Scummy Manga Reviews #6: Naruman

Title: Naruman: What if a High School Girl Decided to Become a Manga-Ka Amidst the Publishing Slump? (なる☆まん：もし出版不況の中女子高生はマンガ家をめざしたら)
Published by:Tatsumi Mook, May 2011
Art and story by: Yamano Sharin (山野 車輪)
Genre: Academic Essay Manga


What it's about:

Naruman has lifesaving advice for all aspiring professional manga-ka:

Don’t.

Just.

Don’t.

The publishing industry is caught in a negative spiral and manga is no exception. Sales of serials have fallen to nearly half of the mid-90’s bubble with no sign of recovery. Wages are low and competition fierce. Market shares are being devoured by an ever-broadening field of alternate entertainment options. Modern manga has one foot in the grave.

But why? What insidious force dried up the one time wellspring of the country’s mojo, the often imitated but never replicated hype beast that made Japan Cool an international buzz-word?



In true manga fashion, we have a gaggle of schoolgirls to hold our hand as we trek through the dark economic reality and hack through otherwise impassable white papers. The protagonist is a returnee who, after growing up with a distorted perspective of manga through the cracked prism of America, is shocked to find that the streets of her motherland do not overflow with narutards and cosplayers.

This doesn’t dissuade her from enlisting her closet manga otaku classmates in a bid to live the dream and become a real professional manga-ka! Yet her plucky optimism soon gives way to detached disbelief as the true nature of the industry unfolds itself before her. There is no Santa Claus. God is dead. Greedo shot first.

And from this destructive revelation, the hope for a more mature tomorrow.

Why it's awesome:

Each topic covered in the manga is intriguing enough to expand into it’s own full-blown treatise. What factors led to the advent of the media mix? Why did anime in the 80’s polarize into private market OVAs and public market children’s shows, and how did this effect manga? How does digital publishing factor into the future of anime? Yamano paints a cohesive whole of the history, economics, and social trends that shaped the manga industry with broad though vivid strokes. It is not intended as the final word on the subject, but rather as a fire starter that lays out the ground rules for future discussion.

And boy, does he give the reader a lot to chew over.

The rise and fall of manga, Yamano explains, is inexorably linked to the baby boomers. This sudden crescendo of post-war births led to a tidal wave of children all waiting to be entertained. Manga piggy-backed on this need with spectacular results. The medium grew from Shonen, to Seinen, and beyond together with the boomers who formed its core market.

The baby boomers produced another sizable crop of potential consumers with the junior boomers (1970-1974), a sort of Japanese Generation-X defined by unprecedented levels of wealth and economic freedom. Anime tie-ins began to emerge as a viable market model, with TV adaptations drawing a new audience to the original manga in a positive feedback loop.

Business was booming, and it seemed like manga had hit upon a successful and sustainable formula of cross-media pollonization. But with every boom comes a bust.

In 1995, Dragonball finished its 10-year run of record-breaking popularity. When it left the pages of Shonen Jump, it took with it a loyal readership that had only stuck around to see how their favorite series would play out. This phenomenon became an epidemic as long-running serials began to wind down across the board. The baby boomers and their offspring had begun their mass exodus from manga magazines. Who would step in to fill the void?



As you can see from the data above, no one.

When readership plummeted, publishers attempted to stem the bleeding by extending long-running serials in a desperate attempt to hold onto the remaining regular readers. They became increasingly conservative and shortsighted, focusing solely on maintaining the status quo without considering the road to long-term recovery.

This strategy proved to be flawed in that it raised barriers of entry, both for consumers and artists. Readers can’t be expected to jump in the middle of a ten-year story. If you think it’s daunting to start reading a title like One Piece with a 60+ volume backlog, imagine what it’s like for elementary students buying comics with their milk money. Between Mixi, Niko-Niko Video, and video games, kids these days have enough alternative means to fulfill their need for instant gratification that don’t involve struggling through convoluted settings and a telephone book worth of characters.

Despite the “Shonen” moniker bandied by the three major publishers, the overwhelming economic voting power of the junior boomers made them the target audience du jour. This prevents children from developing the habit and literacy needed to enjoy manga, thus eliminating an entire generation of consumers. Of course, the current low birth rate society isn’t pumping out enough kids as it is, and in the age of the Internet and free entertainment, one can’t expect them to pay to play.

