The British Museum is hosting The Citi Exhibition Manga until 26 August 2019. Reading manga requires the ability to interpret symbols, decipher overlapping text and images, understand cultural references and appreciate differences in storytelling between countries.īut, above all else, manga is meant to be entertaining. Manga is often referred to as multimodel. In fact, there are so many gitaigo, it’s enough to make anyone ぐるぐる (dizzy)! The Japanese language has more than three times the number of onomatopoeic words compared to the English language, which gives manga stories ample scope for expressive sound-words. Gitaigo, Giongo and Giseigo are the ways that manga illustrates sound effects and feelings in a story. Solid, rounded fukidashi represent normal speech, whereas more cloudlike fukidashi express happiness and more spiky-shaped fukidashi surprise or tension.
The shape of the fukidashi reflects the mood of the message being conveyed. When these stock representations become instantly recognisable to regular readers of manga, it means that excessively prolix text becomes superfluous!įukidashi are the speech bubbles, which give manga characters their voice. They are frequently used to express movement or emotions, with stock symbols used to convey feelings such as sadness or anger embarrassment or tiredness. The elements that are used to build up a manga story include manpu, fukidashi and gitaigo. So, to read a page of manga, you start with the koma in the top right-hand corner and you end with the koma in the bottom left-hand corner. The narrative is contained within frames called koma. Traditionally, manga stories are read from right to left and from top to bottom, in the same way as Japanese writing. Manga stories are similar to comics and graphic novels are read by all ages and cover a vast range of genres, including adventures stories, romance, science fiction, and political commentary. Manga is a form of storytelling, which relies heavily on visual elements, and which conforms to a broad style developed from serialised cartoon strips that first appeared in Japanese newspapers during the end of the 19 th century. The style has become so ubiquitous that we seldom stop to consider the origins and meaning of the characters often not realising that there is a rich language of storytelling lurking behind every manga graphic, as redolent in symbolism as a Renaissance masterpiece.
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