dreamed comic
Dec. 13th, 2002 09:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
egypturnashThis was a dream with lots of changing of form - watching an animated movie, being a character in it (a shapeshifter who turned into a hippety-hop type toy shaped like a bumblebee), fashion design roughs, a swirl of storyboard and conceptual drawings, and finally an anthology-type comic. Or maybe I should say anthology-type manga, because this was an anthology from Japan.
It wasn't the usual Japanese look, either. Instead, I was amazed: every few pages had work by different artists, in radically different styles. It was all over the map - cartoony, realistic, noir, itchy lines, just wild. One story was like Basil Wolverton crossed with Jack Cole (Plastic Man's creator) - really dynamic, with strange texture obsessions. One was big-nosed, big footed shlubs. Some of it was kinda badly drawn. There was work that was primarily stippled. There was a story about a bunch of people trying to emulate a fictional cowboy hero, usually getting outnumbered as they shouted out the catch-phrase of 'In the name of (whatever the cowboy hero's name was)!'. There were text-heavy ads, mostly in English - actually, most of the comic was in English, I guess it was translated. It read left-to-right, too. There was a really silly thing involving a giant child that had an exhortation for readers to sent in photos of them posing like an action soldier hero; the best one would win the competition, and have their photos used as source material for the next story in this series of stories of Winsor McCay-like distortions.
And I was really into thiscomic manga, because I was glad to see that what people have suggested is really quite true: what makes it over to the West is just a small portion of what comics artists and animators do over there; for some reason people only want to import the big eyes, small mouths, giant robots stuff, despite all these other, dramatically different stylizations.
Then I woke up, and was sad to be back in the world where all the stuff I see from Japan looks exactly the same.
It wasn't the usual Japanese look, either. Instead, I was amazed: every few pages had work by different artists, in radically different styles. It was all over the map - cartoony, realistic, noir, itchy lines, just wild. One story was like Basil Wolverton crossed with Jack Cole (Plastic Man's creator) - really dynamic, with strange texture obsessions. One was big-nosed, big footed shlubs. Some of it was kinda badly drawn. There was work that was primarily stippled. There was a story about a bunch of people trying to emulate a fictional cowboy hero, usually getting outnumbered as they shouted out the catch-phrase of 'In the name of (whatever the cowboy hero's name was)!'. There were text-heavy ads, mostly in English - actually, most of the comic was in English, I guess it was translated. It read left-to-right, too. There was a really silly thing involving a giant child that had an exhortation for readers to sent in photos of them posing like an action soldier hero; the best one would win the competition, and have their photos used as source material for the next story in this series of stories of Winsor McCay-like distortions.
And I was really into this
Then I woke up, and was sad to be back in the world where all the stuff I see from Japan looks exactly the same.
I hear ya.
Date: 2002-12-21 12:27 am (UTC)But Astro Boy is da shit, yes.
Unless it's those horrible comics from the 80's I saw on eBay where they tried to make him look muscular. *shudder*