All PostsWhen you look at people reading manga on the train for instance, you can see that when there is dialog on a page, they read them, but when a page is without text, they just breeze through it. And yet, the author’s intention is just the opposite: if there’s a page without text, it’s because the attention should be given to the art. And this is where the problem lies, people think they are reading a manga, but in fact they are mostly reading the dialog.
This had me thinking that manga was losing part of its interest, and I wanted to produce something that would encourage people to spend more time reading text-less pages. And the solution I found was to do something entirely text-free, from the start. With the added challenge of managing to still be interesting and fun.
Of course, there is a lot of people who, commuting in the morning, don’t really want to use their head. In a certain way, they want a “comfort read”. And this is a page that requires a little effort from them. Obviously, some people are put off by this, and there is no way this manga can appeal to them. But in my opinion, the most interesting part in this approach is encouraging people to question what they are reading. That’s what I like the most in this work.
Tori Miki, discussing his gag manga series (published in English as Anywhere But Here (Fantagraphics)), in an interview with Xavier Guilbert at du9.
My brief review of Anywhere But Here.