| This has been bugging me on and off for awhile, and I thought I'd ask to see if anyone knows the reasoning behind it: Why do shoujo titles often lack background artwork, usually having very little and there being a lot of white instead? I know shounen titles are also guilty of this, Bleach in particular having been complained about a fair bit on forums, but it seems to be just something that's accepted when it comes to titles aimed at females. When I was reading Mars (my second favourite manga, FYI), it irked me how so many panels had NOTHING but the the characters' faces. After reading GTO and seeing the effort Fujisawa put into the vast majority of his backgrounds, it's very irritating to see so many empty looking panels. It's more acceptable in certain cases, such as when the titles in question were serialized weekly, but it isn't as if monthly shoujo titles are exempt from the laziness... |
AironicallyHumanApr 22, 2010 8:21 AM
| Eh, plenty of shoujo titles have gorgeous backgrounds. It just matters what you're reading. If you're reading things like Margaret/Bessatsu Friend/etc with titles that focus on high school settings, most don't take GTO's cue and are lazy. If you get into the fantasy titles, there is often more effort put into developing the setting. I've noticed multiple titles with very nice backgrounds in Ichiraci, B's Log, Zero-Sum/WARD, etc. |
| Aha, so it isn't just me this annoys then. It's one of the reasons I can't quite get into Nodame Cantabile. I guess I'm just too used to highly detailed art and rich backgrounds. |
| Wall Flower/ Perfect Girl Revolution anyone? hands down the laziest drawn manga I have ever seen, the mangaka doesn't even make an effort on back grounds, it's like the entire world is covered in a white fog or black haze and the characters are drawn as humanoid blobs for 90% of the chapter and she is a fairly good artist when she wants to be and she only does like 20 pages a chapter. Lazy Mangaka is Lazy. But read Good Ending, Surprising amount of detail for a Female Mangaka, she actually draws like a guy, she's kinda Similar to Seo Kouji in art style. I actually thought she was a guy until I saw a news report about her. |
| It doesn't think, it doesn't feel, it doesn't laugh or cry..... All it does from dusk till dawn is make the soldiers die. |
| I think they just focus a lot on drawing the details of the characters, rather than the background itself. Instead just opting to add shoujo bubbles here and there or not even adding any background at all...I guess some shoujo mangakas' think that their readers only want to see pretty sparkly characters and care nothing about the backgrounds. Or they just were so busy and intent on drawing the characters, that their deadlines came up so they just stuck a couple of flowers in the background. I have read some manga where most of the backgrounds were entirely white or shaded in gray and black, I just find it boring sometimes staring at the blank white panels.... |
Infinite-VoidApr 22, 2010 9:07 PM
 |
| I'm not sure why. I did see many shoujo mangas where authors pay attention to details as backgrounds and such. Kayono is one. Most of them hire assistants to do the job. |
| It's painful to see everything lumped together in one pile. When you stop reading crappy shoujo, you'll stop seeing crappy shoujo artwork. Here's one that's doing just fine. |
shinkeikaku said: oh good golly! The backgrounds look amazing! Do you mind telling me what manga that's from?It's painful to see everything lumped together in one pile. When you stop reading crappy shoujo, you'll stop seeing crappy shoujo artwork. Here's one that's doing just fine. |
"I've read so much manga that at times my mind works in comic panels and dramatically expressed chibis. I'm both ashamed and amused by this." |
| I'm pretty sure that budgets are the main cause of empty backgrounds. The ones who are responsible for backgrounds are mostly assistant mangakas right? So no money = no assistants = no (minimum) background. But mangakas who don't work for weekly magazines might have more time to draw the backgrounds themselves. So if such a mangaka doesn't make decent backgrounds, she could be rightfuly labeled as lazy, maybe. |
Earth gets angry after a kick in the face. |
| Not sure. Heck, I noticed when reading Banana Fish that a lot of the pages have background on maybe 1/3-1/2 of the panels. The rest have none or minimal at best, for example: But to be fair, it's like she knew when they'd be more useful and she never covers everything with flowers either. I don't see anything wrong with making good use of dramatic lines either from time to time. But in the case of Banana Fish, the plot is so engrossing that once you've got a basic sense of location (ex, apartment), do you really need it repeated if all you're really supposed to be looking at is the character's facial expression? In that way, I think she avoids the negative pitfalls usually associated with lots of blank white or black space by focusing on the expression well. But she seems capable of doing backgrounds just fine too, she tends to put a lot of graffiti on her backgrounds for this series in certain