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Forum - View topicAnswerman - Why Are Most Manga Published in Black and White?
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Яeverse
 Posts: 1142 Location: Indianapolis |
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Was sure most of the full color versions of JUMP manga come out a bit after the up to date version, and I dont know if Id have brought up DBZ one since, the mangas been done for years and there was really no time crunch to really work on coloring that, as compared to saying releasing a colored version of the newest BLack Clover or HeroAca volume
Coloring manga will be save when the AI coloring programs are ready for primetime IMO. |
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jdnation
Posts: 2032 |
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I think it'd be a good idea for certain ones - like it has been for Ghost in the Shell, and High School of the Dead.
Not everything needs it. But certain prestige releases could. For example short series like - Death Note - could get a boost from colour. Though it is also true that sometimes the black and white art can be so fantastic that colour would detract from it in my opinion, as it would in Death Note. Long running ones, probably not a good idea, but then again some exceptions like Dragonball could get away with it. I've come to appreciate really good art in black and white just as we do in colour. A good case of appealing to overseas markets would be to team up with American colourists overseas from Marvel /DC. But outside of Dark Horse, I don't see Marvel or DC being interested in pursuing publishing manga, and the manga publishers probably can't put up the additional costs, and their customers likely don't care. So the effort for a time-consuming process involved would be pointless. But for a selection of titles small enough to republish in colour? I can see room for exceptions. But overall manga customers are totally fine with what they are getting and I imagine would prefer the low costs considering how much they buy. The few colour pages being included would be appreciated more. Also I don't imagine this market demanding colour from manga exists. If they just mean younger kids, I think they'd be better off just selling them on the anime.
Won't happen. Because even with human artists, the colour stills needs to be checked and changed and adjusted. Even in American comics, it's not just some simple one and done thing applied in photoshop. Artists and colourists also think about what colours go where and how to colour a scene to set mood and tone and direction and where they want to viewer to focus. So it's a collaboration and not just left up to some guy. And just as anime studios go through several variations of character colour to decide what to do, the same process can be just as involved with comics. Maybe some won't care and don't mind colours as being on par with simple anime. But the more serious ones certainly will and will want to approve of everything. |
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Kimiko_0
 Posts: 1796 Location: Leiden, NL, EU |
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Coloring would add more work to the creative process, but it could in many cases replace most or all of the shading work that's done now, so I think it wouldn't add all that much in the end.
As for the paper weight thing, doesn't cheap paper affect black ink the same as other colors? Tankoubon are printed on better quality paper too for that reason iirc. I dunno, maybe it's more a matter of what artists are used to? The readers are used to it as well of course. It'd be interesting to see how color manga would be received by Japanese readers compared to b&w manga. Come to think of it, it's kinda funny how Japan is usually all about "higher quality at a higher price" compared to Western "lower quality at a lower price" for media. You'd think they'd be all for premium-priced full-color manga. |
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I_Drive_DSM
 Posts: 217 |
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I feel a lot of this likely boils down to market expectations. Years and years ago when manga was select brought over to the US prior to even early stalwarts such as VIZ, select titles would get colored for the US market. They were also flipped and frequently re-touched. American comic book readers were for the most part not really used to reading black and white comics unless you happened to get comics that were sold outside the normal comic channels like say Eerie or Creepy for example (I'm certain a good deal of older people know those two comics).
This has - kind of - happened in the past, but for the most part it has been Americanized versions of material rather than directly coloring manga originals. When the Robotech "comics" were produced in the mid 1980s, DC initially produced Robotech material for around a year until Comico took over and did the Robotech Macross Saga comics. They were all in color, but I believe they all carried unique artwork adapted from the shows (I have some of the Macross Saga comics in boxes somewhere.....). Recently the more recent DC Robotech material is created solely by DC artists, and not adapted or similar. Another one I can think of is Adam Warren's version of the Dirty Pair, which Warren was drawing as early as 1988. I do find it strange that companies would attempt to construct their own assets outright of an IP though, when they could have just brought over manga assets and built off of that. |
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Steve Minecraft
 Posts: 120 |
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Manga already does better overseas than American comics do, there's no need to change anything to appeal to overseas markets. The comic industry is kind of dying. I see no reason why big Japanese imprints would bother teaming up with companies like Marvel and DC who are struggling to stay alive.
Comic books cost either 3.99 or 4.99 now, and only have 20-22 pages of content. A tankobon of manga costs about as much than that in Japan and has like 180-222 pages of content. Japan is more like higher quality at a lower price in this area. Color in manga isn't a big deal to me. Considering all the popular series get anime adaptions eventually if I wanted color I'd just watch the anime version. Plus in addition to color, I also get animation, music, and voices. Comics don't have the privilege of getting adaptions like that so it's more important for them IMO |
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Sir Daniel Fortesque
Posts: 236 |
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Except Viz seems to have dropped Dragon Ball Full Color kek
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Sakagami Tomoyo
 Posts: 941 Location: Melbourne, VIC, Australia |
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I'm perfectly fine with manga being in black and white. I like what the artists do with shading. I'm kind of okay with the idea of some manga being in full colour from the get-go - there is already some, in fact. But across the board? It's kind of academic given the extra labour and thus money involved means it's not going to happen, but I'd personally prefer manga to stay black and white with the occasional special pages or chapters. But if it were to go full colour all the time, the last thing I want is American comics colourists either doing it or teaching them. If I want something done the way American comics are, I know where to find American comics.
