“Sen no omoshiorsa: Tanioka Yasuji to Sugiura Shigeru”
Chapter 5 from Manga wa naze omoshiroi no ka: sono hyōgen to bunpō (Why Is Manga So Interesting? Its Expression and Grammar, NHK Library, 1997), pp. 66-79.
If you're thinking, "Hey, that cover up above looks familiar," you are correct. This is our second translation for TCJ of a chapter from Natsume Fusanosuke's 1997 study Why Is Manga So Interesting? Its Expression and Grammar (Manga wa naze omoshiroi no ka: sono hyōgen to bunpō). Last October we presented chapter 6, "The Structure of Expressions in Manga," in which Natsume discussed artists like Tiger Tateishi and Tori Miki with an eye toward their use of the “line” (sen) in communicating through visual symbols those sensations of the world that typically are invisible in everyday life. This preceding chapter also concerns the “line,” which we would characterize as one of Natsume's signature topics.
In the 1990s, Natsume developed a formalistic approach to the study of manga, with the intent of analyzing why Japanese comics continued to fascinate generation after generation of readers. He strongly felt it was due to the way artists combined words, drawings and panels, so he began to develop a “manga-expression theory” (manga hyōgenron) to focus on the formal properties of the manga page. Western readers will no doubt recall that while Natsume was doing this, the American cartoonist Scott McCloud made his own impact in Comics Studies with his seminal Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (Tundra, 1993). Shortly after McCloud’s book came out, Natsume and those in his research circle discovered it and felt overwhelmed, as if the “black ships” of the West had again invaded Japan’s shores.1 Like McCloud, Natsume used his own cartoon drawings, often recreations of other artists’ pictures, to illustrate how comics work.
Natsume similarly covers those points in Why Is Manga So Interesting? but though individual chapters, going into each topic with a bit more depth. We should keep in mind that this essay and its parent book were derived from 12 half-hour broadcasts hosted by Natsume on NHK’s educational program Human University (Ningen daigaku). Originally aired in 1996, Natsume’s segments were geared toward a general audience (probably skewing to a slightly older demographic than McCloud intended for his book) and themed in part on (re)discovering comic art as an important aspect of Japanese culture. Natsume also authored a thin, cheaply printed viewer’s guide to accompany the program, of the sort NHK still prints and sells today in advance of television series to aid viewers in following and anticipating each episode. The NHK Library series then sometimes republishes these pamphlets as books, often in expanded form. The 1997 iteration of Why Is Manga So Interesting? was thus expanded to book form with additional chapters adapted from Natsume's college lectures, again with the aim of bringing these concepts to a general audience.3
Last autumn, in a special issue commemorating the 30th anniversary of Understanding Comics, the academic journal INKS featured a number of articles about McCloud’s legacy. Curiously, no scholar examined the book’s fifth chapter, about the cartoonist's line. One might read into this omission the possibility that McCloud’s analysis of that topic did not impact scholars (and artists) as much as his ideas on other aspects of comics, such as the icon, panel transitions and closure. This is exactly why readers should take note of Natsume’s emphasis on line in this parallel text. After all, Natsume here is arguing for a similar kind of universality in the reading experience. Like McCloud, he uses the cartoon face as both an icon and also a vehicle for “closure,” a concept McCloud defines as the “phenomenon of observing the parts but perceiving the whole.”4 Interestingly, Natsume offers only a circle with two dots - closure for him happens without the mouth.
Perhaps more importantly, Natsume uses two giants of Japanese cartooning, Tanioka Yasuji and Sugiura Shigeru, to illustrate his point about how Japanese readers enjoy and find interesting (omoshiroi) the ability to make sense of otherwise minimal or nonsensical marks in the panel. There is value in Natsume’s essay simply for its discussion of Tanioka, a giant of humor manga about whom very little has been written in the English language. For Sugiura, Ryan Holmberg (who has written about him for this site) has recently finished a new translation of the artist's groundbreaking Ninja Sarutobi Sasuke (a 1969 redrawing of stories from 1953 through 1956), which will be published in June by New York Review Comics. This book will supplement Holmberg's earlier translation of Sugiura’s Last of the Mohicans (PictureBox, 2013). Sugiura was one of the most popular artists of children's manga, filling the Omoshiro Book Library series with rousing tales of ninja battles, but he also developed a kind of “pop” and pastiche drawing style in rendering shapeshifting and slippery characters; this fluid and unrealistic approach to ninja action seems to have greatly interested Natsume, as seen in his discussion here of Sugiura’s Shōnen Jiraiya, published in the 1950s.
Sugiura often figures into Natsume’s “manga-expression theory,” because of the artist’s ability to stimulate the imagination through his line. In Natsume’s pioneering 1992 book Where Is Tezuka Osamu? he enlisted Sugiura as a comparator to better understand the God of Manga, stressing how these two artists conveyed dual aspects of “vitalism” and “ambiguity” in their manga lines. We sense, Natsume argued, “in their manga the uncertain state of human beings, and we feel a happy-go-lucky love of life. With that in mind, I think we can classify Sugiura as an indeterminate version of an otherwise very Tezuka-like model.”5 Then and now, Natsume has argued how the line forms an important role in the triumvirate of manga expression; indeed, it is an indispensable and often overlooked element, one equally on par with words and panels.
-Jon Holt & Teppei Fukuda
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Pictures Consist of Lines
Pictures and panels are the most indispensable elements that make manga what it is. At the very least, from the beginning of the modern period, even if you consider the one-panel comic, any manga must be established through content that is created by the panel and the pictures within the panel. Especially, at least in the case of manga, most Japanese would agree that manga is a kind of expression done with pictures, which are linked in a sequential form through multiple panels. If either pictures or panels are absent, then manga cannot exist.
Furthermore, any manga deserving of the name today will inevitably be mediated through a large number of words; this becomes another important factor, complementing the panel and picture elements. Although there are today manga without words—so-called silent manga—their numbers are very small. Without understanding the connections among words, pictures and panels, we will not be able to analyze the form of manga expression.
For this series, up until this point, I have discussed manga using a number of pictorial elements that were relatively easy to understand. I plan to gradually say more about words and panels,6 but this might be a good place to slow down and focus a bit more on the picture element.
Of course, a picture (e) could consist of any number of things, but for a manga picture, the most important aspect is its line (sen). Admittedly, there are pictures in manga that might have the appearance only of color, and they might lack lines entirely. Similarly, there are manga pictures that might have been done mainly with screentone (Figure 1) or dots generated with computer graphics (Figure 2), but for the most part in Japan, there are not that many manga with pictures made only with color. The most common types of manga publications are low-cost magazines softcover books, etc., so there are very few publications today that are high-quality enough to employ color. Plus, the kind of transparent adhesive that has patterns printed on it—what we call screentone—was originally created for design use, but it started to become greatly used in manga by the mid 1960s due to what some call a revolution in manga techniques at that time. Even so, it is not a tool one must necessarily use to make manga.
So, again, if we leave aside these methods, it is clear that most of today’s manga pictures are composed of lines. If we look again at Figure 1, to complement the character outline that is produced by his line, the artist adds nuance and shading through different gradations by the use of screentone. Look closely and notice the boy’s smooth skin [in the right panel], which the artist achieves by curving the shading through the application of screentone. Another factor that adds to the illusion of smooth skin is the artist’s use of his pen to draw curving lines for the chin and cheeks, further expressing the softness of the boy’s face.
If the artist’s line had become wilder, it is likely that the boy’s young flesh would end up feeling more rugged or scraggly. I do realize that even if the boy had cheeks that looked a bit more rugged, the artist might convince his readers to let him get away with a rougher look without disrupting story convention - namely, the kind of agreement between artist and reader, where, at least for this story, we all know this character is the typical “apple-cheeked, beautiful young lad.”
What Makes Tanioka Yasuji So Interesting?
