• Home
  • Releases
  • Blog
  • Design
  • Posters
  • Submission Guidelines
  • About
  • Privacy Policy

Loser City

Multimedia Collective

  • Home
  • Releases
  • Features
  • News
  • Reviews
  • Interviews
  • Art
  • Submissions
You are here: Home / Features / Anatomy of a Page: Naoki Urasawa’s Pluto

Anatomy of a Page: Naoki Urasawa’s Pluto

December 16, 2015 By Austin Lanari Leave a Comment

Anatomy of a Page

Comics are a visual medium, but so often criticism of the medium hinges on narrative, ignoring or minimizing the visual storytelling and unique structures that make comics so different from cinema and photography. We’ve decided to change that up with a feature that we’re calling Anatomy of a Page, in which we explore pages and panels that showcase the language of comics and how the best visual storytellers maximize the freedom of comics in order to tell stories that can’t be told anywhere else.  Today we will be taking a look at Naoki Urasawa’s Pluto, rated the 10th best comic of the past five years by present company.  While praise and criticism alike of Urasawa typically focus on the BIG features of his work, Urasawa really sets himself apart with the small things he does under the hood of his stories.


Sometimes, a page of a comic just needs to carry the story. That’s not to say creators aren’t still putting a ton of work into them. Rather, it’s simply true that some pages, as a whole, don’t have something super interesting going on. All pages (of any comic worth a damn) are mostly-irreducible moving parts of a story; some simply aren’t that exciting.

Urasawa is a case study in taking “boring” story pages and turning them into clever narrative Swiss Army knives. Even when his page is *just* composed of carefully choreographed, steadily paced conversation, it’s deceiving how much he’s really up to.

Pluto 66-67

Pictured are pages 66 and 67 of the first volume of Urasawa’s mystery/sci-fi/detective procedural/Tezuka homage/magnum opus for any other creator who wasn’t so fucking prolific, Pluto. Prior to the past few weeks, my only exposure to Urasawa was the ambitious and always mysterious Billy Bat. I don’t use the word “ambitious” lightly with Urasawa: his stories constantly act like they are the most mystifying thing you have ever read. Billy Bat earns it for a little while, until it earns too much and collapses under the weight of its own expectations for itself. Pluto is unique in Urasawa’s corpus because its status as a Tezuka tribute/cover forces Urasawa to focus. For a meatier blurb about both Urasawa’s faults and the triumph of Pluto, make sure you check out JAM’s take.

In any case, for your consideration, check out page 66 (the right-hand page) above, and take particular note of the final two panels. Throughout the conversation between the male detective Gesicht and the female travel agent, Urasawa moves our perspective around. None of these perspectives are particularly dramatic, and all amount to simple rotations such that we’re focused on the face of either the speaker, or the listener when their reaction is salient to the narrative.

Conversations in comics can be boring. Generally, creators shift perspectives to keep the reader’s eye engaged with the page, or otherwise choose to build a page that is in itself narratively interesting and significant as a higher-order narrative and artistic unit. I’m usually inclined to use Anatomy of a Page to talk about the latter type of page. I contend that Urasawa’s pages, like the one above, are often less flash, more function, but with all of the narrative cachet one wants from a carefully constructed pictorial narrative.

Pluto zoom

The last two panels of page 66 make the whole practical enterprise of this conversational page particularly worth noting. You see, despite the fact that Urasawa plays with our perspective, he consistently maintains the spatial relationship of the speakers across from one another in the scene until he fucks with us in those last two panels by presenting their heads back to back. In all eight volumes of Pluto, Urasawa only shows speakers juxtaposed in this manner a total of two times (the other being on a really important story page I don’t want to put on blast here).

In order to understand why Urasawa paces this page in this manner, we have to consider the two previous pages.

Pluto 64-65

Gesicht is flashing back, distracted, remembering something he just found out about the case he’s working. Then, we see him snap out of it. The conversation continues on the next page, where we get a brief establishing shot, showing just enough of his location so that we know he’s in public. Urasawa could have given us a big establishing shot here, but he waits. He teases us, and yet we don’t even know we’re being teased. This allows the rhythm of the conversation to continue uninterrupted by fancy splash panels that detract from the narrative. By doing this (as we will see in the proceeding pages), Urasawa maintains full control of the reader’s expectations and can strategically drop in establishing shots at the moments of his choosing, and not the moments you expect. Western creators would do well to take note of this kind of fine-grained narrative throttling.

Gesicht is on the right every time he’s depicted on the same horizontal field as the travel agent so far, except at the very end of the page. There are several reasons why he breaks it up and ends the page with Gesicht. The most important one is that it puts a tremendous amount of weight on the final panel of this page. Urasawa wants you thinking about Gesicht’s very minor, very casual befuddlement at being asked whether this is his first trip to Japan. Urasawa built this page not only to very simply and effectively serve this particular conversational sequence, but in order to give the reader a nudge about a major bit of foreshadowing.  Remember that once we turn the page, the travel agent is very casual about the question. It has no significance in this context, and she’s just wondering if it’s his first trip. But Urasawa paces this sequence so that the question is left hanging for the reader in a way that it wouldn’t have been without the page turn interrupting the question’s resolution.

