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🕑 Added 2017-06-20 07:14:09 +0000 UTCAs always, these are rarely edited for grammar or spelling. Read at your own risk.
I want to talk a bit about the ERASED manga, particularly in terms of how a structural perspective on its panels can reveal some really clever aesthetic construction.
Because I do think that Sanbe is actually very good at utilising the form to tell a story.
Now, generally when we look at manga there’s two very notable lenses. The first is a sort of semiological perspective, which is where you’ll find a lot of lenses working on cultural and socio-cultural analyses would look at them. If you’re familiar with Scott McCloud’s work in Understanding Comics, he heavily favours a semiological perspective when talks about Magritte or when talks about the Japanese aspect-to-aspect panels.
The second is a linguistics approach to manga, particularly in terms of manga and its elements as a grammar, and how that grammar is manipulated sheds lights on what that certain form might say. For this, you’ll probably find the works of Neil Cohn to be pretty notable, he talks about comics and manga as language, drawing upon the works of Frederik Schodt’s mid-90s work.
And it’s that perspective I want to exercise, because it gives us a really useful to look at one particular element of manga analysis, and that is its substrate meanings. Cohn lists a series of categories called Establisher, Initial, *Peak, Release, and Refiners. But I want to talk about one specific aspect about them in that they reveal reading hierarchies.
And so I’m going to use Sanbe’s Boku Dake ga Inai Machi, particularly its 37th chapter because it’s a very clear example of stratified reading that happens in manga. But it also tells us the limits of formal readings. The idea of looking just at form.
So it’s the first 20 pages or so, where the monologue begins with Satoru’s mother talking about all these difficulties and challenges that come with taking care of Satoru and worrying about how long it would be waiting for him to wake up from this coma.
But it does something really strange, which is that it ends the sequence with the killer. And there’s a very important structural language that’s employed to make this work. So a sequence like this begins with a series of markers on two levels. The elements overlaying the action set up the mother as the point of perspective, and the panels are dominantly what we could consider to be macro and monos panels playing against each other. So a macro panel is where multiple characters or a scene is emphasized, and a mono panel is where one character is shown. When we see part of a character but not them holistically, it’s called a micro panel.
And when we look at these panels we see in this sequence Sanbe establishes with some macro panels but then dominantly focuses on micro panels. It’s always empty or singular, partial components. And what happens is a sort of relaxing, disarming state occurs, where the panels are really only linked by the monologue. So what happens is that the intra-panel content never contests the monologue that occurs.
This is important because we find out that the monologue sequence ends with the killer’s, but because the panels are dominantly micro, there’s no clear beat that punctuates the sequence to make us say, “Oh here’s where the narration separates”. We can say that X panel is the moment, but that’s a component added in with our own reading habits. And that’s a really purposeful move because what it shows us is that it takes advantage of the lexical form of the panels to tell us that what these two characters feel about this character isn’t that different. And so that is used to emphasize a sickening feeling one might feel the moment we get to the revelation, and that revelation is punctured by the single mono panel that’s there.
So there’s this monologue, but within this monologue is this substrate of differentiation that Sanbe attempts to mitigate, probably completely eliminate through the panels. In some way, it comes off as a descent, but that moment of descension is not meant to be noticed. It simply is in retrospect once we reach a state in which we realise a descent has occurred. So this scene is actually quite clever. After all, what differs the mother from the killer? This sequences implies nothing, but that’s not necessarily the case, we know there’s a difference. But there’s no moment in pure form in which we can distinguish that difference because the panels eliminate any moment of escalation until we know there’s an escalation. And so there’s a context injected into the meaning of the sequence as value-object.
What is some of the worth in context? Well, I argue on my main channel that ERASED is conducting this criticism of a dangerous procuracy, and I think we can impose that implication to this. I mean, a form analysis of this sequence reveals that the form can be corrupted through a strict adherence to grammatology. You know, that if we simply follow the rules then the rules will guide us there. I mean, if you’re gonna argue that ERASED is criticising the system and how its rules can be corrupted, then this sequence is that concern made manifest through art. It’s a look at how the structure of reading panels itself is corrupted. But that judgment we make on that sequence, that very note of distortion, betrays an ‘other’ element that possibly transcends the form itself. Here, it’s the context that we know he’s the killer.
But do the panels? And so it’s a possibly roundabout way of showing not only that the feeling of the killer and the mother aren’t so different, but it shows through form how someone like Yashiro can slip through the cracks, corrupting the rules.