Unlike the super-sophisticated compositions of the previous examples, when we look at more basic manga, we see how simple lines can blur the distinction between lines and dots. This really can be quite interesting. A good example of this is Figure 3, which is a manga by Tanioka Yasuji; in the first panel we have just some lines and dots that initially make no sense. And yet, as the manga progresses, we realize that it is actually someone’s face. The humor that this manga conveys is related to the mystery of how human beings can make sense of pictures, which I will discuss later in this essay.
Turning to Figure 4, this image also has a similar mysterious appeal to it in the way that, even though the character [in panels 13 and 14] is strange for being some kind of unknown creature, we still see him as a living being because he has a mouth, two eyes and two legs. Such facial and bodily features are depicted almost in code through this kind of extremely simplistic line, but even though not one of us has ever seen or met beings this amorphous, somehow the images not only work, but they are also quite charming and fun.
Very simple manga like this often can provoke a kind of primitivistic surprise. It seems to me that the power to surprise or fascinate us are things that are not native to manga, but something pictures and lines always had in them from the start.
When Lines Produce a Picture
The line is a strange thing. There are numerous examples where artists have depicted other beings in the most abstract and simple ways with line, like the primitive peoples and their cave drawings. There are later cases too where the pictures look very real. When I say pictures are “real,” I feel that such drawings were made in general long after civilization had advanced, and there had been a kind of revolution in the techniques of artistic expression; in contrast, it is hard to tell which of the examples we have seen of earlier simple human drawings came first.
When information enters the human retina and we receive the image, our brains emphasize the areas that are the borders between light and shadow. Then, our brains will recognize those boundaries in the simplest way as a line. To make a drawing of a plaster cast, it is necessary to train the eye to not be fooled by outlines that naturally appear, but instead to see the object as a series of steps in the gradation between light and dark. Conversely, we can say that our human brains and eyes make us quite capable of recognizing the gap between light and shadow as a line without any training.
Now, I cannot tell you exactly from what age and in what way human beings begin to fabricate pictures from simple lines. And yet, it is possible to make a guess. When you make a small child pick up something to draw with and you ask them to play with it, even as they simply move their hands, their own colors and marks they put down will become interesting for these little people; and then, they will flail around marking up the whole paper and soon become quite tired of it all. With children who are a bit older, you then see that this group will draw winding lines on their picture pages. Perhaps they have noticed the connection between their own arm movements and the lines that appear on the paper, and so they often will simply repeat the act of drawing those lines. At some point, these children’s drawings somehow begin to take form.
[Natsume’s Note: Figures 5 and 6 were drawn using my left hand.]
For example, when using a writing implement, occasionally it catches on the page and something like a ball or circle gets made at the end of the line (Figure 5). Then, if an adult asks, “What did you just draw? What is that?” perhaps the child might say, “A snake.” What is interesting for children is simply drawing a line; they are not conscious of the act of drawing an object. Now, on the next day, if you ask that child about the same thing they drew, they might answer, “It’s a string.”
As soon as children begin to try to draw a person, they do it by applying a few lines to represent the hands, legs, eyes and nose to what is otherwise just a figure with a head (Figure 6). When this happens, they pay no attention to the size of the hands or legs, to the connection between the head and torso, and so on. This is perhaps one step prior to the stage when early humans in their caves started to draw their own symbolic people. We cannot view the development of an individual overlapping in any way with the history of humanity, but I feel that we can see a link between two other things: when people have consciousness as human beings, there is something we all share in how we will see the human body symbolically in some total visual code.
What Gives the Line Its Primitive Coolness?
I am going to draw for us a single circle. Of course, at this point I do not know if it is a circle like the sun, or perhaps a hole. Now, once I put two dots inside the circle—just with those two additional marks—it will inevitably appear to us as a person’s face (Figure 7). A real human face is not actually round like a circle nor are human eyes merely dots, but even so, we will recognize a face in this picture. The more I think about this experience, the stranger it seems to me, but there really is no other way than to say this feels true.
