MOb Psycho 100 and the other comic giantClick to enlarge all images Note: All Japanese manga is read right to left, though some English translations flip the pages for Western audiences. In order to maintain the original art's composition, no pages here have been flipped. I must admit, I have anxiously awaited this post since the beginning of my project – the first chance I have had to dive into the beautifully strange world of Japanese manga and explore the myriad of places in which it has imparted influence. If I were to make a judgement on which countries boast the most robust comics industries in the world, my educated guess would say that Japan and the United States rule supreme, with France coming in a close third. (I would be wrong about France, as South Korea’s booming comics community has flown into third place as of 2021, but fourth place French and Belgian comics still hold legendary places in comics history.) Japan has a unique hold on popular culture, manga series and their anime adaptations becoming more mainstream by the season and influencing modern media. Series like Avatar: The Last Airbender and RWBY provide Western examples of animated tv series which model themselves after anime series, often lumped in with them by default despite not originating in Japan. In a video by PBS titled “How Manga Took Over American Bookshelves,” YouTuber Princess Weekes, Master in Literary Theory, cites Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira film as anime’s initial Trojan Horse into the Western world, followed closely by Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell. Years pass by, and the Louvre – the mecca of fine art in Europe – put on an exhibition of comic and manga art in 2016 titled “Louvre No. 9,” referring to a term coined by art critic Claude Beylie in 1964 for comics: “the ninth art.” These days, you are hard-pressed to find a teenager who has not watched at least one anime, but even art historians are catching wind of their importance and visual strength. So…what is it about manga that transcended one nation’s cultural identity to become a globalist commercial phenomenon? The answer to manga’s popularity (as heightened by their respective anime adaptations), I think, lies directly in its art. The common barrier for American superhero comics to enter into art historical realms is its “assembly line aesthetic,” its highly polished, idealized graphics and action stories. This changed with the rise of underground and alternative comics which sought to use the medium to tell more mature stories (in the explicit sense for the former and the intellectual sense for the latter) in a multitude of genres outside the superhero norm. By contrast, Japanese manga has always had a wide variety of genres. Those genres, however, focus more on gendered demographics than subject matter, meaning that, while manga for young boys (shonen) and manga for young girls (shoujo) can theoretically share plot similarities, they each have a unique style typology associated with their corresponding gendering. (There are more than two genres and subsequent styles of manga, but I focus on these two for simplicity’s sake.) As I explained in my Kuniko Tsurita video, shonen manga tends to use thicker lines and simplified shapes, more in line with American comics; some series, such as My Hero Academia, take direct inspiration from American superhero aesthetics. Shoujo, on the other hand, uses daintier linework and increased facial detail, focusing more on conveying emotion than dynamic action. One such shoujo which ranked highly on the New York Times Bestseller List during its run, Fruits Basket, places heavy emphasis on rendering hair and eyes so as to exaggerate key emotional beats in its narrative about romance and abuse trauma. The recognizability of manga styles can be most attributed to these two elements – hair and eyes. Where most American comics simplify hair into blunt shapes, manga artists often render individual hairs so that they can expressively blow in the wind, cover character’s faces, and frame their expressions. Where American comics either uses simple circles or opt for realism in the eyes to maintain graphic sleekness and readability, manga art is notorious for its giant eyes meant to capture as much emotion and reflectivity as possible, especially for its younger, naïve characters. It is these expressive, starry eyes which help Japanese manga stand out from all other comic forms in both style and pathos. Today, I wanted to analyze an unusual title which sort of defies all the reasons that manga became popular globally, gaining notoriety for its psychedelic visuals and expressionist action sequences– ONE’s Mob Psycho 100. The pseudonymous ONE’s breakout work, One Punch Man, began as a crudely drawn webcomic that garnered enough of a fanbase with its interesting premise and compelling storytelling to earn a professionally serialized, redrawn manga and incredibly popular anime series. Though his drawing skills have improved since his career began and he now works with assistants on backgrounds and shading, the original spirit of ONE’s bizarre, blunt, and homemade art style remains. Where the One Punch Man anime uses the redrawn manga as its stylistic reference, the Mob Psycho 100 anime falls more in line with the source material, thereby calling more attention to the drawn line and ONE's artistic voice. The Japanese manga and American superhero comic industries function with some degree of similarity, both including an amount of collaboration to allocate different parts of the comics’ production to masters in their craft. Japanese manga, however, lends more storytelling and drawing liberty to the individual creators. Where a different artist pencils, inks, colors, shades, and does the text for American comics, Japanese mangaka will typically take care of the majority of that work themselves or with a partner, sometimes taking on background assistants or