing from right to left and see what happens.
Nothin’ in the rule book says you can’t.
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Even if all you want to do is draw a character–let alone tell a story, as this article discusses–it’s plain that merely depicting big eyes and a small mouth isn’t going to get you something aesthetic. Almost every manga-ka and character designer uses big eyes and small mouths, for example–we can tell one from the other, and prefer one to another, because of exactly what their facial elements look like, and the subtle differences in proportion between them and the differently-drawn elements of another character designer.
A blatantly obvious thing people forget about big eyes is that they require more artistry than small eyes; that is, once you’ve decided to call special attention to the eyes by making them big, you’re on the spot as this character’s designer. What is the shape of this big eye? How thick should the lashes appear? Is there a suggestion of eyelid? What’s the ratio of pupil to white? What’s the shape of the pupil (unlike human beings, chara often have ellipses rather than circles)? What position within the eye does the pupil tend to assume–straight ahead, or a suggestion of cross-eye? And we haven’t even gotten to the pupil itself, often a relatively complex pattern of color vs. iris, with highlights, shading, and even sparkles thrown in. Simply saying to a westerner, “the ‘manga look’ is big eyes” would be like saying to a Japanese, “the ‘superhero look’ is muscle definition”–whereas American comics fans are perfectly capable of telling one Marvel artist from another.
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I like the direction you’re going in with this. I really think that the difference for both anime and manga boils down to time. Manga uses decompressed time, and anime tries to stretch time on single frames – and most anime is adapted from manga, so it’s adapting time in a certain way.
Scott McCloud says more in one of his books about perspective in manga that doesn’t happen in superhero comics. It’s worth looking into. I think it was in his most recent book.
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First off: I think you’re absolutely right in a lot of these theories. Especially in regard of most of coming done to the culture and artistic influences you’re exposed to growing up.
But on the same point – anime and manga’s been around over here in the states for awhile now. Wouldn’t it stand to reason then that we’d see American works with Japanese influences?
I’d say you’re pretty much spot on with works like Totally Spies, X-Men: Misfits, the Marvel Mangaverse, most “World Manga” in general – there certainly are shows and comics that set out to “be Japanese” and miss the mark entirely.
However, in defense of Teen Titans, I would argue that show never for a second pretended it was actually “anime.” It was an american cartoon that wore it’s influences on it’s sleeve – that is to say, FLCL and Jamie Hewlett’s work with with the Gorillaz. Same goes for Avatar: The Last Airbender – the show involved a lot of asian themes and fighting styles, so of course the art style had asian influence as well. Likewise, Scott Pilgrim certainly has a lot of manga influences, but is still very much an western comic book.
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There a handful of reasons why anime- and manga-influenced Western art looks wrong. One is that Japanese artists develop their abstractions through honest simplification–studying how to draw reality and then forming their own simplifying algorithms for depicting it, whereas Western artists learn to draw by copying Japanese artists. Another is that Japanese artists use proper construction of their subjects, making them real three-dimensional objects that happen to have smooth, simplified surfaces, and Western artists see this and wrongly assume it means they can draw flat people with triangles for noses and weak pointy chins and expect it to look the same. Webcomics and Deviant Art submissions are particularly bad for this. The best Western manga artists are the ones who sincerely think through the full three-dimensional form of the person of thing they want to draw, and who allow a certain amount of robust Western squareness or roundness to blend with their manga simplifications (for example, Tim Eldred or Ben Dunn). On the other hand you have Bruce Timm who continually pushes for more simplicity, to the point where his people cannot possibly represent real three-dimensional entities; they seem made of flat cardboard. If Batman turned his head away from us it would disappear–except, you will note, in the Japanese-animated episodes of that series, where the animators fleshed out Timm’s flat model sheets.
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The sense of timing in anime is not unique to anime alone. Storytelling in Japan and many other parts of Asia are structured differently beyond just technical reasons. If you read older Chinese and Japanese novels, you get a different sense of progression and development. It has almost a circular progression with lots of stop and starts. It doesn’t always build straight into a climactic point and looks for resolution. There’s a cultural connection.
Regarding Japanese influenced American comics, I hate the whole dualistic “right” and “wrong” dichotomy that some people use. It’s not how artistic creativity works. Artists (musicians, writers, and visual artists) usually copy, steal, and incorporate stuff from their favorite artists. It’s a natural part of an artist’s development in a Post Modern sense. If you look at old anime, it was cribbing off of the Walt Disney animation style. Was Tezuka wrong for trying to imitate Disney’s stuff? No, it’s just one artist trying to learn the craft by copying someone else.
After a while, the innovative artists usually breaks free from imitation and moves into a mode of inventiveness. Instead of copying, they use their influences and take the medium in another direction giving birth to the evolution of a completely new movement and style.
However, the real problem of the OEL/Non-Japanese manga is the lack of hybridization and development of a their own unique style. IMHO, the strongly prejudice and well established comic book commercial market has contributed to this stagnation. Many American comic book readers abhor the manga and manga style works (OEL), and many hardcore manga fans see OEL as disingenuous. Because of these rigidly nurtured markets it is nearly impossible to have a different take on comics. The really creative and innovative stuff usually gets relegated to the smaller indie comic book market or the literary graphic novel market.
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I have to disagree with the point on manga placing more emphasis on flow. This is an important component of comics in general and if you look at manga and Scott McCloud’s writing on panel transitions, western comics tend to have a more rigid panel-to-panel narrative where manga has no problem with cutting to something completely different out of the blue or injecting a gag which completely interrupts flow.
I do think manga places much more emphasis on the whole page as a full composition made up of the sum of its panels though. Western comics tend more towards a step-by-step sequence. So when you think of something like the ‘infinite canvas’ gimmick that gets tossed around or panel-to-panel e-reading, a traditional western artist doesn’t have much trouble getting his head around the concept, but the manga artist tries to figure out how the page would still come into play.
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The flow I’m referring to is not so much the flow of narrative as it is actually the flow of panels, the visual flow. Even if manga makes a sudden cut, or throws in an extreme angle in the middle, the goal is to make the page (and by extension the comic) work together as a cohesive whole, which is not far from what you said.
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Ah, I picked up the hammer and saw!
Yes, I agree then, hee.
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