Manga and the Japanese Comic Tradition

For this week I read "Battle Angel Alita Last Order". It is extremely interesting to go from french comics to Japanese ones. There is definitely a large contrast between the art styles. Japanese comics enhances the characters features in order to become more appealing. I know that this is largely to to the influence that betty boo had in japan at the time. Her bug eyes where appealing to the Japanese and so they decided to incorporate this element into their artwork. This has become an essential characteristic that is used to identify an anime style. Of course this is extremely present in Battle Angel Alita. Something else that manga does that in not commonly seen on other comics or graphic novels, is that they take advantage of the "book" format and some times use 2 pages in order to create a large horizontal illustration. This helps give a feeling of deepness to the story. On the last blog post I mentioned how the french tend to touch on more mature topics. Well, The same applies to the Japanese. The difference however, is that the french tend to do more sexually related topics and Japanese comics tend to be more violent and filled with gore. Overall I enjoyed this week's comic. I enjoyed comparing it to the previous works I have analyzed in the last couple of months.

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