Murder before Motorbikes and Meltdowns: Otomo’s pre-Akira oeuvre

One afternoon in the summer of 1999, I found myself in Kichijoji sitting on the floor across from a respected manga critic (who will remain nameless) attempting to discuss my reasons for exploring the comic culture of Japan.  During most of these interviews, I came with a translator, but this man, I was assured by other Japanese-speakers via said translator, spoke perfect English.  I had come alone, and now found myself completely lost in a lecture that for all I knew had the depth of Hegel, but I was too busy struggling to make sense of the “perfect English.”  Switching to my FAR FROM PERFECT Japanese would have been less than useless and the height of rudeness.  So I sipped my tea and nodded, peppering pauses with “naruhodo” as I had observed my mentor do with me when floor tables were turned.  When I realized, at one point, that he was asking for names I admired, I replied, “Otomo Katsuhiro.”  He retorted, “You mean Akira, I assume.”  I was American, reading only the few manga that had been translated and ended up in the tiny comic shop I worked at in Caribou, Maine.  Of course I meant Akira.   Add Shirow Masamune to that list (another whose creations had found there way to popular anime features) and you had nearly the complete extent of my pre-Tokyo first-hand knowledge of manga.  “Yes, Akira is grand, isn’t it?”  I asked.

Now, again, my understanding of the exact words and minor points the man then explicated was minimal, but the brunt of the argument came through loud and clear:

“No.  Akira is boring.”

A 2000 page, multi-volume epic addressing the atom bomb, telekinesis, and body distortion horror that would make Cronenberg salivate, filled with mind-blowing art was “boring”?  Who was this pompous tool?  His mustache began irking me even more than before.  “You think it’s uninteresting?”

“It’s drivel.  Childish wish-fulfillment trash.  It’s such a shame that he turned his back on creating something meaningful, because his early short stories showed such potential.”

I left the man’s house angry, muttering to myself under my breath about “perfect English,” ashamed at my own pitiful command of his language, but worse, ashamed that perhaps my very love of this medium, one that I was busy purporting to all who would listen was an Art form, was juvenile and adolescent.  I vowed I would prove this uptight, stick-in-the-mud pedant wrong.  I hopped a train to Mandarake rather than going straight back to my host home as I planned and hunted down a collection of Otomo’s early work entitled Short Peace.  The initial flip-through showed just what I expected: autobiographical sketches that lacked any of the ambition or formal innovation I had come to love.  A story with the length, breadth and character count of a Russian novel was somehow wasting this potential?!?  Because sometimes they move things with their minds?!?  Ha ha.  Score one for the undergraduate art student foreigner.  Wrong, sir.  Wrong.

I was on the train home when I found this hidden towards the end of the book (I have flipped this through the magic of Photoshop, so the direction of the read is American.  Sound FX are still mostly backwards, as that is haaard.):

art: Katsuhiro Otomo book: Short Peace © Katsuhiro Otomo

art: Katsuhiro Otomo book: Short Peace © Katsuhiro Otomo

art: Katsuhiro Otomo book: Short Peace © Katsuhiro Otomo

art: Katsuhiro Otomo book: Short Peace © Katsuhiro Otomo

art: Katsuhiro Otomo book: Short Peace © Katsuhiro Otomo

art: Katsuhiro Otomo book: Short Peace © Katsuhiro Otomo

art: Katsuhiro Otomo book: Short Peace © Katsuhiro Otomo

This was probably not the sort of piece to which the critic had been alluding.  I would guess he would find horror to be just as automatically worthless as sci-fi.  A genre seemed to be a genre in his book.  (I wonder where MacBeth falls?  A Midsummer Night’s Dream?  Oh, I’m being simplistic.)  And to be fair, my Japanese has never been even close to good enough to allow me to actually read any of these stories.  For all I know, the other stories in this collection have words that give them the insight of Chekhov.  But the pictures are just of people standing around talking.  The layouts are unremarkable.  The linework is clean but predictable.

I had a film teacher who insisted that she should be able to shut off the sound on our videos and still find them compelling.  I wholeheartedly agree.

I have never championed comics as literature.  I feel viewing them as such and asking their contents to adhere to the rules and standards of what works in fully-text novels leads one to look at some pretty dull comic books.  I leave discussions of our young medium’s literary merits to others.  There are certainly some stories that have risen to that challenge, but I teach English literature.  I cannot seriously argue that the story of any issue of X-Men, or just the story of any Adrian Tomine short, moves me in the same way as those of James Joyce or Flannery O’Connor or Ivan Turgenev, that it deserves the same analysis and depth of thought.