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nargun
Posts: 926 |
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Kinda. Cheap paper is rough paper. The roughness of paper imposes a limit to how fine you can print detail; if the thing you're trying to print is smaller in feature-size than the roughness of the paper it's not going to print very well. Details are going to fall in holes in the surface roughness and not print, that kind of thing. Now. The printing press can only print or not print. If you want useful colour you need graduations of colour, but the actual printing is all-or-nothing: we get around this by breaking the picture into squillions of tiny areas too small to obviously see, and where you want dark areas you print most of them and where you want light areas you only print a few of them. This is called "halftoning" Now. "Squillions of tiny areas" obviously counts as "fine detail". You can't print it on bad paper: newspapers get away with it by making the dots really big, but that means newspapers look terrible. But wait, nargun, you ask: doesn't this apply to black and white images as well? If it applies to mid-pinks it applies to mid-greys as well. And I say, "yes, yes it does"... but manga doesn't use greys. It's all black, or white: even screentone is made up of relatively-large black dots or what-have-you. [it's all about the technical limitations. Red-and-black pages used to be reasonably common in manga but that went away in the... seventies, I think? it's a nice look and it's v cheap compared to full colour, but it probably didn't add much. On the other hand, the use of screen-tone colour for US comics in the early days meant that they could be printed "in colour" very cheaply, but because this is a bit technically tricky, the artist couldn't do their own colouring which meant that the black-and-white art had to stand alone anyway, and the detail they could use on the b&w was limited. Compare and contrast Jack Kirby with Keiko Takemiya.] |
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#hiros7039
Posts: 31 |
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It took until 2019 to answer this question?
To publish something cheap as possible to the mass market. Bring a story to millions of potential viewers. There are plenty of black and white western comics that's been around for a long time. Back from Batman to Mirage TMNT to The Walking Dead. |
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R. Kasahara
 Posts: 677 |
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Adding on to what I_Drive_DSM has said: a rather famous example of this happening was Marvel's release of Akira (under its Epic imprint), which had a fantastic coloring job by Steve Oliff. This colorized version was even reprinted in Japan later on, in gorgeous deluxe edition volumes which were, of course, heavier and more expensive than the standard releases. I highly doubt we'd get such a high profile coloring job again. It was a different time; in addition to the colorization, Marvel printed Akira flipped. DC has published manga as well, under the CMX label, but they never found much success with it, plus I don't think they ever went so far as to attempt colorization. |
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OjaruFan2
Posts: 664 |
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Doraemon has been available in color digitally on Amazon Kindle in North America since November 2014: https://www.amazon.com/Doraemon-Vol-1-FUJIKO-F-FUJIO-ebook/dp/B00GTG4776 (BTW, the regular black and white version isn't available in North America in any shape or form)
The digital color version even has a Japanese Kindle release: https://www.amazon.co.jp/ドラえもん-デジタルカラー版（１）-藤子・Ｆ・不二雄-ebook/dp/B0119FSVQ4/ref=sr_1_8?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1553307560&sr=1-8&keywords=ドラえもん+カラー Last edited by OjaruFan2 on Fri Mar 22, 2019 9:32 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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Morry
Posts: 756 |
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I can see color becoming a luxury option in the future. A series comes out in classic black and white but later receives a digital or physical coloring released months or a year after the original. Essentially repackaging and selling the same content twice at minimal cost, which has already been standard practice in many industries for a while. The potential added appeal to western audiences is a bonus.
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nargun
Posts: 926 |
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lolno. + it's actually pretty time-consuming to colour art [and thus expensive; as a rough figure, colouring ten pages will take about as much as the black-and-white art for five] + certain common manga techniques [large areas of black, screen tones, heavy crosshatching] work extremely badly if the art is later coloured [a plan to make the art coloured requires negative impacts on the B&W art] + the numbers of people who'll buy the coloured art isn't enough to justify the expenditure [the art costs 1.5* as much to make, so if the number of people buying twice is less than half the total audience -- which it will be, guaranteed -- the artist is better off drawing new stories.] I mean, you could get someone other than the original artist to draw it at less cost, but at that point what's the point? may as well colour it yourself with crayon. |
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moff
Posts: 19 |
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I don't know if they were isolated examples when they came out, but Dr Slump, Urusei Yatsura and Yu Yu Hakusho had them, to name a few. |
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Unknow0059
Posts: 26 |
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I hope they don't start coloring the pages.
I prefer the black and white style. I find that coloured often looks out of place. |
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