Children aren’t the only ones being cut out of the equation. Magazine page space is limited, and a large percentage of pulpy real estate is sectioned off to the old boys with long-running serializations. Problem number one is squeezing your way through the door with five people on the other side pushing it shut. Assuming a budding artist beats the odds and makes their professional debut, they can’t stand on even footing with the veterans, hence problem number two. Experience, technique, budget, and assistants—Normally an artist would build up these resources through on-the-job training. The current cutthroat model doesn’t allow that luxury. Manga has tied its own noose by raising quality and subsequent expectations above a level achievable by incoming artists.

Long-running serials have become rotting support beams holding up an exclusivist industry. The grand collusion between publishers and veteran artists has muscled out both aspiring manga-ka and potential readers. Rapidly declining sales suggest that manga as we know it is on the verge of collapse.

But is that really such a bad thing?

Yamano argues that this is the perfect opportunity to introduce a new business model that puts the manga-ka at the head of a multi-media enterprise. Why stop at merely drawing manga? Character goods, light novels, theme songs, voice actors, animation—The potential for tie-ins is unlimited.

I’m sure that raised a few eyebrows. Are we talking about manga or anime here?

Consider this—In terms of marketing, manga has always played second fiddle to anime. Character goods aren’t produced for the manga, but for the anime based on the manga. Anime uses the name recognition of popular voice actors and directors to draw in an audience. Each of these areas is handled by a group of specialists, be they figure makers, animation studios, or talent agencies. Division of labor ensures a high quality product.

What does that leave the manga to compete with? Merely a story, and art, all handled by one person struggling to meet deadlines for a publisher who views them as nothing more than another cog in the stuttering economic machine.


To hell with the publishers! Cut out the middleman and become president of your own brand! Why outsource your intellectual property to third parties? Oversee everything yourself and reap the benefits of greater creative control and increased profits!

The manga-ka of the future will be more manager than artist, not because of a lack of artistic vision, but because our age of free entertainment and declining paper publications demands it.

His vision isn’t as far-fetched as it first sounds. Consider the success of Comiket, the gargantuan self-published flea market that boasts yearly attendance records of over one million. All sales return to the author as pure profit. Contrast this with the 10% royalties a professional receives for Tankobon (trade paperback), and suddenly the amateur is making scratch equivalent to the professional with 1/10th of the sales.

Granted this ignores page rates, but it’s an even tradeoff in terms of volume. Which requires more effort—200+ pages for a commercial Tankobon or 30 pages for a Dojinshi? You can understand why some pros continue to write Dojinshi even after their pro debut. They don’t even need to come up with original works!

Here is the crux of Yamano’s argument. Parody Dojinshi form lines around the building; Original Dojinshi line birdcages. Will entrepreneurial manga-ka be able to create an intellectual property worth a damn?

The When They Cry series, Toho Project, Voices of a Distant Star, and most recently Black Rock Shooter are all independent franchises born from a single seed that germinated across multiple medias. Black Rock Shooter is particularly impressive for starting as a single illustration on Pixiv (the Japanese deviantART) that inspired a Vocaloid song and accompanying music video followed by an OVA and PSP game.

Obviously it can be done. But not without help.

All developing talent needs an agent to help it reach its full potential, and manga-ka are no exception. This is why editors will always have work even if the current publishing model fails. If the manga-ka is to function as franchise chief, then the editor would need to evolve to take on greater responsibility and management duties in addition to providing artistic feedback and upholding deadlines. They’ll need not only impeccable aesthetic sense, but business sense as well.

And what of distribution? Digital publishing, which manga commands an 80% market share in Japan, will be fertile ground to till, in addition to established means such as Comiket and Dojinshi specialty stores. In theory, the current failing bookstore model could be saved by expanding to deal in Dojinshi and related character goods, making it more akin to a convenience store. Upstart musicians, voice actors, and artisans would create the product to stock the shelves. Given enough time, the network would legitimize itself.


According to Yamano and his research, in any case. But whether you accept this as a legitimate model or decry it as pie-in-the-sky idealism, it’s clear that something must be done to rejuvenate the industry. Naruman offers a clear road map and reasonable end game backed up by raw data and views that overlap with established creators. Personally, I’m more afraid of the implications of him being wrong than of him being spot on.

What it won't come out in English:

Tokyopop! No, seriously. Tokyopop compressed a 50 year boom-bust cycle into a mere 10. They duplicated two of the major factors that setup the Japanese industry to self-destruct, namely: Establishing an unsustainablly low price point and inundating the market with too many titles.