appropriate places. I mean, look how awesome the subway is, I'm more than willing to forgive the simple door with the guy bursting through it on the other page when she put the detail where it more needed to be. So in Banana Fish's case, I'd say it's there to better focus the audience's attention where it belongs and to make the read go by a bit faster when you don't have to take in unnecessary scenery. In the case of this page. Why Wallflower has like nothing, going down the 4 chibis against a white background...yes, this seems excessively lazy, it happens far too frequently and it's not like noteworthy expressions and word bubbles are filling up the space. I think as long as the space is either filled with dialogue or it's just a no-nonsense look at a specific expression meant to hold your attention. Used correctly, I see nothing inherently wrong with it as a technique but gyah, so much white space in Wallflower!! I think I'd actually be curious to see a manga with no backgrounds and only white space. Like, no props, nothing, like all the characters are imagining it. |
teanut said: I'm pretty sure that budgets are the main cause of empty backgrounds. The ones who are responsible for backgrounds are mostly assistant mangakas right? So no money = no assistants = no (minimum) background. But mangakas who don't work for weekly magazines might have more time to draw the backgrounds themselves. So if such a mangaka doesn't make decent backgrounds, she could be rightfuly labeled as lazy, maybe. I highly doubt it's budget or lack of assistants, Wallflower for example is serialized in Betsufure, which has plenty of amazingly drawn manga in it's past. Peach Girl, Life, and Mars which all had pretty good back grounds and highly detailed art for Shojo manga. I doubt those mangaka where anymore better off then she was. I really think it's either, she hates drawing back grounds (which is understandable, I doubt there aren't many artists who do). She can't draw them, or she's just flat out lazy about it. |
| It doesn't think, it doesn't feel, it doesn't laugh or cry..... All it does from dusk till dawn is make the soldiers die. |
Jasonbear said: shinkeikaku said: oh good golly! The backgrounds look amazing! Do you mind telling me what manga that's from?It's painful to see everything lumped together in one pile. When you stop reading crappy shoujo, you'll stop seeing crappy shoujo artwork. Here's one that's doing just fine. Hakkenden. It doesn't really have a dedicated scanner/translator because they are too busy working on crappy, generic shoujo while ignoring worthwhile stuff.. |
Jasonbear said: shinkeikaku said: oh good golly! The backgrounds look amazing! Do you mind telling me what manga that's from?It's painful to see everything lumped together in one pile. When you stop reading crappy shoujo, you'll stop seeing crappy shoujo artwork. Here's one that's doing just fine. the backgrouds is awesome it show a lot of detail in it ~ |
shinkeikaku said: Jasonbear said: shinkeikaku said: oh good golly! The backgrounds look amazing! Do you mind telling me what manga that's from?It's painful to see everything lumped together in one pile. When you stop reading crappy shoujo, you'll stop seeing crappy shoujo artwork. Here's one that's doing just fine. Hakkenden. It doesn't really have a dedicated scanner/translator because they are too busy working on crappy, generic shoujo while ignoring worthwhile stuff.. probably cause the manga it self is on Hiatus, so who knows |
| It doesn't think, it doesn't feel, it doesn't laugh or cry..... All it does from dusk till dawn is make the soldiers die. |
Jigero said: probably cause the manga it self is on Hiatus, so who knows Not really. People just perpetuate the shitty shoujo cycle. It may not be in the newest Ichiraci magazines, but there's 13 volumes of material before they catch up. That's very recent. |
shinkeikaku said: Jigero said: probably cause the manga it self is on Hiatus, so who knows Not really. People just perpetuate the shitty shoujo cycle. It may not be in the newest Ichiraci magazines, but there's 13 volumes of material before they catch up. That's very recent. But it's like that with alot of other Genres as well, Seinen gets very little play but how many generic shonen power level crap has an almost infinite supply of scanlators at it's disposal. |
| It doesn't think, it doesn't feel, it doesn't laugh or cry..... All it does from dusk till dawn is make the soldiers die. |
Jigero said: But it's like that with alot of other Genres as well, Seinen gets very little play but how many generic shonen power level crap has an almost infinite supply of scanlators at it's disposal. Except people don't have this misconception that seinen is crappy because scanners only pick crappy seinen works and ignore the good ones. Instead, it's underdone in general and has a higher rep. Shoujo has a bad rep because they keep picking shit... like stuff with these lazy artists. There's more to shoujo than flowerly high school romances with blank backgrounds and chibis, but most don't even see it. |
shinkeikakuApr 25, 2010 8:55 AM
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