In this entry we’ll continue to reverse-engineer the thought process Toriyama went through when deciding how to depict the characters’ facial expressions in Dragonball Chapter 30 and we will also discuss the techniques Toriyama employs that permit him to tell an ongoing story that is both coherent and consistent without planning anything ahead. You have to have read the other effort posts in this series to understand this one. You can find all the previous entries in order right here.
This was right at the top of the next chapter of my effort post but then I realized it was about the dialog I talked about in the last post. Whoops. Anyway, as I’ve said in my previous posts on Toriyama’s visual storytelling style, a good writer thinks of their narrative as an argument. They have a thesis and the events of the story are their supporting arguments. In other words, they have a direction and purpose in their narrative. And if something doesn’t push the story in that direction, it should be omitted, even if in isolation it’s the greatest thing they’ve ever written. Some of the best things you ever write will end up on the cutting room floor. Truth.
Then I went ahead and said that the more an author can tell us about a character or a setting the better. The more we know, the richer and more immersive the world. More! Need more details! At first the two ideas (leave out details that don’t push the story in the direction it needs to go vs. give us as much detail as possible) seem to contradict each other. Not so! In the course of keeping the story tethered to its premise, all the tools used to do so, the characters’ physical attributes, the characters’ behavior and expressions, the characters’ dialog, the setting, can serve double or triple duty. The best writers and artists are masters of multitasking.
I’ll first show an example from the film Hot Fuzz, which in my opinion has one of the most efficient scripts ever written. That movie has zero waste. I’ll show you.
If a character is in a scene, they should have one overarching “essential action” that describes what they do during the entire scene. A character can take many individual actions in a scene, but they should have only one “essential action.” This action, determined once the script is complete, informs the artist how to portray the characters. Let’s go ahead and have a look at Dragonball Chapter 30 and try to reverse-engineer the thought process that went through some of the “acting” we see.
As established in the previous entry, the decision to exclude something from a comic is just as important as the decision to include something. If it helps, think of this as similar to the sound engineer’s choices while scoring the anime on whether or not a section should have music or silence.
If we have an establishing shot where a character is in the foreground and other characters are in the background, what that means is that the character who is the focal point of that panel’s composition is aware of the presence of the background characters. By that same coin, if we have a panel where “geographically speaking” a character should be in our line of sight but has been omitted, that means that this character isn’t relevant to the foreground character’s mental state. It’s also worth noting that it’s often understood that if we have an establishing shot where a character is in the foreground and other characters are in the background, the characters who are not the focal point of the composition are not aware of the presence of the characters who are the focus.
Examples:
Background characters relevant to focus character’s mental state. Focus character irrelevant to background character’s mental state.
This is a rather common means of establishing a scene in both cinema and comics. Here’s an example from a different comic:
Moving on:
Character who is logically in our line of sight omitted because they are irrelevant to focus character’s mental state.
Foreground characters relevant to focus character’s mental state. Focus character irrelevant to foreground character’s mental state.
Having established a basic foundation on when a character should be in a panel and when they should not, I also want to note that this choice can also depend on the artist’s style, but this principle generally holds in both manga and western comics. Regardless, once the artist knows a character is going to be in a scene, they should also start thinking about that character’s action. The artist also needs to think of the character as an actor on stage; the character will be delivering a performance through the artist’s drawings.
Effort Posts 