When serials first hit the market, publishers never counted on a demand for trade paperback collections, so they licensed the distribution rights to third parties. Imagine their embarrassment when Tankobon took off in a big way! Over time they wrestled back the rights and funneled the windfall directly into their own coffers, but the damage had already been done. Early Tankobon were aimed at children, with a rock-bottom price point to match. There was no looking back.

For the longest time Tankobon sales served merely to supplement sales of magazines, until as recently as 2006 when sales of Tankobon exceeded magazines for the first time in the history of the industry. The existing magazine model is proving to be unsustainable, with Tankobon rising to enslave its former master. But with the market as segmented as it is, can you really blame the consumer for focusing on titles they want to read, as opposed to the old model of throwing down cash for magazines filled with authors they couldn't care less about?

Tokyopop certainly went off the rails and began licensing every third-rate title they could get their hands on, but this was in part due to the inexhaustible source of said trite back in Japan. While manga’s market share has remained largely unaffected despite the fall of the Big Three shonen magazines, the number of titles in circulation has doubled over the past ten years.

Meaning, the same pie now has to feed twice as many mouths. And with an increasingly fractured market, it’s more difficult to produce major hits with cross-demographic appeal. One Piece alone can’t put food on the table for everyone.

So now publishers on both side of the Pacific have become conservative, and rightly so. How many people would be interested in reading about the history of manga economics in Japan, in comic book form or otherwise? Probably not enough to warrant a major release. And it’s not ero-guro or artsy enough for the connoisseurs to pick it up. A shame, considering how thought-provoking and relevant it is.

Why, you’d almost have to... Publish it independently, or use digital distribution.

But that’s just crazy talk.

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TSB is about to perform a tracheotomy on your eyes and force-feed visual stimulation straight down your optical food tube. That’s right, our Tumbler account is officially open for business! But don’t shove—there’s enough slop to go around, with seconds for you gluttons with a taste for pop culture long past its shelf date. We can’t speak for the freshness, but we do guarantee to be unique and robust.

Click through to dig in:

Tiger & Bunny: Criminally Bad CG or Heroic Effort?

Tiger and Bunny is generating a lot of buzz this season for its unique Japanese spin on the superhero genre that we’ve grown to take for granted in the west, as well as for the schizophrenic condemnation and approval of consumer culture. But there’s something else more garish than the Soft Bank logo splayed across the eponymous protagonist’s chest. Amidst the heated conversation, we’re ignoring the cell-shaded elephant in the living room. Because let’s face it—for everything it does right, Tiger and Bunny’s CG parts stand out like, well, a guy in an a cheap CG mecha suit.

Not everyone can pull this look off, especially not Wild Tiger.

But I’m not here to knock on an otherwise entertaining show for aesthetic compromises made to compensate for shrinking budgets and talent pools. Rather, we'll use Tiger and Bunny as a case study to explore exactly why it is that CG in 2D anime produces such a knee-jerk reaction, even when done well.

To cut to the chase, it’s a problem of integration. For reasons I'll expand on below, 2D and 3D elements have a hell of a time doing the dance without stepping on each others feet. When handled correctly, the results are a masterful mix indiscernible by the untrained eye. Yet slip up for even a single frame, and your brain snaps back to reality, awoken from the spellbinding suspension of disbelief the artist slaved to create.

Problem 1: CG Animation is Too Smooth

From the opening sequence of the first episode, I was already scratching my head trying to figure out why CG characters such as Rock Bison and Fire Emblem didn’t sit right.

Fire Emblem makes me feel funny on so many levels.

Something about their movement was off in comparison to the rest of the cast—was it too smooth?

 My gut reaction was that these heroes were being animated on 1’s while the 2D parts were animated on 2’s. Clicking through the action frame-by-frame, I found out I was wrong—characters are also done on 2’s (for the most part).



Woah, back up for a second—1’s and 2’s?

Anime is created at 24 frames per second. This means that for every second of footage, there are 24 frames, or animation cells. The question of smoothness is then answered by how many unique drawings are contained within this second, with more drawings creating the illusion of lifelike, flowing movement.