But I have, and I continue to argue through this blog, that comics, by virtue of being a collection of lines on a page adding up to form, are art.  And in the hands of a master feeling his oats, are even Art.  And we should view them through this lens.

The appeal of the other comics in this collection, if there is one, must reside in their words and the story those create.  As such, they are like films with bad lighting and pat cinematography: formally flawed.  Despite what some will try to argue, good art cannot possibly hurt a good story.  It is not a distraction.

On the contrary, the above piece proves that innovative artwork and storytelling (which is achieved in comics via art) can heighten a simplistic genre (groan) story to the level of a masterpiece.

Over the course of these pages, the minimal story is abundantly clear.  A man killed someone who was probably a former friend, freaks out, and then eventually begins to clean it up.  By the end of the story, which I did not include, he has become comfortable enough with this whole deal as to be eating him.

Not exactly Kafka.

No, a better point of reference would be the much-loved by tortured teens Poe.  The execution here has “Tell-Tale Heart” written all over it.

The first two page spread puts us inside the murderer’s mind and as such is absolutely unbearable.  This is accomplished by way of McCloud’s aspect-to-aspect transitions and sped up by including many panels per page and peppering it all with the killer’s heavy breathing.  It becomes hallucinatory.  The aspect transitions make perfect sense because in a split second we did not witness, this man’s entire world changed.  It is as if he is scanning the room, looking for a sign of this momentous shift, wondering if the sky is about to open up and smite him.  Instead, the perfectly repeated dialogue hammers home that the world is the same, it will not vanish, and thus there is no escape.  We can barely make out his face by the last panel on the spread, so trapped behind his own breath.

And placing the friend’s head upside down is such a brilliant move.  It allows for the blood to run down from it in future panels, but since the initial violence was not shown, it also gives a slow reveal to what has actually happened.  It indicates something is off here, but what that is only becomes clear as we piece together the bits of the surroundings.  The spilled coffee is rightly suggestive of blood.  The bloody hammer a tier later let’s us in on it, so when the head reappears on the next page slightly tilted, we are not surprised at all that a river of blood is flowing from it.

This inverted head shot keeps repeating throughout the course of the scene; it’s changes mark time for us.  Otomo’s art is so subtle that towards the end we can make out stages of decay, shrinkage, and rigor mortis in the shot.  This shows us better than the clock that this tormented killer has been sitting far too long with this corpse.

This scene is visual poetry, and that sort of repetition reminds me, appropriately, of this poem:

He clasps the crag with crooked hands;

Close to the sun in lonely lands,

Ringed with the azure world, he stands.

BREAK

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;

He watches from his mountain walls,

And like a thunderbolt he falls.

Technically, this piece by Alfred Lord Tennyson called “The Eagle” is a fragment, but I’m not sure he could have made a better poem with more.  The comparison I would like to make here is one of construction.  I draw your attention to the last lines of both stanzas.  In the first, all potential energy and mounting power, “he stands.”  At the end, as the eagle, familiar of Zeus, dives like a lightning bolt, “he falls.”  There is another faint echo in the lines implying nature’s subservience to him, the “sea…crawls.”  These verbs place the poem and give it it’s tension and power.  This would not be discernible if they were dressed up and hidden.  The starkness of their words, placement, and repetition allows them to reverberate with one another.  Their echoing motif helps us navigate the poem.

Otomo does the same thing visually here.  From the breaths, to the upside down head shots, to the crouching killer panels, to the standing profiles that frame pages six and seven, to the layout choices — everything is repetition.  We understand the subtle, and not-so subtle, shifts in the killer’s mind because we have reference points we return to which anchor the scene.  The murderer moves through the Seven Stages of Loss (adding a final one, 8. Mastication) violently and unpredictably, up and down the scale and back again, and we can track this thanks to those visual motifs.