All of these storytelling decisions feed into each other, one after the other, making for a smooth read. Urasawa is a narrative metronome, and one of the reasons that page 66 ends with Gesicht is because an alternative way of framing the conversation—one that is just not Urasawa’s style—would be to have Gesicht on the right with his speech bubble merely under the words of the travel agent. Urasawa’s conversations are tight, rhythmic, and finely controlled to lead you from page to page.

Another reason Page 66 ends with the speakers flipped is because seeing Gesicht facing off to the left makes for a smooth transition into the title splash on 67. And saving the splash for 67 rather than blowing his load earlier with an establishing shot on 65 allows him to build more tension leading to the title page, while also allowing for that title page to lead more smoothly into the next page turn.


Pluto 68

There’s page 68, four aspect shots establishing the next scene. Western comics creators simply don’t use aspect shots the same way as many mangakas, but when they do, few are as careful about it as Urasawa (not that this is always a bad thing: different storytelling styles will often dictate these decisions). Urasawa, again, doesn’t just whack you in the side of the head with establishing shots of the city: he builds to the title splash on 67 which shows the city beyond the vaulted windows, making the page turn a journey merely beyond some windows, rather than a gross, jarring narrative leap, aided only by a caption.

I can think of dozens of analogous scenes in Western comics where this entire sequence would have been constructed 1. *open conversation* 2. *big establishing title shot* 3. *more conversation* 4. *switch to next scene*. Urasawa opts for 3 before 2, but what’s most important is that he earns his choice of narrative structure one small story beat at a time.

Share this:

  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)

Related

Filed Under: Features Tagged With: Anatomy of a Page, comics, manga, Naoki Urasawa, Osamu Tezuka, Pluto

About Austin Lanari

Austin Lanari knows more about meta-ethical constructivism than he does about comics. He's working on fixing that. Follow him @AustinLanari

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

SOCIAL

FacebookInstagramTumblrTwitter

Buy Loser City Apparel

loser city T-shirt

Be a Loser

Sign up for Loser City's mailing list to receive weekly updates about the latest articles, shows, and releases.

TRENDZ

Anatomy of a Page art Austin CBS comedy comics Dark Horse DC DC Comics documentary Fantagraphics Film Fossil Records Games HBO hip-hop horror humor IDW Image Comics Indie indie comics jake muncy manga Marvel Marvel Comics Melissa Benoist Music penny dreadful Pete Toms punk Questionable Comics Review Ryan K Lindsay sci-fi Seattle Showtime Supergirl SXSW Television the CW TV video games Video of the Week ymmv

Top Posts & Pages

  • Let's Do the Panic Again: Phantom Planet Returns

Follow Loser City

  • Email
  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Tumblr
  • Twitter
Instagram did not return a 200.

Follow loser_city on the Gram

Loser City is…

Comics, shows, a secret critical network -- we aim to fail big.

Danny Djeljosevic: Co-Founder

Morgan Davis: Co-Founder

Nick Hanover: Glorious Godfrey of LC

David Fairbanks: Creative Writing Editor

Kayleigh Hughes: Film Editor

Julie Muncy: Games Editor

David He: Assisting Consultant*

Contributors: Nate Abernethy, John Bender, AJ Bernardo, CJ Camba, Liam Conlon, Daniel Elkin, David A. French, Rafael Gaitan, Dylan Garsee, Stefanie Gray, Johnson Hagood, Shea Hennum, Zak Kinsella, Austin Lanari, Marissa Louise, Francesca Lyn, Chase Magnett, Justin Martin, Diana Naneva, Claire Napier, Joshua Palmer, James Pound, Mike Prezzato, Lars Russell, David Sackllah, Keith Silva, Nicholas Slayton, Carly Smith, Ray Sonne, Tom Speelman, Mark O. Stack, Dylan Tano, Mason Walker

Art

Why So Angry: Refusing to Forget Stories of Abuse

Poetry: My God, My World

Comic Cinema Club: Sorcerer by Rafael Gaitan and Mike Prezzato

Nonfiction: Progeny in Crisis by Kayleigh Hughes

The Persistence of Synergy: Scenes from the Stock Business Photo Prison Hellscape

More Art

Interviews

Dhani Harrison Plots His Own Path With Solo Debut In///Parallel

Boston Terriers and Desert Vibes: A Conversation with Jay and Sanders Fabares of “The Pale”

Questionable Comics: Becky & Frank and Rachael Stott

More Interviews

Copyright © 2022 · Metro Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in