Because Oi, Hayaku! has gone down, I have taken my posts from OH! and brought them to MANiME for the sake of completion. This was the final official post in the blog, titled “A Panel is Worth a Hundred and Sixty-Seven Words”, posted in January 15th, 2009. I hope you enjoy.
A picture is worth a thousand words, or so they say. Well, they can go suck it.
A picture is worth a thousand words. Such is a phrase that is often said by people who look at pictures their whole lives. Namely, illiterate children and high-class art critics (though then again, who can tell the difference?) who claim that any number of words fail to express the beauty that a picture provides. Yeah, right.
Here, let me paraphrase this picture in four words. It’s a fucking dot.
Now that the baseless theory has been disproved, let us proceed. For the most part, a manga will have a introductory first chapter of considerable length and then shorter following chapters. For instance, One Piece, Naruto and Bleach have around 20 pages per chapter per week. Fullmetal Alchemist gets around 40 to 50 pages, though that’s once a month.
The question, then is just how efficiently the mangaka uses these limited pages. A good manga chapter should be able to make the reader feel like something has actually happened during its course. It should not, and I repeat, NOT make you feel like you’ve been cheated out of your money by a fast-talking Korean swindler.
Let us take the example of Bleach the worst offender. Virtually every chapter of Bleach these days seem to advance the plot at a painstakingly slow pace. There’s no meaning in the battles; a character is introduced, shows off his special power, then dies. You don’t believe me? Try the recent chapters.
From chapter 318 to 339, we’ve had four new arrancars, each of whom died in a few chapters. All we get is a few words, a release and inevitable death. Or, take the three already-existing arrancars, Mila Rose, Sun Sun and Apache, who apparently can summon something by ripping off their arms. No explanation is given – apparently, Kubo doesn’t think it’s worth the time to explain something that doesn’t really make sense. Furthermore, these three arrancar were given no distinct personality, though that can be said about all characters in Bleach, main or minor. Oh, and they died, too.
The flaw lies in the fact that Bleach spams its pages with gigantic panels. Each page has only around 3 panels, or even 2. And that’s not counting those two-page spreads. When a character talks, it’s rarely anything of importance. Bleach manages to bring about a spectacular paradox – on one hand, it says and does little. On another hand, the story progresses with frightening speed without actually furthering the plot. Where there should be plot holes, there are just… holes. The plot was probably bleached.
Of course, just cause Bleach is a pile of crap doesn’t mean the opposite works just by itself. Having TOO much shit in one chapter makes reading a pain, unless it’s exciting / enlightening enough to hold your attention. You try to make something TOO detailed, and it gets ignored. For instance, take Black Lagoon. It’s an awesome manga with great characters, but I gave up on trying to make sense of why things happen because I couldn’t make sense of the conspiracies in the current arc. All I know is that Roberta wants the Americans dead, and really, what reason do you need to want Americans dead?
But I’ve said enough about stuff that you don’t care about. Let’s now return to the problem at hand. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then how much is a panel worth? Well, then let us resort to this beautiful formula to figure it out.
And that, my dear readers, is why a panel is worth a hundred and sixty-seven words.
godly post.