The lack of symmetry on any page keeps us as off-balance as he.  The fact that vertical gutters never form a line between tiers also keeps us constantly shifting.  We are given nothing stable to cling to aside from those horrific repetitions.  Only the beautiful wide shot of the light through the window gives us that stability we lacked: it is symmetrical and implies the nice, comfortable Kirby six panel grids that are so absent.  Appropriately, it is that same cold light of day that is the turning point.  The only symmetry comes at the bottom of the penultimate page of this selection.  The killer’s head is buried in his knees deep in contemplation, and then it rises in acceptance.  “He stands/He falls” has become “He hangs/He rises.”  The unwelcome light and contrasting simplicity leads the narrator to the conclusion he had to eventually reach: Well, I guess I’d better clean this mess up.

Delegation of Tasks

To be fair, much of the reasons toys, and movies, and video games have such great designs is because they hire people like this just to come up with the visuals:

art: Doug Chiang © Doug Chiang

This guy did designs for the new Star Wars movies! He probably worked on something good as well… (If your wondering, after the above post, why Lucas didn’t tap Nirasawa for designs there, I share your befuddlement.) Look at all the thought that went into this machine, and yet, it’s really quite a simple concept, fleshed out perfectly. I particularly love all the guide lines he uses to balance the image. He tries, in vain, to explain what each is for in his excellent design book, but ultimately the intuitive artist should be able to see visually what they accomplish in terms of form. I can’t exactly explain them either. They are like those loose strokes your art teachers used to try to force you to start with to get “the gesture of the pose.” Swoop, swoop and done: now just fill in all those pesky details of surface anatomy and shadow. Well, it’s true. If you don’t get the stuff in the right place, the details are for naught. And here, you can see how Chiang makes sure he has a workable and pleasing shape with those construction lines before he gets into all his awesomely anal details of tank treads and elbow joints. Something needs to stick out this way, this way and…this way. Center of gravity — here. And gravy.

Well, the monthly superhero penciller does not have time to even tweak until he gets the right shape. He can’t even get this far…

art: Doug Chiang © Doug Chiang

Let alone this far…

art: Doug Chiang © Doug Chiang

But with designs like this in the zeitgeist, are we comic readers really supposed to be afraid of Skrulls?

One of the two major event comics of the summer involved green-skinned aliens with lines on their chins. Is this Babylon 5?

Now I genuflect at the altar of Kirby more than the next guy, and I’ll certainly defend his work as timeless to literary critics and high society art snobs, but I think he would honestly be disappointed that his ideas, even his toss-off designs like the Skrulls, are still being trotted out verbatim time and time again, mutilating the carcass of a long dead horse.

Kirby lived in different times. Not simpler, but certainly ones in which technology was not so pervasive. Kirby’s smartest realization is that we would have no idea how the technology of advanced alien cultures would operate, superior work should be inconceivable to us, so it should be drawn as baffling geometric shapes with no concern for function. That’s gutsy and artsy on so many levels. He created the future.

Now artists are recycling a past he tried to see beyond. Kirby was so restless he would change costumes from page to page; you cannot possibly tell me he would not be bored to tears by the lack of innovation in the field he helped to reinvigorate. I can’t even imagine he’d be flattered to know the Skrulls were the hits of Summer 2008. “The Skrulls? God, with the chins? Tell me they’re not still wearing purple jumpsuits. You know those colors were just the villains-get-secondary-colors-so-as-to-contrast-with-the-heroes’- primary-colors editorial mandate, right? Bruce Banner was not actually supposed to be the sort of swinger who wore purple pants. I wanted him grey, anyhow. Stan said it was too ugly. Too ugly! I showed him with Orion!!! Even Iron Man he turns gold!”

Kirby the design innovator would not be welcome in comics today. The creepy “don’t change my beloved childhood toys” nostalgia would have no use for him. He’d be helping to design those thousands of individuated Taurens I vicariously watched when Sean T. Collins posted a video he vicariously enjoyed from a tribute march in World of Warcraft. Everything appears customizable in that game! How Jack would love to draw a new bull-headed character for every player (I know that’s not how it works)! “I don’t have to keep reference sheets?” “No Jack, just throw the old drawing away and see what you can think of next!” He’d be appalled that comics were trying to compete for children’s dollars in the age of a googleplex of perfectly designed Pokemon with men in spandex.

I have given excessive time to science fiction/superhero/fantasy design in this category, not because I think more new comic artists should keep mining those spent shafts, but rather that these books rely on visual inventiveness, and yet display such a paucity of creativity! And with each new graphic card for computers or pixel-upgrade for Blu-Ray comes a slew of gorgeous design that make use of this, making comic book creatures and heroes look even more shoddy in comparison.