In a mere moment, simple lines and dots can become a picture. Figure 7 is a good case in point. What is interesting, I think, is that when this picture comes into being, something else also happens - a kind of leap in our cognition of it. A similar leap in cognition happened with the earlier example (Figure 3) where we saw the interesting change taking place in Tanioka Yasuji’s manga. When people speak of these cool and interesting things, they tend to see it as the “deformation” (deforume) or “exaggeration” (kochō) of an image through pure simplification. Such discussion is premised on the idea that a realistic image must exist, so that it can become interesting when an artist omits parts and destroys that reality. In other words, what is interesting is that real thing had to exist first, but there is something new and appealing that gets added on as a secondary quality through the drawing.
Even so, to my understanding, the point at which this level of interest started to be considered was quite recent. The truth is, for human beings, the oldest expression is the image of the simplified line, like the kind of images we discussed earlier being done by either primitive humans or those drawn by children. I think it is entirely permissible to think that these old, primitive feelings of surprise and enjoyment still survive in manga that are done with simple lines.
And yet, the same thing is true even in the complicated picture we saw back in Figure 1, where the line of the boy’s cheek created a good discussion for us because we did not know exactly how the artist rendered the curved line. A manga that is simple can have the same power as a complicated one in how it can use its line to exert its strange power on its viewers through the impressions it can make.
To talk about the actual kind of impression that line conveys to the viewer, let’s look at another example. When I make a line like a curved oval, any viewer will somehow get a peaceful and genial feeling from it (Figure 8). If I continue to draw the line and make the whole thing into a manga word balloon (fukidashi), it will end up creating the impression that the words within it are soft and mild (Figure 9). On the contrary, once I start to draw a line that looks rather pointy, like a spear tip, the reader will feel some aggression in the speaker’s psychology (Figure 10). Again, if I complete this line and turn it into a word balloon, of course, it now has an urgent, explosive feeling; this kind of balloon would be used for times when a character is shouting or is angry (Figure 11). Artists who draw manga will unconsciously manipulate the line to convey such impressions. And, as readers, we process such meanings from those lines.
Lines should just be lines, but human beings will inevitably and naturally grasp some meaning from the shapes of those lines. The interesting aspect of this fact overlaps with the quality of the leap that takes place in a child’s drawing, in which children advance from the stage where they have fun just by drawing simple lines to the stage where they try depicting an actual thing. We saw this kind of ambiguity earlier in Figure 5, where the line could look like a snake or a thread at the same time. We also observed something funny and strange in Figure 6, when the line drawing seemed to resemble a person, but there was something off about it. It was probably the same kind of interesting quality we found in Tanioka Yasuji’s strange being in Figure 4.
[Natsume’s Note: A drawing I made with my left hand.]
Most likely, the first person that an infant will recognize is his or her own mother. But maybe it is just the “face” of the mother, seen when the infant is suckling at her breast. That “face” is initially just an outlined shape with eyes; eventually a mouth takes shape, legs and arms follow. And then her hair, her torso, and her body parts connect together. Nose and ears come perhaps even later. And, in time, the toddler will actually reach a point where they will draw a figure with a head connected to a body, with arms and legs connected to the body (Figure 12). So, what we see in Tanioka Yasuji’s simple manga is the power to return us to that state where at some point our powers of cognition are still in the process of forming.
The Appeal of Sugiura's Manga: An Artist Who Made Full Use of the Possibilities of the Line
We have been discussing how interesting even the most primitive kind of line can be—such as when it becomes something like a snake or a string—which is the stage before the line is about depict something. Of course, we can discover the same kind of neat something in an actual manga.
A good representative of the kind of manga line we are talking about is that of Sugiura Shigeru. He can create primitive ambiguities with his line that are very fresh and appealing. Whether he is drawing a person, a tree, a flower, a building or food, he can create with his line a similar type of impression of something not quite fully formed. When I try to copy his drawings, I can truly understand it. If it is a person, he shows us a person; if it is patch of grass, it’s grass; but Sugiura’s line always makes me feel somehow that his creations have a kind of life force that can end up transforming into some other completely different thing.
