COMICS RIFFS I LOVE: BOICHI's suits from SUN-KEN ROCK! (Patreon)

The Korean artist BOICHI is probably best-known nowadays for his work on the manga Dr. Stone, but I first enjoyed his work on the crime/action series Sun-Ken Rock, serialized in full on the Crunchyroll Manga iOS app. An over-the-top gangster narrative featuring Japanese fish-out-of-water Kitano Ken battling his way to the top of the Korean crime scene, Sun-Ken Rock isn't a manga I can quite give an unqualified recommendation, as it's often goofy and gamy as hell—sometimes both at the same time, as with the jawdroppingly inexplicable "Korean BBQ sauce bukkake" scene.

But the series does some things incredibly well, as it features thrillingly kinetic fight scenes, beautiful use of high-contrast B&W chiaroscuro, amazing spectacle, and some of the most adept and smoothly "comic-integrated" uses of photoreference I've ever seen. (More on that in a future post.)

And the series features a brilliantly simple and iconic approach to depicting men's suits, whether business wear or more formal attire.

As all the gangsters in Sun-Ken Rock wear high-end suits, we see endless frickin' scenes of grown-up menswear rendered in this brilliant manner: The suit jackets and pants are usually shown as solid black silhouettes, but the dress shirts—and shoes!—are hyper-detailed, a combination which works fantastically well. 

No lapels depicted! Huzzah! Most artists bungle business suits badly when we try to indicate light vs. dark areas on 'em (and always, always botch the lapel depictions); this silhouette-based approach makes for such a cleaner, crisper, bolder appearance that I'm definitely borrowing it myself for future use. 

When action gets underway and the suit jackets get to flappin', BOICHI edges in on the silhouettes with some open hatching to indicate motion:

(Dig those frickin' hands, by the way.)

Again, such a simple but graphically bold take works great throughout the series' hundreds upon hundreds of pages of dynamic action:

These are but a few pages of the 150-odd screencaps from the series that I've saved on my tablet; BTW, BOICHI's artwork looks phenomenal displayed on my big ol' iPad Pro's 12.9" display. Seriously, folks, the big iPad Pro is God Mode for reading digital comics. Nothing else comes even close to this reading experience, I've found.

Whatever its occasional flaws, IMHO Sun-Ken Rock is one of the main reasons to subscribe to the Crunchyroll Manga app, as it's not (legally) available in digital form anywhere else. 

In closing (and in contrast), here's a frankly crappy Empowered vol.4 depiction of a tuxedo:

Man, just imagine how much better Thugboy's tux would look as a clean, crisp sihouette, huh? Oh, well.

UPDATE: For the purposes of flogging this post online, I worked up a compare/contrast jpeg with the Drake meme clarifying which menswear approach works better:

Next time: We start the week off with another Monday double dose of life drawings, as usual. See you then, folks!