sending finished pages to a letterer. Some two-person teams, such as Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata (creators of Death Note and Bakuman), split the work as writer and artist, respectively, but many work by themselves. This lends itself to a culture of overworking and negligent self-injury in Japanese manga – and visual art in general – which many scholars have pointed to as a reverberation of trauma from the World War II atomic bombings. In Interpreting Anime, Professor of Japanese literature Christopher Bolton writes that anime uses “Hiroshima and Nagasaki as original traumas that are then worked out and mastered through their repetition in popular culture” (27), characterizing their cyclical appearance in Japanese media as a form of therapeutic processing. A similar sentiment arises in Takashi Murakami’s work, especially his Little Boy exhibition which uses the American nickname for the bomb as a metaphor for Japan’s post-war regression into nuclear cutesiness – an attempt to escape their harrowing memories. In Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture, Murakami and the Japan Society survey the popular culture of Japan with the interpretation that much of its post-war visual culture channels its atomic bomb trauma into either reinterpretations of the bomb as monsters, technology, or human violence, or into saccharine, cutesy characters whose positive attitude and bright colors avoid engaging the bombs’ lasting wound all together. Both contain an air of what Murakami calls “political correctness” (10) towards the bombings, as though barred from expressing their anguish so as to make up for their participation in the war and its atrocities. Just beneath the surface of Japanese visual culture, he argues, lies a vibrating nihilism and absurdism which creates such a sense of detachment and escape from the body that they come back around the other end in cerebrally self-destructive tendencies. The main character of Mob Psycho 100, an eighth-grade psychic named Mob, thinks that the only way to keep his dangerous abilities in check is to bottle up his feelings until they spill forth every so often in violent bursts of emotion. This is precisely what Murakami means when he speaks on conflicting post-war feelings which seek both escapist comfort and numbing destruction. Where “the chaos accepted by the Japanese people in the aftermath of the war coexisted with the sense of order embedded in Japanese aesthetics” (30), artist ONE’s unrefined art style actually aids his goal to subvert the order in those long-established aesthetics. Mob does not know how to productively process his emotions, and his stoic exterior can only remain calm for so long before he bubbles over. The people in his life, however, are materialistic, power-hungry, and fraudulent, all seemingly disenchanted with the world or so self-obsessed that they cannot even self-reflect long enough to feel cynical. Comparatively, Mob appears innocent, naïve, and emotionless, but in reality he feels responsible for anyone he might hurt in his outburst, choosing instead to try and live the most normal life he can. The visual language of the manga also fits in with Murakami’s ideas on cutesy absurdism; distorted faces, heads replaced with vegetables, and exaggerated body shapes creating a psychedelic effect which keeps the reader in a cerebral space. If one can stay in their internal fantasy, ONE and Murakami argue, they do not have to face the effects of their ugly reality on their physicality and mental health. In ONE’s enacted worldview, human beings share an innate ugliness. We are not perfect, idealized characters but people with certain skill sets that we can use to their full potential, not use at all, or use at the expense of others, especially if our privileges allow us to manipulate other people. In each of ONE’s series exists an underlying critique of comic stories, a twist to the tropes usually found in manga and superhero comics. ONE asks in One Punch Man what would happen if a superhero achieved such power that saving the day no longer excited him, thus reducing him back to an average, unfulfilling life. In Mob Psycho 100, he asks what would happen if someone with psychic powers struggled in his social life, left to grapple with what he sees as an otherwise lackluster identity. In Mob Psycho specifically, all characters have exaggerated features in their expressions, facial features, or bodily construction. ONE most often uses these “ugly” exaggerations to comedic ends. Given that the very first character we meet is a con man who lies to and underpays an eighth grader AND that ONE has worked with more refined artists in the past, however, the deliberate choice of aesthetic for his most recent manga serves to highlight the ugly, unrefined, and childish aspects of humanity – both in children and adults, alike. Reigen Arataka, a fraudulent business owner falsely claiming to have psychic abilities, is the first of many ugly-looking characters, though his status as a main character does not necessarily differentiate him from any other “pathetic” human being in society. ONE draws one-off background characters with similar exaggerations in their design, and crowds of people – both manipulators and victims alike – each have features which ONE makes certain to individualize and exaggerate, creating a baseline ugliness across society at large. While humorous, in this individualization also lies an expansion of the world and a treatment of main characters as being just like anyone else. In a sense, the background characters in ONE’s drawings often look more unique than even the protagonist, someone who distinctly struggles to express emotion. The very first panel in which the viewer sees Mob’s face, he wears a seemingly disinterested expression, maintaining his half-lidded gaze for a majority of the pages. In another sense, even though Reigen serves as the most obvious contagonist