Visual Aliens Part II

In the first part of this post, I introduced the notion of a visual alien, an isolated unit which is drawn in a markedly different visual style from its surrounding. I also postulated that there were two basic reasons to include a visual alien: Distinctness (to underline the alien’s difference from everything else) and Virtuosity (to show off). In this post I will be illustrating with some examples of visual aliens by a single artist, drawn from American comics. In principle, a visual alien could be anything — well, anything that can be drawn, anyway. It could be a cloud, a table, a rock, a tiger. But in the examples that follow I will focus on characters that are visual aliens (although I would love to hear of non-character examples).

A natural place to look for visual aliens is in parody and pastiche, and in particular visual parody/pastiche, where one artist imitates the visual style of another. But in most visual parodies or pastiches (or at least the ones I’m familiar with), the parodist simply imitates the entire style of the parodied artist, drawing everything in the parodied’s visual style. This is the case with (most of) Veitch and Sikoryak, discussed in the last post, but also with (for instance) Al Capp’s parody of Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy (“Fearless Fosdick”) or Elder’s parody of Archie (“Starchie”). Fearless Fosdick is confined to his own strip-within-a-strip, which is drawn in Gould’s style throughout; in Starchie, all the characters are drawn in the Archie house style — except for a brief cameo on the first page by Little Orphan Annie, who is drawn in Harold Gray’s style. Here, as a visual parody within another parody, we have Annie as a visual alien.


Fearless Fosdick


Starchie

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Visual Aliens Part I

Hi. The name’s Jones, one of the Jones boys. I usually blogĀ  over at Let’s You and Him Fight. This here is the first part of a two-part guest post about a comics technique that I call visual aliens.

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Moyasimon is a manga by Ishikawa Masayuki recently published in English for the first time. It’s about the misadventures of a young agriculture student at university; what makes this student special is that he can see bacteria with the naked eye. The bacteria, invisible to everyone else, look to him like cheerful little cartoon sprites, not a million miles from Larry Marder’s Beans.

Moyasimon Bacteria

It’s a clever conceit, and the bacteria are winningly cute. Unfortunately, that’s about all that’s winning in this manga. Despite generally positive reviews online, Moyasimon is simply not very good. The humour isn’t funny, the intrigue intriguing, or the character work engaging. A big fail, in other words, apart from the portrayal of the — admittedly adorable — bacteria themselves.

One thing did catch my eye, however about the series. Masayuki draws most of the non-bacteria characters and backgrounds in a fairly generic seinen style — a little bit realistic, a little bit cartoony. But there are two characters — viz. professor Keizo Itsuki and sophomore student Takuma Kawahama — who are drawn in a very different visual register, much more cartoony. The clearest illustration of this that I’ve found is this image here which features the main characters next to the actors who play them in the live-action adaptation.

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