Reading manga
This started off as a comment in sisabet's journal, but I'm putting it up here as a very, very rough draft of a post on visual conventions in manga that I hope to get around to this weekend. You may want to wait till the weekend to check it out--although if any of you have comments or corrections, I'd love to hear them.

Spoilers for Imadoki! volume 1 and X volume 16, and thank you to soragamieru for some of the page scans.



Some broad generalizations:

Page layout

1. Western comics tend to have very static page layouts. Panels are almost always bordered panels, and are usually rectangular or square. When bordered panels are juxtaposed with unbordered panels, most often the unbordered "panel" is the entire page, with some other panels inset.
   
   (I suspect the use of panels of a similar size and shape is also subliminally reassuring because it reminds people of strips of film and creates an expectation of progression--but I may be reaching.)
   
   I'm sure there are exceptions to this--I was recently looking at one of tzikeh's Hellblazer tpbs which had a lot of diagonal frames--but I think it's a valid description of most of the Western comics I know, which would be superhero comics and the Vertigo line (which differs in content but visually is very much in the superhero tradition). It also seemed to be true of most of the alt and indie comics I have, although I have an even smaller sample size there. Alan Moore plays around with this a lot in Promethea, by the way, and if I have time, I'll try to talk about how it differs from manga later on.
   
   This means that layout is not something you really need to process when you're looking at Western comics, or that a lot of the processing is automatic, because the layout is so consistent. Here's an example from Nightwing, which I chose partly because the way the panels are offset is slightly unusual -- and yet it's very, very tame compared to what manga does:
   
   
   
   When I was learning to read Western comics, I would pretty much always look at the text first, and then go back and look at the art. I'm sure there were some exceptions, but most of the visuals I remember from comics are visuals with no text in the panels, or on the entire page, because if you show me a page with text and images, I'm going to look at the text first. I am not a visual thinker, and I have a tropism towards prose.
   
   
2. This kind of layout shows up a lot in shonen (boys') manga, but it's not the only kind of layout even there--and it's really, really rare in most of the manga I've been reading, which are shojo (girls') manga.
   
   Below is a page from Death Note, a shonen comic, and you can see that the panel layout is very familiar. Reads right-to-left.
   
   
   
   
3. And this is a very shojo page layout from Imadoki!:
   
   
   
   Page one has a mixture of bordered and unbordered panels; notice the smaller, bordered, inset ones are all "closeups" drawing attention to the small changes in the boy's emotional reactions and leading you to page two, where his reaction is writ large, to emphasize how very important it is. In context, we've been getting to know these kids for about 150 pages and this is literally the first time we've seen the boy smile. And bang! She's in love. This reads right-to-left, so the reading order is (1) the boy's face; (2) the boy's speech bubble; (3) the girl. And the diagonal panel division draws the eye up, so you spend longer looking at that top panel, the boy and the sunset, before dropping down to see the girl's reaction, with the speech bubble connecting the two panels to guide the transition.
   
   In order to read manga, you need to look at the entire page before you look at individual panels. Trying to look at the panels first can make pages literally incoherent -- I'll try to find a good shot of this, probably from X, where I couldn't make out what was happening in a panel because I didn't realize it was only part of a picture that made up the entire page background.

Visual conventions of manga

Characters or scenes who take up one side of the page, acting as the background for multiple panels or being put to one side, so that the other panels in some ways reflect on that one figure. This is an example from X: The two characters are Subaru in white and Seishiro in black. You need to Seishiro's hand in the background in order for the rest of the page to make sense, but you also need to see the inset of Seishiro and Subaru for the close-up of Subaru's eye to make sense. This picture also shows one of the other shojo characteristics, which is the closeup on parts of the body--usually eyes, but here also hands--which I think of as the equivalent of reaction shots on television. They're a way to slow the narrative down, a way to say that the characters' emotional reactions are as significant to the story as the actions. (I think this has a lot to do with girls reading for emotion, and has some relevance to the peculiar flaws and virtues of fanfiction, too, but that's a big digression.) So there's a lot going on in this page. In terms of action, it's just Seishiro taking a cigarette from Subaru and smoking it. But we also get a close-up of Seishiro's bloody hand holding the cigarette. The cigarette represents the sexual attraction between the men (and in the manga, cigarettes are explicitly tied to Subaru's attempts to grow strong enough to challenge Seishiro, adding a layer of meaning you don't get in the anime), but the blood represents what's keeping them apart, which is Seishiro's crimes more than they're currently being on opposite sides. And just to reinforce this, we get the panel of Subaru's eyes--this makes it clear that the hand is so big because it's *what Subaru is looking at*. And, of course, the bandage is another signifier of Subaru's desire to be like Seishiro and to be punished for loving Seishiro.

(This reads right-to-left.)

Manga panel border divisions are also really different. In Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud talks a lot about the importance of the gutter, the empty space between panels. A lot of manga pages just don't have this--they have lines dividing up the space, and the lines themselves aren't straight but are frequently diagonal. There's a different and larger set of default panel shapes than Western comics have (basically rectangle and square). When pages do use gutters, they often use them differently--bordered panels will alternate with unbordered panels, or borderless panels will be used to draw attention to a particular image--sometimes a flashback and sometimes just an image that's important for some reason, usually emotional; the borderless image is like the flash of thought that interrupts a linear narrative, a momentary eruption of stream of consciousness. In both of the examples from X, above and to the right, you can tell that the hand is the most important image on the page, that all the other panels are leading up or commenting on that particular image. Also see Imadoki! above for different panel shapes and borders. Manga quite often looks very crowded by the standards of Western comics, although I'm not sure if this is because there *is* more detail or because it's harder to parse detail in black and white. One of the reasons I recommend Clover and Saiyuki as first manga to people is that they both have (very different) styles that minimize the information overload, Clover by use of negative space and Saiyuki by use of greyscale and contrast.

This reads right-to-left.