How to make a manga: Tips on how you want to present your storyline

September 27, 2009 by r2moo2
Filed under: how to make a manga

I wanted to share with others about drawings, but today’s Sunday so I decided to take a break from that. Today I am going to share a little about creating a good storyline of a manga comic.

Anyway, F1 race has started in Singapore!

The above picture is taken from a screenshot of the anime series, Flame of Recca.

How to make a manga: Tips on how you want to present your storyl

Mastering manga art is difficult, but mastering the art of creating a good storyline is no where easy. We cannot assume that knowing how to draw will make us good manga artists.

So today, I will share about the two themes that I always notice in manga comics, or even in television dramas.

I have noticed that in many manga comics, or even in television, there are two distinct story plots of how the author tries to present his or her story to the audience. The first is situation focused, and the other is character focused.

Character focused manga are very common; manga comics such as One Piece, Naruto and Bleach are character focused where the characters take on the centre stage of the story plot. The story plot is generally built around the main character.

Situational focused manga is less common; one of them is actually Hatsukoi Limited, where the focus is to let readers see the different aspects of first love. Characters take a slightly lesser prominence in the story, and exists to express the theme or plot of the story well.

I will summarise the characteristics of both character focused storylines and situational focused storylines.

Situational focused storylines characteristics

Commonly found in television dramas rather than in manga comics.
Authors generally use complicated, heart-wrenching and easy-to-relate situations to pique the audiences’ interest for their story.
Many characters are generally used, and the focus is to unravel the mystery of the story, or to solve messy and complicated issues of the story.
Audience generally get entertained where there is suspence or twists to the story, and when mysteries or complicated issues are solved.

Character focused storyline characteristics

Commonly found in manga comics and in many korean dramas.
Authors generally build their story around the main characters, and they try to get the audience to be interested in the development of the main characters.
Fewer characters are generally used, because time and effort is needed to build the character profiles well.
Audience generally get entertained by relating to the main characters; if the character cries, audience will shed tears, if the character laughs, audience will laugh with the character.

Of course, I am not saying that authors only use the character focused or situational focused storylines. Many authors generally make a hybrid of the two, but I always notice that they are either more character focused or situational focused even though it is a hybrid.

Needless to say, character focused manga comic is more popular because of the following reasons:

Readers can easily relate to or identify with the characters better than with situations. In many studies shown, most people relate to characters better than to situations. (That is why SEGA and Nintendo will use Sonic and Mario as their icons respectively.)
Character development for situational based storylines is generally much weaker than character focused manga. That’s because many times, too many characters are used for situational based storylines, and the author has not taken the time to build the character profiles well.
On the other hand, some character development storylines are really bad at situational development; sometimes the characters are involved in very cliche and unoriginal situations that send goosebumps down my spine. I really dislike that.

Therefore, there is no ‘best’ way of how to create a story; either one of the themes is fine.

However I personally will opt for character focused storylines; I have watched many television dramas, anime and manga comics, and I prefer to relate to characters much more than to situations.

Final words for this post

Anyway, in the development of our story plots, I guess that most of us think situationally rather than by focusing on characters straight, isn’t it?

Therefore, take note that when we create a story, we are generally more focused on situations than on characters, and if we want to be more focused on characters in our story plots, we need to align ourselves back from time to time.

Today is a shorter blog post than usual, but I think too many words sometimes spoil the post.

Stay tuned for more!

Share and Enjoy: