Within Manga, there is a clear, obvious connection to how manga is made and to something called the Rhetorical Situation that's used in Rhetoric within writing. The ideas discussed are heavily used to help manga artist create their work for the world to see.
Each of these ideas are used to create a manga to give fans a story and characters they would enjoy along with loving and relating to. To understand how these ideas relate to manga, the examples of Shoujo and Shounen manga styles will help show the different styles using the Fives Modes of Communication and different design choices within Rhetoric.*
* Chapter 1 and 2 of “Writer/Designer: A Guide to Making Multimodal Projects”.
* Chapter 1 and 2 of “Writer/Designer: A Guide to Making Multimodal Projects”.
When creating a manga, an artist has to consider five design choices: Emphasis, Contrast, Alignment, Organization, and Proximity*. Each one helps create a manga and is important within the drawing style of manga but also can be different in all of them too. These design choices are also related to the Five Modes of Communication.
*Chapter 2 of “Writer/Designer: A Guide to Making Multimodal Projects."
*Chapter 2 of “Writer/Designer: A Guide to Making Multimodal Projects."
Within any manga, certain emotions are stressed, to give emphasis to what is happening in the scene, outside of what is said by the characters.*
*Contrast is also used to help give specific emphasis to something said by a character.* An example of this is in “Horimiya”, a manga created by Daisuke Hagiwara, who is the artist and HERO who creates the story and is an implied author*. This manga is about a high school girl who hides a different side of who she is as a person. Another student in her class also hides the other side of who he is as well. They cross paths and find out about each other’s different side and share an adventure in their daily lives as different people during their high school years.* *Horimiya; MyAnimeList In the beginning of the manga, the two characters (Hori and Yuki) greet each other in the morning. In the second scene, the character on the right (Yuki) asks the character on the left (Hori) to copy her notes for English class. In a different font, the character, Yuki, says “WAAHH!” as she comes near Hori. The character Hori has a shocked face and in the same font as before with Yuki states “HUH!?” then goes into her dialogue*. Things outside from the text are happening in the background of this manga and any other as well. This helps readers see the emotions happening within the situation in the panels. *HERO and Hagiwara, 3 |
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Emphasis can also be seen in the creation of a manga character's eyes and/or facial expressions in an emotional way. The eyes of a manga character are the "most important and characteristic feature..." and the characters are "set up to feature the eyes as the center of focus".*
Facial expressions help a character "convey a specific feeling" and the characters expression can tell us what their intentions are... etc.** *Top Ten Essentials: Christopher Hart’s Draw Manga Now! ** Art of Drawing Manga |
Contrast is used in to help distinguish between lines but also within the manga as a whole. This is because, when published in any form, manga is in the colors’ white, gray and black. This includes the shading of certain area’s and line thickness, which helps the manga and emphasizing certain scenes while contrasting them from each other.
Contrast "plays a large role in emphasis, in that the most contrasted often appears to be the most emphasized.”* Within the idea of contrast: color, size, placement, shape and content are a part of it in which it becomes a big factor to help manga artist contrast certain text and other elements in manga.
*Chapter 2 of “Writer/Designer: A Guide to Making Multimodal Projects." |
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A manga that uses contrast more than “Horimiya” is “To the Abandoned Scared Beasts”. Created by Maybe, who is the artist and writer along with an implied author, the manga is about a past civil war between the North and South where the people of the North create super-soldiers who are monsters called Incarnates. These beasts are in need of help to become peaceful and live in the society or be hunted down and killed*
*Katsute Kami Datta Kemono-tachi e; MyAnimeList On pages 7-11 of the manga, a teenage girl enters a bar saloon, looking for someone*. The teenage girl spot’s the man who she is looking for and declares that she is has found her target and will pay for what he did to her father**. She then pulls out what seems to be a rifle and begins shooting him then falls back from the after effect of the rifle***. Within these few pages, all emphasis is given to showing the effects of shooting gun and the after effect when the teenage girl fires the rifle by using words (in Japanese) and such. *Maybe 7-8 ** Maybe 9 *** Maybe 10-11 On page 11 (Vol.1) of “To the Abandoned Sacred Beasts”*, the thickness of the word in Japanese is a huge contrast to the rest of the panel, supporting the word being emphasized for the scene and helping readers understand the emotions being emphasized as well. *Maybe 11 |
Along with Contrast, the alignment of manga is crucial to how the story is presented. As stated in the about Manga section, it is read as a text/image from right to left along with each panel being read from right to left with the text read left to right for American copies of manga.
