Manhwa and Manga

With most people hyped up and raving about anime, I sit quietly in a cafe and fervently click at download buttons, use search engines looking up Japanese and Korean titles no one in my side of the globe, the Philippines at least, may have heard of. Everyone in the cafe is happily streaming through youtube, veoh or crunchyroll enjoying the live, colored, action graphics. I do otherwise. It seems I’m still stuck with still life. I read manga. Or manhwa.

Why?! you might ask. Well, I’ve asked myself that questionmany times. Before I turned out like this, I was your everyday average anime otaku wannabe. I viewed tons of anime, played computer games, talked anime, dreamed anime, drew anime, wrote anime. I was getting there. I was getting to the top of the otaku shrine slowly but surely. But as I surfed the internet one day, I stumbled across a scanlation group. I discovered Death Note. I discovered Eternal Sabbath. I discovered manga. And now, I think I’ve finally realized it: I love manga more than anime.

There’s just so much good manga out there. And as much as there are excellent anime that are unmatched by their manga counterparts, I think there’s more excellent manga that are not surpassed in quality by their anime adaptations. Then again, I don’t want to start an argument over which is better between anime and manga. These media complement each other. But since anime is famous enough, let’s talk about manga instead.

What makes a good manga?

What keeps me reading a manga or manhwa foremost is the plot. It has to have a story. This is very important for me, especially since I began essentially as a bookworm. I’m certain I’d read a manga however badly it has been drawn if it has a compelling story. That goes to say that characterization has been handled well with a certain level of credibility, and that the plot has an organic wholeness to it. Thankfully enough, I’ve found that lousy drawings often go with lousy stories and so upon reading the first few chapters, I can judge quickly enough whether a work is worth pursuing however long.

The second criteria is artwork. Manga/manhwa artwork is the execution of the story through illustration. But it is not mere drawing. It involves skill in choosing the right scenes to render, considerable neatness, style, use of light and shadow, use of lines and patterns, etc. This is actually the prime meat of the manga/manhwa–to tell stories through pictures. It’s the visual art that readers look for in manga and manhwa, otherwise, novels would simply do.

Apart from the story’s visual delivery, the handling of the thought and speech bubbles is very important as well. I call it ‘timing’.

The length of words have to be just right. The timing or instance the speech or thought is introduced has to be just right, and where a group of text is placed in a panel matters, too. Proper handling of the text or sfx in manga/manhwa greatly complement the illustrator’s scene renderings and result in the effective pacing of the story as a whole.

Good mangakas, I think, do not waste their ink on drawing too many scenes or relying too much on text to deliver their stories. They are able to pick out the most effective scenes to draw, the angles from which to approach them, and render the characters’ emotions with such skill that the images themselves tell the story. This is the craft of visual story-telling, and after stumbling upon the more artful mangas and manhwas that are available out there a reader begins to notice these things, and I think one becomes more discerning as to what mangas and manhwas are really exemplary and worth one’s time.

For my part, I dislike mangas/manhwas that are overly laden with text. The text end up looking like a bunch of sticks because they’ve been reduced to such small font sizes just to fit a speech bubble. I think (although it is not always the case) that wordiness is an indication of the illustrator’s weakness in depicting actions and scenes effectively and hence, the reliance on too many words. Mangas/manhwas that are wordy I’ve found to be more telling than showing, and for me that’s bad manga/manhwa. A good manga/manhwa should strike a balance between words and graphics.

I’ve even stumbled across manga which are almost entirely pure illustrations, but are nevertheless quite effective in delivering their stories and the spirit and milieu of the worlds that their stories take place.

Aruku Hito and Blame, for example, come to mind. Of course, subject matter and the atmosphere the mangakas want to create influence this spare use of words. I don’t think such a drastic move would work on all mangas, but I think what such select works show is that the essential in manga is its capacity for telling stories through vision, its delivery of images with expert and balanced manipulation of ink, shadow and space.

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Last  edited on June 12 , 2008