April 8th to 25th - 2022: BLACK AND WHITE, YET GREY

Amongst the endless shifts working at Oakwood Theme Park in Pembrokeshire, over the 2022 Easter Holidays, I managed to get some time to myself to relax a little, and work on the project, mainly just some simple sketches, and ideas for panel/page layouts of the book (which now has also changed somewhat again in my head).

One evening though, thankfully a bit more time to myself after the park closing early, I managed to grab some food and get comfortable in my bed with snacks and a drink, the usual hermit lifestyle (don't forget the curtains being closed, NO LIGHT) and needed to find myself something to watch and keep my undivided attention.

So, as ever, I turn to anime and decided to watch AKIRA. Wow, even after watching this masterpiece god knows how many times now, I am still always blown away and mesmerised by this piece of filmography.

I can understand how this film could be almost impossible to make in the current day and age. The film is of its time, and has gained a huge positive and negative reputation, and cult following over the years, pinpointing it in history as one of the greatest pieces of cinema, even if most people who watch it have no idea what is happening.

BUT WHO CARES, BECAUSE I DON'T, IT IS STILL A GREAT FILM!

So, after watching the film I remembered that AKIRA I also a manager, well was a manga, and became a manga, I will explain this shortly, so after having been paid (yay) I bought the first volume of the manga series, which thankfully was a left-to-right printing, not the original right-to-left edition as my dyslexia really messes with my head as it is and I don't know how I can read those books "backwards".

So the book arrived midway through the Easter Holiday and read parts of it here and there. It is so different to the film, and that became more and more apparent as I read the first volume in the six part series.

But what really stood out, was the style of artwork. The style of how it is drawn crosses from the anime over to the manga, and back again, depending on which way the story and original piece evolved. Regardless, the element that stood out was the half-tones, which in this format are used as a form of shading and texture for certain elements. I knew that I had to try this with my own art work and see how they would turn out.

Here is an image of the first page of my comic, which has been drawn from images that I have taken with a friend (my actor/model for the protagonist and only character of the story) on a found and local location in my home town.

On the left is the original image without the half-tones, whilst on the left is the same image but with half-tones added. Since Photoshop plays up a lot for me, I resorted to using ProCreate to create the set of images, using a digital 'half-tone brush pack' which I downloaded from the internet, which was created specifically for creating Manga (which is super helpful since that is what I am trying to replicate in my own style).

In comparison, the panels that feature the half-tone elements, take on a lot more detail and structure within the images, really identifying what is being displayed in them. It gives a clear separation between the river (which runs across the entire page in the background) from the landscape and protagonist in the foreground and distance (which acts as a border at the top and bottom of the panels), really giving the landscape and its natural elements (trees, bushes and paths) form, and depth between the foreground and the different levels of background.

This became even more apparent when adding the half-tones to the other panels that I was working on or had already completed for the comic, look below (ignore the page numbers at the bottom of the images, I did these comparisons on Indesign and was working out how to add page numbers to my pages automatically):

References:

• Otomo, K., 2022. Akira Neo-Tokyo Explosion. [image] Available at: <https://www.reddit.com/r/akira/comments/s1erk4/does_anybody_happen_to_have_a_high_res_version_of/> [Accessed 26 April 2022].

• Otomo, K., 2018. Akira Panel. [image] Available at: <https://www.researchgate.net/figure/a-panel-from-Katsuhiro-Otomo-Akira-Kodansha-vol-1-1984-p-16-b-vol-5_fig2_326755116> [Accessed 26 April 2022].

• Otomo, K., 2022. [image] Available at: <https://www.reddit.com/r/akira/comments/cfivjf/great_panel_from_the_manga/> [Accessed 26 April 2022].

• Dragotta, N., 2022. Ghost Cage #1. 1st ed. Image Comics.

• AKIRA. 1991. [film] Directed by K. Otomo. Japan.