Alignment is defined as “how things lineup”.* Manga heavily relies on the alignment of the panels for the story to flow smoothly. This is especially true for when something within a panel is given emphasis in which there is different contrast in size that “demonstrates coherence through a single alignment”* When looking at any manga, alignment is carefully used in every aspect.
With the panels for manga, there are various styles such as basic, butterfly type 1, butterfly type 2, Action, etc. Panels can be drawn in many ways depending on what the artist wants and the story within the manga itself.
*Chapter 2 of “Writer/Designer: A Guide to Making Multimodal Projects."
Alignment is defined as “how things lineup”.* Manga heavily relies on the alignment of the panels for the story to flow smoothly. This is especially true for when something within a panel is given emphasis in which there is different contrast in size that “demonstrates coherence through a single alignment”* When looking at any manga, alignment is carefully used in every aspect.
With the panels for manga, there are various styles such as basic, butterfly type 1, butterfly type 2, Action, etc. Panels can be drawn in many ways depending on what the artist wants and the story within the manga itself.
*Chapter 2 of “Writer/Designer: A Guide to Making Multimodal Projects."
Within any manga, all panels are close to each other due to page sizes but also the design of the traditional manga as well. In Chapter 2 of Writer/Designer: A Guide to Making Multimodal Projects, Proximity means “closeness in space” in which with manga being a visual text that refers to “the use of images and other characteristics that reads can see”. "In a visual text, it refers to how close elements (or grouping of elements) are place to each other and what relationships are built as a result of spacing. The relationships created by the spacing between elements help readers understand the text, in part because readers might already be familiar of element in a visual text, including words and images, or to elements of an audio text…”*
*Chapter 2 of “Writer/Designer: A Guide to Making Multimodal Projects."
*Chapter 2 of “Writer/Designer: A Guide to Making Multimodal Projects."
Proximity and visual mode play hand in hand when it comes to how manga is colored, the lay out of it, designed stylistically, size of characters (and other things), and the perspective within the manga to attract attention from either a potential or current reader*.
*Chapter 2 of “Writer/Designer: A Guide to Making Multimodal Projects." |
When drawing a character within any manga, an artist must consider many things. In some pages of a manga, the setting can take up an entire page. Scale references come into play in which heights vary based on the setting. This includes poses a character may do to "portray an emotion through body language".* Some characters bodies may not be fully shown in a panel and the pose will be emphasized on what is shown.
*Top Ten Essentials: Christopher Hart’s Draw Manga Now! |
Ranging from 0 to 5' 11" (180 cm), someone who is 5' 3" tall would have an average desk be the same height as the standing person's upper things. The desk itself would measure about 2' 4" (or 70 cm)*
*Drawing Manga: People and Poses |
An artist must also consider other things such as Dimensions of People, Perspective (Eye Level), Angels (Low and High), and a lot more when creating a character within a manga.
In the creation of a manga, an artist creates a page filled with 3-4 panels. The artists must consider the organization of each panel in contrast to everything said before. With each design choice, how it is organized into a coherent story is all depended up each choice described by Arola, Ball and Sheppard in Chapter 2 of Writer/Designer: A Guide to Making Multimodal Projects working together. This all starts with how the manga is organized. In the chapter, it's stated that organization is “the way in which elements are arranged to form a coherent unit for functioning whole”*. With manga, this includes the arrangement of people, buildings, background, and other elements that much be considered before other design choices. For any manga, all the Modes of Communication and Design Choices stated within Writer/Designer: A Guide to Making Multimodal Projects highly depend on how a manga artist organizes the story itself, leading to everything else.
*Chapter 2 of Writer/Designer: A Guide to Making Multimodal Projects
*Chapter 2 of Writer/Designer: A Guide to Making Multimodal Projects
Along with artists and writers, manga wouldn’t be possible without the different Modes of Communication and Design Choices created. Any manga is an example of how much artists and writers rely on different design choices to help create their wild and unique ideas into a coherent story. Manga is not just a cartoon or comic, it is an experience for readers each time one is held in your hands and read, bringing your mind into an alternative universe. Manga is that important to a lot of readers in this way with its uniqueness within the style of it.