Urasawa Naoki no Manben

Urasawa Naoki no Manben is a documentary series where the mangaka Urasawa interviews and shows the work habits of other famous mangaka. Very interesting. Available freely online I think.

Watching some episodes of Manben. I think artists and Japanese people in general speak a lot of stuff that sounds just like nonsense to me, as if they expect others to think the same way they do. And then others will nod and agree, because it’s socially acceptable and also because they got some related idea that they agree with. So the two people are basically talking about different things and agreeing, and the audience is a third person clueless about what either really thinks, but maybe agreeing with their own interpretation of it (often depending on their preconceptions about the people talking).

As I sometimes say: “communication accurately is impossible”. But just now I was also thinking that maybe for artists the problem of communicating is even more pronounced because they deal with such complex ideas. For example, a manga communicates to the reader by the sum of all the panels — in a way the ideas behind it cannot really be compressed. Trying to explain any of it in words is very difficult, perhaps best results achieved with comparisons to previous works (“Like X, but with Y”). This is also big part of why I think true creatorship requires doing great bulk of the work yourself.

This one mangaka has a really weird technique to sketching. She flips the paper and traces through the lines to the other side, while making corrections. She continues flipping the page back and forth, at times erasing big parts of the less detailed sketch. That also accomplishes examining the mirror image, a common technique in digital art, although maybe analog art pros don’t benefit from something they never do as part of their workflow. She also mentions having practiced drawing by copying still frames from videos. Indeed that could be better for practicing sketching that using pictures from different sources where the model always changes. I should try that. Sometimes I pause live-action TV and films, finding stills I feel like drawing.

I wished more of the authors in the series used digital tools, I Asano Inio was the only one featured extensively, I think.

Watching more Urasawa Naoki’s Manben. Discovered Takahasi Tsutomu — he has a really interesting way of toning. He analog paints on a transparent plastic placed on top of the manuscript, then scans the paint, digitally filters it into tone dots and positions on the page, then comes another round of inking by hand. He draws his manga without using any assistants, at great speed. He also mentions what I wrote about just recently that working alone you don’t have to explain anyone what you are trying to achieve, so you can get there for example in unorthodox order — he does beta and additional inking after toning.

I’m impressed. Urasawa says in the program that mangaka all over are going to want to experiment with that particular painting technique. I sometimes wondered why they use the dotted screentones anyway, surely there is not technical limitations at this age for using any flat gray colors, and wikipedia confirms my suspicion that it’s for texture and “While computer graphics software provides a variety of alternatives to screentone, its appearance is still frequently simulated, to achieve consistency with earlier work or avoid the appearance of computer-generated images.”

Watching some Manben episodes. I’d expect to be left in awe by the skills of the pros, and some episodes do that, but then there are others, like this Naoki Yamamoto who is probably the creepiest mangaka I know of. I have read some of his work, including Believers which I randomly read as one of my first manga ever (I think because it’s early in the alphabet and I was using some online site). Anyway, Yamamoto uses very old digital tools in what looks quite cumbersome way to me (“software last updated in 1993”).

Lol when he spills coffee on the tablet, trying to use is mug as a model. I don’t think his art looks bad considering he doesn’t even have pressure sensitivity in the software. You can see the pixels in his lines. Goes to show how much more important other aspects of drawing are.