medium and message

Updated 3 months ago

this is not a note about Marshall McLuhan’s famous aphorism. it’s more about thinking about the tendencies of certain mediums, and the ways in which they shape the way certain stories are told (so i suppose it is about the aphorism, but in a manner more related to technicality and craft than social or political import). what makes it difficult to adapt something from, say, manga to a live action feature film?

one thing i noticed. what point of view does a reader adopt when reading a manga or a graphic novel? how does exposition occur?

unlike pure written fiction, the question of the voice of the narrator becomes less urgent. because it is visual, there is less of a need for what is happening to be described—and less of a reason to rationalize where that voice is coming from, whether from a character or an omniscient narrator. it could be said that the “narrator” continues to subsist in the invisible hand of the artist, but its artifice is simply less apparent, by virtue of the medium. this could also be said of film as well, though of course it has its own unique considerations (the camera becomes its own sort of character, and its relationship to the scene becomes an element of importance, among other things).

in graphic novels and manga, this also interacts with the act of reading—left to right, or right to left—and composition. the narrator is less a voice and more of a guide through the page, and the way that an author plays with this—pushes and pulls the eye—is a crucial component not only of creating something that is legible, but also as a potent tool to use for narrative effect (seeing something as a character sees it—what is their eye drawn to first? how do they look through and process information in a scene? how can this be mirrored in the way the page is composed?)

what is also interesting about this format is the flexible way in which the interiority of various characters can be exposed without undue friction. in other media, it’s entirely possible to showcase the interiority of multiple characters in a scene, but there is the sense that keeping each character’s thoughts clear from on another—and to do so without a somewhat clunky feeling—is a challenge.

and yet here manga excels. in each page, we are able to read through several narrative streams concurrently: the action happening within the scene, the dialogue between characters, as well as their internal monologues or reactions. these unfold without much friction because no additional written language is necessarily needed to distinguish between them; they instead receive different visual treatments, and are composed relative to one another to make the relationships between them clear.