Manga is a style of Japanese comic books that are similar to “traditional Western comic books” (Qu, Wong and Heng 1214) through their style of drawing and layout. Manga is categorized into many different genres such as shoujo manga; depicting romantic stories of young women, most typically in a high school setting, made for a readership of teenage girls. Manga’s, of all genres, are primarily drawn using only the colors black and white. They “are seldom colored” (Qu, Wong and Heng 1214) by the artists, or mangaka, because it is a time-consuming task involving intensive labor to color, on average, a total of 30 pages that make up only one chapter in a manga series. In addition, mangas are typically released one chapter per week, leaving the artist only one week to create the plot, the drawings, the panels, and sometimes the translation is also included. Manga series can also be as long as eight hundred chapters, a contributing factor to the lack of a color dynamic in mangas. Therefore, because of this heavy and intense workload, “most mangas only have a color [dynamic on the] cover and/or a few color pages inside to gain readers’ attention” (Qu, Wong and Heng 1214).

So, because of the intense and time-consuming task of incorporating a color dynamic in a manga they are simply drawn using black and white. The way the two colors are used is similar to how writing and typing take place. When we write or type, we start with a blank white page and we writing or type onto it using black; we imprint. The same format is used for manga. The mangaka starts with a white page and imprints black onto it to create the images and panels. The same is also done with comic strips: a single ‘strip’/line of a comic, such as Garfield, Calvin and Hobbes, Fox Trot, which are published in newspapers. The most used format is to imprint black onto white, but in some cases, it is the opposite; white onto black. Another form of a comic is a graphic narrative such as Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, which tells the story of her bearing witness to the traumatic violence and unimaginable actions that took place during the Islamic revolution. Persepolis is one of the cases that white is imprinted onto black which is where my interest and exploration lies. It is only in some instances that Satrapi does follow the typical format, why is that? And why is it that Satrapi decides to color in opposition to mangas and comic strips color dynamic?

In the instances that Satrapi uses the black onto white format, the typical format, it is a scene depicting violence or some sort of trauma. Satrapi explains this herself in Hillary Chute’s article called “The Texture of Retracing in Marjane Satrapi’s ‘Persepolis’” where she says, “violence today has become so normal, so banal—that is to say everybody thinks it’s normal” (Chute 99) She continues to explain how if she were to use colors of “flesh and the red of the blood” (Chute 99) then the drawing would become realistic. And if the drawing becomes realistic then it becomes normalized because violence is seen so often today in forms of photographs, films, and media that everyone has lost their sensitivity to it. Therefore, by ridding the drawings of their color it causes the reader to imagine the unimaginable horror of the violent actions taking place on the page but much more graphic than the actual illustration; which is Satrapi’s intent. Furthermore, these violent panels in Persepolis are the time when Satrapi uses the typical format, the rest of the graphic narrative is done with white imprinted onto black; opposing the color dynamic of mangas and comic strips. By doing the majority of the narrative in white onto black and some, the violent panels, in black onto white, causes the violence and bearing witness panels to stand out even more to the reader.

All things considered, Satrapi decides on a color dynamic of using both the typical format of manga and comic strips of black onto white and also her own of white onto black, to illustrate the violence she bared witness to during the Islamic revolution. And, in addition, why do mangas and comic strips not use Satrapi’s color dynamic to showcase their underlying intention? For comic strips, the reason may be their stories are not long enough to have that kind of impact. For mangas, it might be because that Satrapi’s color dynamic may be as heavy and intense of a workload as coloring all the pages.

Work Cited

Qu, Yingge, Tien-Tsin Wong, and Pheng-Ann Heng. “Manga Colorization”. ACM Transactions on Graphics 25.3 (2006): 1214. Web. 12 Jan. 2017.

Chute, Hillary. “The Texture of Retracing in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 36.1&2 (Spring/Summer 2008): 92-110. Wed. 4 Jan. 2017.