Here’s a suggestion for the beginning of a solution: reassign the division of labor in comics. There is absolutely no reason, despite the presence of geniuses like Kevin Nowlan and Klaus Janson, that penciller and inker should be separate people. However, that does not mean I approve of the new time-saving trend of scanning in pencils and coloring over them. (Don’t even get me started on how much effort on the part of Joe Madureira was wasted on The Ultimates…) I merely think the guy who envisioned the art, probably has enough skill to finish it. In art school, I would bet he or she was forced to actually do so. Perhaps even with a brush similar to the ones inkers use! I am always baffled when I see a page of meticulously tight pencils. If Travest Charest could really imagine all of that detail, and knew where he needed every single line you see in the finished page, am I to believe he didn’t have time to ink it, or that he can’t figure out how thick to make bounding lines?

I am willing to accept, however, that the person who can perfectly layout a story, and depict the action, and stylishly create mood, and do every other thing covered on this site that goes into creating the art of a comic page may not be the world’s greatest fashion designer. Perhaps he or she can’t invent realistic-looking techie gadgets. An industrial designer might have a better time with that.

The Japanese division of labor seems a little more intuitive. There, the artist whose name is on the book is really more of a director. In his charge he has a legion of assistants, many who were specially hired to complete only certain aspects of the work. When I was in Japan, I set up an interview with Yuki Masami because of his creation of Patlabor, the cybernetic police drama. Much to my chagrin, he was now working on one of those special interest/hobby manga books that somehow thrive in Japan, the terribly titled “Grooming Up!”, a comic about a girl and her horse. He didn’t really feel like talking about Patlabor anymore. Neither did any of his roomful of assistants! There were beds in the studio! Most of these guys probably couldn’t have even talked about mobile armored police if they wanted to since, as Masami explained, he hired a new team when he started the new book. He now needed experts on horses. This honestly makes so much sense. He came up with the plot with his editor, laid the book out, and inked all the faces (for consistency and expression), various crew members did all the rest. Hate drawing backgrounds, John Cassaday? Hire an architecture school dropout! Never was all that big on getting out that pesky French Curve? I bet you could find an elderly drafting major who never learned AutoCAD and is hard up for work. Can’t invent mech to save your life, (designer of Ultimate Iron Man, I’m looking in your direction)? Get Doug Chiang to do it! Look at the first line of the Wiki for Patlabor:

a manga franchise created by Headgear, a group consisting of director Mamoru Oshii, writer Kazunori Ito, mecha designer Yutaka Izubuchi, character designer Akemi Takada, and manga artist Masami Yūki.

When you have Mamoru Oshii directing and a guy devoted to designing tech, how can one go wrong?

Seriously, Marvel editors, hire some bigshot Hollywood or Japanese designer once a year to just re-imagine or invent every character you have appearing in a given book that year. Watch sales skyrocket among teens and be prepared for even more calls from the movie folks. Or just force your artists to study the work of everyone I have put into this category…

Perfectly Controlled Cartooning

OK, one last “Roll Call”-type image. Then I promise I’m done.

art: Shinji Nagashima book: Fuuten © Shinji Nagashima

These characters are from one of my favorite finds from my stay in Tokyo: a book from the Sixties or Seventies that is barely discussed called Fuuten, which roughly translates to “Bums” or “Homeless,” but I prefer “The Unwanted,” “Nobodies” or “Riffraff.” Shinji Nagashima’s pen and ink work is still stylish as all get-out today. Culturally and stylistically, I think it’s fair to say he is Japan’s R. Crumb, but I would not be surprised if he beat Crumb to the punch. His wonderful cartoons even amble around in a spread-legged gait that reminds an American audience of “Keep On Truckin’.” I am also not exaggerating in the slightest when I say the two volumes of Fuuten I am proud to have in my collection has had more effect on how I think of the potential of comics than anything Crumb has ever done. Did I just lose my indie comix cred card? Look at the spreads I post under Why Comics: Perfect Sequences and then get back to me with your ear-chewing. Nagashima can show the beauty of everyday existence on a comic book page. That resonates with everyone. I, personally, have never been drug-addled and sexually depraved and living in a loft in Haight-Ashbury. I love Crumb, but discussions of his work will be limited to his stylistic inking innovations. You could learn everything I have to teach by just getting a copy the complete Fuuten and drinking in every page.

