Spam Day, ctd. - some Mohiro Kitoh praise
Jun. 25th, 2006 02:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hmpfI should have mentioned this earlier, but sort of forgot because I was so tired: My copy of Mohiro Kitoh's Wings of Vendemiaire arrived today. A thousand thanks to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
nager whose gift to me this is. :-)
Kitoh's my personal God of Manga, sadly underappreciated not just in Germany but even in France, which is usually better at appreciating the more complex manga authors than shojo-crazy Germany is. One of Kitoh's series, Naru Taru, the one that introduced me to his works, is available in English, too, under the title Shadow Star Naru Taru, I think. In France only the first three volumes or so of Naru Taru are available - it was cancelled after that. In Germany there's all of Naru Taru (although that sold very badly, I'm told, and the translation, as far as I can tell, not knowing the original, is fairly crappy) and the two volumes of his short story collection, Wings of Vendemiaire - that one was only ever available in a limited edition of 500 copies, so it's a bit of a collector's item, and it tooknager a fair amount of time to hunt down on e-bay. *huggles nager* Sadly, those are all of Mohiro Kitoh's works that are available in any of the languages I know. At least Mangascreener are doing scanlations of his latest series, Bokurano, which I'm also really enjoying. It's unlikely it will ever be published anywhere in Europe, though, I think, considering how badly everything by Kitoh seems to have sold so far. I've actually thought about importing the series from Japan, just because I adore the art so much. It makes me sad not to be able to see it on paper. (Printing out the scanlations doesn't work so well since they're relatively low quality. Still, I've got a print-out of one of my favourite pages up on the wall above my computer at the moment.)
Let's talk about Mohiro Kitoh's art a bit. Googling his name or the title Naru Taru will get you plenty of info about his startling and disturbing plots and themes, but few people ever seem to really talk about his art (except maybe to complain about his spaghetti people). I suspect that that is because he is very much an artist's artist; or perhaps a designer's artist, I dunno. What I mean by that is that he composes his pages and panels in a very deliberate way - which I'm sure most comic artists do, really, but with Kitoh, I very clearly see aesthetic principles at work that I spent three years learning about during my own artistic training.
The first thing you'll probably notice (apart from the spaghetti people *g*, and the fact that there are no creepy saucer eyes) in a Mohiro Kitoh manga is how *uncluttered* the pages appear. You can see a few examples of typical page layouts from Naru Taru here. Kitoh mostly, perhaps even exclusively, uses rectangular panels, usually placed next to each other, with only very occasional insets or panels where the image breaks out of the frame. Also, the panels often aren't very busy - but what *is* in there is made to count. Often, Kitoh uses unusual perspectives to make a panel more dynamic or more striking. He also refrains from using a lot of busy background effects, and doesn't even use a lot of speed lines; instead, he mostly puts his characters in front of either black, white or grey 'empty' spaces - e.g. walls or sky. He knows the value of solid, 'calm' spaces on the page to set off the elements of the panel - the protagonist, a plane, a monster, whatever - he wants to focus the reader's attention on. He also often contrasts large, 'plain' areas with small, detailed areas to great effect. And he uses black and white contrasts very well. Since his pages are so uncluttered, something like the solid black of someone's hair or shirt really stands out and catches your eye. He draws houses, furniture and cityscapes with the precision of an architect; they look clean and kind of sterile, almost uninhabited, but that, I suspect, is deliberate. His people are unnaturally thin, but unusually expressive in their poses and movements - and they're a far cry from the artificial posing you see in many mainstream manga. And then, there are the monsters and angels - the 'bone dragons', the giant robots... They're not what you'd expect - far from it. They're the subconscious made physical, fantastic, organic shapes breaking into the clean and well-ordered architecture of Kitoh's cities. And when things get cataclysmic, the smoke of explosions pours over the page like spilled ink, out of control, all pretences of precision gone. The architect's drawing bleeds black ink, chaos spills from the very lines that kept order...