Jiraiya (Shōnen Jiraiya, [serialized in Shōnen, 1956]).
A good example that shows Sugiura’s manga line fully at work is the scene we have in Figure 13. The young boy ninja has become a cloud, only retaining his face; in the next panel, he then sprouts out from his cloud form with just one of his human hands; and then, in the third panel, his face is back, but for no good reason his two eyes are lined up horizontally on top of each other and one of his fingers has grown strangely long. He makes all these transformations however he likes. What makes Sugiura’s manga so interesting is his line, which not only depicts fixed things—like how a person will be a person, a cloud will be a cloud, and so on—but they also can become unfixed. His line is free to express any number of possibilities, permitting him to change things around however he likes. It would have been enough for the boy ninja to ride on top of a cloud, but what is so neat about Sugiura’s manga is that he draws the boy’s body so that he fuses with the form of the cloud.
What I am saying is that there is something enjoyable in these jumps that happen as the panels flow one after the other: in the first panel, it would have been strange enough to have a cloud with a boy’s head emerging from it; but then in the next instant, it is a cloud retaining just one of his hands; and then we have a double-eye-layered face - there is something indescribably charming here. Sugiura Shigeru had been active in manga since before World War II, but he has maintained so many hardcore fans because his line has a funny charm to its that transcends generations; his art has a kind of undying appeal to it, like what primitive art does for people. His art takes these strange leaps in imagination through his panel flow and in all the multiple meanings in his lines.
In your average manga, artists give us straightforward lines that do not have the uncanny qualities we see in Tanioka Yasuji and Sugiura Shigeru. In most manga, a table is always going to be a table; a cloud will always be a cloud; people are going to be just people. Most manga work on the premise that the story must have a “verisimilitude of reality” (genjitsu-rashisa). What those artists are doing is suppressing the naturally existing ambiguity of lines with their drafting techniques because they aim to stabilize the verisimilitude of reality in their drawings. What truly superior nonsense (nansensu) manga artists do, though, is to cut through all of that reality and present to us the origins from which the line came.
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- More of Natsume’s original impressions of Understanding Comics, as well as his perspective from years later, can be found in the special “Understanding Comics at 30” issue of INKS, the journal of the Comics Studies Society, Vol. 6, No. 3 (Fall 2022), 365-373.
- Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics (Tundra, 1993), 121.
- Interested readers will note that, in addition to this translation of chapter 5 and last year's translation of chapter 6 at TCJ, chapters 1-4 have been translated for INKS. Chapters 1 & 2 appeared in the Summer 2022 issue, Vol. 6, No. 2 (pgs. 172-198), while chapters 3 & 4, which include discussion of Fujiko F. Fujio, Saitō Takao, Azuma Hideo and others, appeared in the Summer 2023 issue, Vol. 7, No. 2 (pgs. 174-195).
- McCloud, 63.
- Natsume Fusanosuke, Tezuka Osamu wa doko ni iru (Chikuma Bunko, [1992] 1995), 225.
- [Translators’ Note] In addition to the two chapters translated at this site and the four earlier chapters translated for INKS, we have published translations of the following later chapters of Why Is Manga So Interesting? to which Natsume alludes: “The Power of Onomatopoeia in Manga,” Japanese Language and Literature, 56:1 (2022), 157-184; “The Construction of Panels (Koma) in Manga,” ImageTexT 12:2 (2021); “The Functions of Panels (Koma) in Manga,” Electronic Journal of Contemporary Japanese Studies, 21:2 (2021); “Panel Configurations in Shōjo Manga,” U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal, 1:58 (2020), 58-74; and “The Characteristics of Japanese Manga,” International Journal of Comic Art, 22:2 (Fall/Winter 2020), 164-179 (in which Natsume considers manga’s place in Japanese culture).
