Yeah, Angoulême was six months ago, but that doesn’t mean I’m not gonna post a few pics from the amazing Moto Hagio show!
Shows of original manga pages are rarer than the proverbial hen’s teeth. I’ve seen exactly three: this one, Junji Ito at a previous Angoulême, and Kaoru Mori at the Kyoto Manga Museum. I’ve always been intrigued by why original manga art is so rarely seen–or offered for sale–and never really had a definitive answer until I stumbled on this article (in French, but Google Translate does a pretty good job of translating it). Whatever the reason, whenever I have the opportunity to see manga originals, I take it–especially in the case of someone of Moto Hagio’s stature!
The exhibt was vast–and quite crowded–so I didn’t take a ton of pictures, but here are a few highlights chosen, as is my wont, mostly for interesting cartooning craft reasons:
I love the page layout here. The final vertical panel is amazing. Check out, though, this crazy stippling! This kind of thing turns up in several of her pages on display here.
This page is worth posting just because it’s insanely gorgeous. But, check out how the artist has combined crosshatching with opaque white to create the glitter/star effects:
Some really nice nib-work with opaque white on this page:
Just throwing this one in because I absolutely love these sorts of pages that you often see in shōjo manga: a big one-page image that’s a sort of “poster of a character’s emotional state.” (And of course, yet another reason that thinking about comics in terms of “shots,” “camera angles,” etc. is such unproductive nonsense.) There is some nice stippling in that robe though!
Some more really nice space/stars effects with opaque white in the corner of this page. And note the corrected leg position of the character:
Another gorgeous page!
Check out how many different patterns are going on here–some hand-done (cross-hatching, the plaid on the clothes) and others screen-tone–but the drawings all read very clearly visually:
The stippling in this panel is 100% bonkers:
I was largely unfamiliar with Moto Hagio’s SF work, but there were some truly stunning originals in that genre at the show. Check out the insane hatching here in this giant/close-up eyeball:
I can’t even begin to think about how you’d set up an image like this with multiple mirror surfaces:
Welcome to Crazytown!
The pattern on the coat here is not screen-tone; it’s hand-drawn.
Check the hatching and stippling combo here in this outer space panel.
Amazing usage of screen-tone without outlines/contour lines for some of the jigsaw puzzle pieces here.
I have no idea what’s going on with the wavy-patterned screen-tone here–tone with a pre-printed pattern? White areas pulled out with a razor?
She’d give Bill Woggon a run in the clothes-drawing deparment!
The razor-work on the screen-tone on this original is gobsmacking:
On the way out of the exhibit I bought a copy of Moto Hagio’s L’il Leo in French, not aware that there was an English translation of it. It’s ostensibly a lighthearted kid-friendly collection of stores about the titular Leo, a talking cat. It’s a great read, but there’s a surprising amount of pathos in some of the stories–particularly the lead story where Leo winds up going to school and being ostracised by the other students for doing cat stuff at school, not knowing how to behave in a classroom, etc.
We left Angoulême early Sunday morning by train so we could spend a bit of time in Paris before heading back to Columbus. While there, we caught the Joan Sfar exhibit. It was similarly amazing–but that’s a post for another time!
Recent Comments