***
BTW: I just found out that Mohiro Kitoh is *exactly* ten years my senior. Yes, exactly, i.e. on the day. :-)
nager whose gift to me this is. :-) Kitoh's my personal God of Manga, sadly underappreciated not just in Germany but even in France, which is usually better at appreciating the more complex manga authors than shojo-crazy Germany is. One of Kitoh's series, Naru Taru, the one that introduced me to his works, is available in English, too, under the title Shadow Star Naru Taru, I think. In France only the first three volumes or so of Naru Taru are available - it was cancelled after that. In Germany there's all of Naru Taru (although that sold very badly, I'm told, and the translation, as far as I can tell, not knowing the original, is fairly crappy) and the two volumes of his short story collection, Wings of Vendemiaire - that one was only ever available in a limited edition of 500 copies, so it's a bit of a collector's item, and it took
nager a fair amount of time to hunt down on e-bay. *huggles nager* Sadly, those are all of Mohiro Kitoh's works that are available in any of the languages I know. At least Mangascreener are doing scanlations of his latest series, Bokurano, which I'm also really enjoying. It's unlikely it will ever be published anywhere in Europe, though, I think, considering how badly everything by Kitoh seems to have sold so far. I've actually thought about importing the series from Japan, just because I adore the art so much. It makes me sad not to be able to see it on paper. (Printing out the scanlations doesn't work so well since they're relatively low quality. Still, I've got a print-out of one of my favourite pages up on the wall above my computer at the moment.) Let's talk about Mohiro Kitoh's art a bit. Googling his name or the title Naru Taru will get you plenty of info about his startling and disturbing plots and themes, but few people ever seem to really talk about his art (except maybe to complain about his spaghetti people). I suspect that that is because he is very much an artist's artist; or perhaps a designer's artist, I dunno. What I mean by that is that he composes his pages and panels in a very deliberate way - which I'm sure most comic artists do, really, but with Kitoh, I very clearly see aesthetic principles at work that I spent three years learning about during my own artistic training.
The first thing you'll probably notice (apart from the spaghetti people *g*, and the fact that there are no creepy saucer eyes) in a Mohiro Kitoh manga is how *uncluttered* the pages appear. You can see a few examples of typical page layouts from Naru Taru here. Kitoh mostly, perhaps even exclusively, uses rectangular panels, usually placed next to each other, with only very occasional insets or panels where the image breaks out of the frame. Also, the panels often aren't very busy - but what *is* in there is made to count. Often, Kitoh uses unusual perspectives to make a panel more dynamic or more striking. He also refrains from using a lot of busy background effects, and doesn't even use a lot of speed lines; instead, he mostly puts his characters in front of either black, white or grey 'empty' spaces - e.g. walls or sky. He knows the value of solid, 'calm' spaces on the page to set off the elements of the panel - the protagonist, a plane, a monster, whatever - he wants to focus the reader's attention on. He also often contrasts large, 'plain' areas with small, detailed areas to great effect. And he uses black and white contrasts very well. Since his pages are so uncluttered, something like the solid black of someone's hair or shirt really stands out and catches your eye. He draws houses, furniture and cityscapes with the precision of an architect; they look clean and kind of sterile, almost uninhabited, but that, I suspect, is deliberate. His people are unnaturally thin, but unusually expressive in their poses and movements - and they're a far cry from the artificial posing you see in many mainstream manga. And then, there are the monsters and angels - the 'bone dragons', the giant robots... They're not what you'd expect - far from it. They're the subconscious made physical, fantastic, organic shapes breaking into the clean and well-ordered architecture of Kitoh's cities. And when things get cataclysmic, the smoke of explosions pours over the page like spilled ink, out of control, all pretences of precision gone. The architect's drawing bleeds black ink, chaos spills from the very lines that kept order...
***
BTW: I just found out that Mohiro Kitoh is *exactly* ten years my senior. Yes, exactly, i.e. on the day. :-)
