MANGA 383
and adult-oriented manga, and Japanese artists have built around this cartooning style a
unique vocabulary of manga cartooning.
Artists may have diff erent preferences for drawing in this mainstream style, depend-
ing on their alignment within the genre system. For example, a shonen artist may draw
an image with a clear, heavy line without much artistic embellishment. A seinen artist
may draw this style with heavy penwork and thoroughly rendered textures, or alter the
mainstream style slightly towards more adult proportions. Shojo artists, on the other
hand, might draw the mainstream style with a very light, nimble line and a heavy use of
fi lled grey-tones instead of hand-rendered textures.
Other diff erences between Japanese manga and Western comic book styles abound,
some of which are superfi cial, others which demonstrate the diff erences between how
Japanese and non-Japanese readers perceive comics. Minor diff erences include the sym-
bolic elements in manga, such as the use of a large, single sweat drop to symbolize worry
or frustration, nosebleeds to symbolize lust, or shading of the eyes to symbolize em-
barrassment. More intriguingly, in America the preference for illustrating motion is to
clearly illustrate a fi xed scene with the moving element, such as a person, illustrated as
moving within the scene. In Japan, illustrators show motion in a scene by having the
moving element, such as a person, fi xed within the center of the panel, surrounded by a
background of motion lines.
As in Western comics, manga uses rendered sound eff ects—words drawn within the
visual space of the story—to demonstrate sounds. In the United States, the use of sound
eff ects in comics primarily derives from the physical, action-oriented stories in super-
hero comics. Outside of superhero comics there has been a reluctance to use sound
eff ects, except perhaps in a more subdued way. In manga, however, sound eff ects are
almost universally embraced regardless of the content of the story or its’ targeted audi-
ence. While Western comics often use sound eff ects to clearly denote loud sounds, such
as explosions or crashes, manga often utilizes sound eff ects to indicate subtle actions,
such as a character grabbing an item or making an expression. In some situations in
manga there is a sound eff ect used to indicate silence itself.
One surprising fact to new manga readers in the United States is that the pages of
manga volumes are published in the reverse order of an English-language book. Th is
is not unique specifi cally to manga, but is a refl ection of how virtually all books and
magazines published in Japanese are formatted.
Manga utilizes a publishing format that is much smaller than comics in the United
States. In the United States, original comic art is most often drawn on heavy paper,
such as bristol board or illustration board, in 11-by-14 inch sheets. Manga art is
typically drawn on sheets that are 8.7-by-11.3 inches, known as the international
paper format A4. Th e fi nished art is reduced in size only slightly for full-size maga-
zine printing, but is reduced much further for reproduction in book-format volumes
roughly 5-by-7 inches in size. Th e format can vary based upon a number of factors,
such as the choice of the artist or the preferences of the publisher, and books are
often published in larger or smaller formats.