Example of a walk on 1's (From The Animator's Survival Kit)

If each drawing within a second of footage is unique, that’s animating on 1’s—24 drawings per second (also known as full frame). The next step down would be animating on 2’s, for 1 unique drawing every 2 frames, or 12 drawings per second (also known as half frame). You can further subdivide from 24, leading to animating on 3’s for 8 drawings per second, and so on.

The same walk on 2's (From The Animator's Survival Kit.)

Televised anime is done on 2’s at best, or still frames at worst. Your brain fills in the gaps and never misses those other 12 frames, making action on the 2’s believable, though technically imperfect. More importantly for studios, being able to halve the amount of drawings without noticeably affecting quality allows productions to stay solvent.

This is a holdover from the limited animation workflow of animating on 3’s introduced by Tezuka back in the 60’s, a herky-jerky ghetto that divided the industry between artists like Gundam’s Tomino who just wanted to tell a good story regardless of the quality, and realism junkies like Miyazaki who pushed for greater immersion though lifelike (and expensive) animation.

But that’s a story for another day.

What does it matter to CG animation if its 2D counterpart is going number 1 or number 2? Like I alluded to earlier, the two are trying to dance, and need to keep on the same beat.

By default, CG animation is all on 1s. Once you set your key frames and breakdowns, the computer extrapolates the in-betweens. This is an overly simplified explanation of the process, (and I don't mean to suggest that the computer does the animator's job for them), but my point is full frame animation commands no additional cost in CG. In fact, while 2D anime cheats costs by using long (non-animated) holds on characters, dropping frames like this in full CG is artistic suicide, as the character reverts to a lifeless puppet the instant they stop moving.

So, in theory, we’d end up with the 3D parts on silky smooth 1s, while the 2D is done on comparatively choppy 2s, 3s, or lower. The result: A jarring mismatch of objects moving at different speeds, like walking through a stationary train as the tram across from you begins moving in the opposite direction. Your brain might not miss those extra frames, but it sure notices when certain objects on screen have them while others don’t.

Of course, this is all Animation 101. CG elements in 2D shows are generally done on 2’s in an attempt to synch up to the paper drawings. But knowing is half the battle. It took the industry years of trial and error to make the leap from pencil, and from paper to stylus and tablet. For a CG specialist, going back over the divide to purposefully create “jerky” animation requires similar mental gymnastics.

Meaning: Even with 2D and 3D dancing to the same beat, they still feel off. Why is that?

Problem 2: Data Overload

It comes down to an information gap and the issue of clashing animation styles. The former plays into the latter, so let’s start there.

In terms of the amount of information contained within a single image, CG lords over 2D, no contest. But don’t discount 2D too quickly. It’s information is hidden beneath the surface, implied between the lines. This visual shorthand acts as a sort of secret aesthetic message that our brains decode. With 2D, less can be more.

The Temple of Seven Golden Camels explains better than I can how simple and complex elements either complement or hinder one another.

This lack of raw materials means that a 2D artist needs to stretch each resource to its limits. In other words, no wasted poses, no superfluous movements. Color treatments should be spartan with simple two-tone shadows.

And on the other side of the wasteland, languishing high up on a throne of abundance, CG blows the Horn of Plenty without a care in the world. Therein lies the problem. Remember that we’re trying to unify two competing visual elements. CG needs to cast its worldly opulence behind in order to move down below the information poverty line and square off with 2D. The reverse, frankly, would be impossible.

Easier said than done.

The lack of a proper outline from the image-flattening Toon Shader is another dead giveaway, but too technical to go into here.

As you can see in the image above, Rock Bison sticks out like sore thumb against the other simplified characters drawn in visual shorthand. He's got too much detail, too many lines, too complicated of shadows.This problem is persistent on all the CG characters.The gradients on Fire Emblem’s jock have the same effect as David Bowie’s monstrous cod piece in Labyrinth. You can’t stop staring! Too much information.On the other hand, Lunatic is nearly seamless. There are a number of scenes where it’s tricky to pin him down as being either 2D or CG, and that’s amazing! The audience shouldn't be in a position to ask this question in the first place. They’re supposed to shut up and enjoy the fireworks, and Lunatic’s design allows us to do exactly that. His suit is simple enough to work in either style. His face mask means no awkward “cell in a suit” hybrid animation like with Wild Tiger and Barnaby. Conceptually, he transcends hero and villain. In execution, he transcends 2D and CG.

Of course, this applies to still frames. What happens when the characters start to move?

Before we answer that, let’s think about the process behind drawing the cells themselves.