Let’s focus on one aspect. Nagashima finds a way, within the constraints of his chosen “simplistic” style, to distinguish every character in his huge cast of characters. This is done with every trick we’ve discussed: accessories (hats, sunglasses), hairstyles, and brilliant cartooning: look at the shapes of all those heads! Your not at a loss for a moment in the tale for who is who. More than that, despite the few lines used, the characters do not read just as types. That would ruin a realistic yarn such as this, which is perhaps best compared to “On the Road,” minus the drugs, plus plot lines. These characters cannot become ciphers for the story to function. They must seem like real, individuated Japanese people, each with real problems and true loves. And they do.

The SNAP!

Back in 1999, I spent two months using grant money to study Japanese comics, or manga, in Tokyo, Japan under the tutelage of their resident Scott McCloud, manga innovator and expert (and grandson of their most acclaimed novelist, Natsume Soseki) Fusanosuke Natsume. Natsume Sensei not only arranged interviews and assistantships for me with Japan’s most famous creators, he also found a host home for me owned by the delightful and indescribable museum curator Motoi Masaki, owner of a manga collection so large it occupied the entire ground floor of his home and utilized rolling stacks like those in large library basements! Couple this with a ridiculously cheap plane ticket courtesy of a Japanese travel agent friend of my former enemies in the Yale Japanese department (it cost me more to get from Maine to Boston that Boston to Narita), and you’re left with a comic fanatic with what amounted to $100 a day of grant money to spend on manga. And boy did I! The world of Japanese comics was my oyster and every manga store there is fully-stocked with classic works and the latest collections. I used American Frederick Schodt’s two excellent books of manga criticism as starting points, filled in essential works recommended by all those I met, but mostly spent my time thumbing through works based on attractive spines (I could never read enough kanji to even make out the names) and following my own idiosyncratic tastes.

All of that is to apologize to any of my Japanese mentors and friends for selecting this as my first example of manga art. It is not their fault! They did introduce me to the greats and under-appreciated: Shigeru Mizuki, Yoshiharu Tsuge, the hilarious Yasuji Tanioka, the disgusting Maruo Suehiro, Sanpei Shirato, Yumiko O-shima, and everyone who ever drew for the unbelievably unknown Yagyo magazine in the seventies. I will do my best to show brilliant examples of all their work before our time here is through. Given the astounding talent of all the artists I just listed, how could I even think of introducing their culture’s dominance of the medium with an artist I am sure is considered a dime-a-dozen hack in his native land like Ryouji Minagawa?

Well, uh…I like him. He is obviously ripping off hundreds of other Shonen Jump contributors, who in turn have ripped off what Akira Toriyama did on just one of his books so thoroughly it has come to be viewed in the West as manga-style (when in fact, that owes more to anime). You can even watch him ganking from American movies like The Matrix and its ilk later in this book. Innovative, he is not. It is a bit like when Natsume Sensei began his discussion of the state of American comics in World Comics’ Culture with Tony Daniel. Uggghhh. I’m sure I gave him some Miller and Mignola! Does anyone in America find Tony Daniel to be a fitting sample of anything we do well? Isn’t that the precise moment when everyone stopped buying Spawn? “I mean, I stuck it out for Moore and Gaiman doing what they do but here, some total inanity (TWICE!) by Frank Miller, David Sim showing us his total insanity that was soon to be par for his course, and the creator completely forgetting the hourglass/time limit that was crucial to the book’s whole concept, but I am not eating mouthfuls of Tony Daniel and pretending that crappy tiny ink lines make it McFarlane!”

Well, Ryouji Minagawa is probably lucky if any intelligent Japanese creators think of him even that highly. He is your run-of-the-mill action comics for teenage boys creator, but those guys all do one thing extremely well: action. If you’re going to rob the hydrocephalic eyes, minuscule noses and ubiquitous speedlines, and least look at what Minagawa does here and make it effective:

art: Ryouji Minagawa book: ARMS publisher: Shonen Sunday © Ryouji Minagawa Kyouichi Nanatsuki

art: Ryouji Minagawa book: ARMS publisher: Shonen Sunday © Ryouji Minagawa Kyouichi Nanatsuki

Simple yet bombastic. Full-bleed (to the edges of the page) double-page spread for intense action. Draw the action just after the impact to give the illusion of movement from the effects of the blow. Speedlines that blur the appropriate parts of the body in the appropriate arcs and directions to make the whole read as a whirlwind of fury. Page turn gives a quick pause. First panel next page finishes the action perfectly. One needed the contrast to feel the full thrust of the earlier page. This panel is small and contained so the former felt even bigger. This one is silent and reserved with a clean, crisp line so the former felt even louder and more chaotic. This ends as the character does, in perfect balance. There are no blurs at all now. The arc of the villain’s fall is brilliantly shown by the line of blood from his mouth. As one flips back and forth between the spread and the final, one can watch the locomotion freeze in time with a snap! It suggests to me the snap of a gi during a vigorously performed kata — intense force brought to a screeching halt.

