COMICS RIFFS I LOVE: Slow-motion shootouts by 3 different manga artists (Patreon)

I'm giving Failed-Project Friday the week off so I can try a new type of Patreon post: Namely, digging up reference images I've used for various convention panels discussing various aspects of comics storytelling.

The manga pages above were all used as examples in a panel I participated in a few years ago re: action storytelling in comics both Western and Japanese. All of 'em involve a blazing shootout from 80s- and 90s-era manga, but show very different approaches to conveying the action.

The first two images in the gallery were scanned from a story in Shirow Masamune's Appleseed Databook; for my money, that story is a tragically overlooked gem of high-density action storytelling. Yeah, yeah, the knife fight in Appleseed vol.4 is dandy and all, sure, but don't sleep on the Databook's action scenes, folks. (We miiiiight see more of 'em in a future installment of this feature.)

Note the very high panel count Shirow uses to depict the guns being whipped out, slowing time to a crawl with a flurry of small, densely packed images. Then, in the next page, we go back to real time with a rapid-fire barrage of sound FX: 

In the four-page sequence from Kenichi Sonoda's Gunsmith Cats, we see a very different approach to slow motion, especially in the final two pages, which use large, open panels for the (hilarious) act of Rally kicking the dropped magazine back into her CZ-75:

Gotta admit, I struggle with using open, empty-BG panels for action scenes, as part of my brain is always nagging, "You really should slap some kinda background in there, buddy."  But I'd argue that a literalistic, bande-desinée-style "every panel must have a complete BG" approach to this scene would've drawn focus from the absolute clarity of the action. In fact, I've seen artists attempt full backgrounds during every panel of an action scene, and the results were almost invariably stiff, lifeless, and boringly static.

Finally, we close things out with a shooting from the great Yoshikazu Yasuhiko's 80s-era manga Star of the Kurds:

Yaz uses a panel count almost as high as Shirow for the action, but with a more impressionistic approach in the shooting and its immediate aftermath. The fact that he's one of very, very few mangaka to regularly ink with a brush definitely does add a certain sense of looseness and energy to the action that Shirow's crisper, denser, more precise linework doesn't quite convey.

His choice to have the backgrounds drop out within a panel on p.33 is a very cool one, and a technique I try to keep in mind for my own work when possible. (Note that I did say "try," as this riff only rarely appears in my comics.) 

So whaddaya think of this new type of post, folks? Next time around, I might get into favorite riffs such as Frank Thorne's concentric L-shaped panels from the 70s, or the distinctive way Tetsuro Ueyama opens chapters of his 2000-era manga Solevision Mitsuyoshi. Wheeeee!