Anime techniques have their roots in western animation. Hanna Barbera in particular developed a cost-saving cheat that forever changed the face of production. Their trick was a type of limited animation where they separated a character into a number of layers, each animated separately. So if you have a character speaking and gesticulating, an animator only needs to draw the moving arm, mouth, and chin, while the rest of his body remains static, thus recycling the cell.

First we discovered that we can cut drawings in half by animating on the 2’s. Then we figured out how to optimize the drawings on a cell, dropping costs, realism, and information even lower.

Easy with the finger curls there, buddy.

TV anime doesn’t have the budget to always redraw the entire character for each movement, so they’ve adopted this cheat with great aplomb. And while this works great in 2D, it clashes with the CG. Flame Emblem, Rock Bison, and the power suits have a tendency to overact, either through too many poses, vaudeville hand gestures, or moving body parts that would otherwise be static on a hand-drawn image. This makes them appear much too busy, and when placed alongside their taciturn 2D counterparts, like a spastic child that can’t sit still.

Problem 3: Perfect Scaling

As we can see, 3D does certain things too well for its own good. Full frame animation and image information are fairly obvious problems, though there is also a more subliminal element working to pull us out of the action.

CG allows for perfectly calculated perspective. This comes off feeling cold and robotic next to a show’s inherently wonky hand-drawn elements. It’s somehow fitting that CG elements tend to be equally lifeless mecha and vehicles. Keeping these rigid objects in proper perspective as they drive away towards the vanishing point or zoom around in dizzying space battles is difficult enough to make a traditional animator want to snap their pencil in half.

CG solves the problem by providing models that, by default, create perfect perspective regardless of the movement or camera angle. However, this perfection makes the image appear sterile in relation to the the slightly janky drawings around them.

A smart animator will work around this limitation by purposefully distorting every few frames to give the impression of hand-drawn wonkyness that keeps the image alive. To bring up Lunatic again, this close-up shot from the end of Episode 8 illustrates how effective “messing up” a drawing can be.

There's devilry at work here!

Pay attention to how his eyes distort as he pulls his head back. They wobble, and the screen right iris even disappears for a frame, giving him Macross googly eyes. Based on previous shots, I want to believe that this is CG, but the actual image has all the tells of a traditional cell. Perhaps they switched over to 2D for certain shots? In any case, nice trickery Sunrise. I take my hat off to you.

To recap, integrating CG with 2D raises the following problems:

1) CG animation needs to drop its frame rate to match 2D.
2) CG designs need to be simplified to match codified 2D drawings.
3) CG needs to purposely distort models to counteract otherwise “too perfect” perspective and scaling.

That’s one hell of a series of flaming hoops to jump through. Why even bother?

The answer would be an entire post in itself, so I’ll just sum up the situation as I understand it.

1) Lack of skilled animators domestically.To rephrase Mutant Frog’s translated article on how the industry is hollowing itself out, by outsourcing in-between drawings to other countries, Japan has lost a training ground for new talent that would eventually graduate to become key animators. A true ouroboros. CG animation has since stepped in to fill the void.

2) Designs are complicated. (Related to Problem 1.)

Assuming there is still a small pool of talented artists in Japan, their simply aren’t enough to go around. Once again, CG is there to bring complicated mecha and monsters to life so the remaining animators can focus on other elements, such as characters and acting.

To give a recent example, Gundam 00 breaks out the big guns with 2D drawings for the hero's mobile suits, then falls back on disposable CG for background mecha and spaceships.

3) You have to stay on the cutting edge.

CG may never replace the raw emotion and exaggerated poses that are 2D’s bread and butter, but it can supplement it in other areas. It allows directors and artists to explore new means of expression and rewrite the rules of the medium. So long as there are new toys, people will want to play with them.

Whew, we've barely scratched the surface and already this post is too long for its own good. This covers what I've noticed to be the most jarring elements of CG in 2D anime. There's plenty more to discuss, such as backgrounds, camera movement, and the pros and cons of a Toon Shader, but I wanted to shoot close to the hip and keep to more the fundamentals of animation rather than dig through backend processes.

Despite the flaws and odd design decisions, Tiger & Bunny is relatively well done, which makes it all that more fun to pick apart. There's no denying that persistent ear flick you feel at times, but at least now you have a better sense of what causes it. And with that understanding and enough time, you may even learn to ignore it.