The contrast is everything. The Hollywood editing mentality has seeped into our American cores so malignantly that even when we go out of our way to ripoff other cultures, we only go halfway there. So many American manga are experts at those speedline heavy full page spreads. Those are as laborious and plodding as their DC style blur-less counterparts without the quiet contrast to finish them. Twenty-two pages of motion-blurred fight scene is so overwhelming to be dull if the audience never gets to pause to breathe heavily or admire a beautiful kick.

Can’t I Cantilever? Yes, you can!

Katsuhiro Otomo uses this one trick so well that it’s baffling others haven’t made it a comic book staple like speed lines, excessive exclamation marks and pointy shocked speech balloons. Perhaps it is merely because he employs it so deftly as to be almost undetectable until your right in the thick of it.

It’s this simple: when the action is relatively static and just talky, the page layout is rigidly perpendicular (aka standard). When action is rising (remember your eighth grade literature class charts?), the horizontals start to slide and slant ever so slightly. And when the climax arrives, the tiers are about as level as the slides at a water park. Chaos is reigning and that ratchets up the energy and your reading speed! However, Otomo is always careful to be sure it does nothing to confuse your reading of the page. The tilts become the shifting of the characters’ weights, the moving center of gravity of a dance, and the read is actually enhanced. Have a look:

art: Katsuhiro Otomo colors: Steve Oliff book: Akira publisher: Epic Comics © Kodansha Ltd.

art: Katsuhiro Otomo colors: Steve Oliff book: Akira publisher: Epic Comics © Kodansha Ltd.

art: Katsuhiro Otomo colors: Steve Oliff book: Akira publisher: Epic Comics © Kodansha Ltd.

art: Katsuhiro Otomo colors: Steve Oliff book: Akira publisher: Epic Comics © Kodansha Ltd.

Now that’s awesome! Notice how at first he just slants the verticals to enhance the intensity of a character’s gaze? Check out the directions of everyone’s eye-lines on the first two pages. The “he’s looking here but I’m looking there while she’s looking right and they’re running left” quality just enhances the overall bedlam of the scene. You can see this pot is about to boil! When I was in Japan, I had a very long and fascinating conversation with Naoki Urasawa, the creator of Monster!, about Otomo’s use of his character’s gaze. Urasawa found this usage, leading the reader across the page from panel to panel, very Western. He cited this as further example that Otomo was affected to the core by European and American comics and film, not just in the superficial trappings of his style (which obviously owes much to Frenchman Jean “Moebius” Giraud.) By contrast, he showed me that most homegrown manga had the character’s eyes always facing out towards the viewer. He attributed this to the filmic style of Yasujiro Ozu, director of Tokyo Story. He said it was Ozu’s belief that the character should not avoid looking at the camera, but rather face it directly. The camera is always the first-person subjective point-of-view, he claimed, and therefore the characters should address it as a means of telling their stories directly to the viewer.

Be that as it may, I think traitorous Otomo nails the tension of this scene by opting for the every-which-way approach. You can feel how surrounded everyone is, so when Kaneda finally breaks the crisscrossed tension with a beautiful frozen profile kick in a nice long trapezoidal panel, you welcome the catharsis to come that will release you from this fever pitch suspense. And come it does with Otomo’s brilliant command of his angular panels. I trimmed a page or two in which the whole place starts to collapse, but you can see that just from the pitched “rooftop” of the panel in which the floating wheelchair kid reaches desperately for his friend. That page finishes in perfect angled fan slices that emphasize the action of the bouncing pill. And the final page is the most dexterous, with Kaneda nearly pushing his weight off the side of the panel itself to spring to safety. Notice how his push is always from the left, his run to the right throughout the whole page. Again, the tilts are brilliantly employed to suggest his changing balance in this cat-like escape.