to Mob (antagonistic character not necessarily opposed to the protagonist, but one who hinders them), many other characters attempt to manipulate him for their own gain. One such example is the members of his school’s Telepathy Club who try to convince Mob to become their fifth member so that they do not lose their official club title and resources. Ironically, Reigen calls out the club for their farce, able to read right through their deceit despite previously being unable to read his clients’ expressions. I would contend that Reigen can spot a liar so easily because he himself is one, though when it comes to his clients, Reigen invariably fails to interpret their expressions quick enough to con them without any hiccups. Panels like the one shown below combine a heavily cross-hatched modeling technique with ONE’s signature, simplified eyes, indicating that for all of the information in the client’s expression, Reigen still hits a blockage – represented by the eyes – in his full empathetic abilities. This focus on expressions and the inability to read them becomes a major thematic element of ONE’s art, as seemingly crude and thoughtless as his style may appear. Though not central to the plot, background characters receive equal expressive treatment in their facial features both because their importance as people differs not all that much from Reigen, Mob, and the supporting cast, but also because their expressionism embodies Mob’s internal conflict. Pages from "Chapter 2," in which Reigen calls out the Telepathy Club and Mob struggles with expressing his own feelings and reading others' As he explains in “Chapter 8: Breakdown,” Mob has struggled to express his emotions since a very young age, simply unable to feign polite smiles or regulate his feelings before they erupt. Part of this comes from a strangely contradicting ability to read people; while Mob stays compliant with his “Master” Reigen’s lies, he also recognizes his own traits in other people, such as psychic ability and feelings of inadequacy. Like Reigen, Mob understands himself better than he can understand anyone else, but because his self-reflection leads him to see his emotions as dangerous to the control of his powers, he grows a “complex” about unconsciously allowing either to show. To enact this focus on emotion, ONE’s drawings emphasize facial expressions and establish a simplified “resting face” for each character, one which he can overdraw and distort as needed. He cares less about attractive, sleek illustrations like those seen in most Japanese manga and American superhero comics, and more about conveying the intense emotions on others that Mob cannot reciprocate. Pages from "Chapter 8: Breakdown" in which a villain misinterprets Mob's emotional suppression as a lack of emotions entirely The exorcism job Reigen takes in the first chapter, for example, features two particularly unsightly clients, allowing ONE to completely disfigure their expressions into unadulterated, ugly fear. In the background of this scene and other moments like it, ONE and his assistants render space in a sketchy, trembling line, characterizing the environment as full of haunted, otherworldly energy. So too does the spirit appear in this chaotic style, contrasting the bolder lines and stark white of the characters. In his shock, Reigen’s client screams, his face contorting into viscerally-felt terror. Like Lynda Barry, ONE seems to abandon fully purposeful mark-making, concentrating extra lines in the places on faces that stretch to unrealistic proportions.
In an interview with manga artist Yamada Reiji (translated by Reddit user Kawausokappa), he and ONE describe how his art style has an unbothered attitude towards verisimilitude, choosing instead to prioritize the expression of ideas with less complicated linework. ONE says that, while he has greatly improved since One Punch Man, he never had any previous industry experience as a mangaka assistant and relies on his own intuition to structure pages and format visual effects. Yamada compares his work to artists published in Garo magazine, an alternative manga publication that ran from the 1960s to 2002. Kuniko Tsurita, for example, shares ONE’s affinity for simple shapes and nontraditional, “ugly” manga art styles. Both ONE and Tsurita write action stories through internally sensitive lenses, ultimately exploring not the fantastical ideas of their premises, but the navigation of niche psychological experiences. Both rely, too, on deeply expressionist visuals in place of realism. The most Expressionist element of Mob Psycho 100 – its occasional, dramatic block shading similar to Frans Masereel and Lynd Ward’s woodcut aesthetics – develops into a representative tool for Mob’s emotional suppression. Throughout the first volume, Mob’s character design mostly consists of his black hair and black school uniform, creating in him a wall of thick, black-ink darkness. Despite having struggled to navigate his emotions since he was a baby, Mob has also learned to suppress his emotions because they caused his powers to explode and hurt others in his childhood. The act of emotional expression is, therefore, linked to violence in Mob’s head, thus leading him to slowly boil over inside as represented by a running percentage total throughout the chapters. ONE embodies this emotional blocking that Mob subconsciously does with a dramatic block shading technique – sometimes using it to humorous ends with other characters, but mostly saving it for moments when Mob might otherwise react dramatically to something and wants to mask his expression. Panels and Pages from Mob Psycho 100's first volume, depictions of "block shading" technique In one particular scene, Mob finds himself at a cult meeting led by a spirit named Dimple with the power to make people smile despite their personal struggles, resulting in a large crowd of people bearing sickening grimaces that merely mask their worries. Mob, maintaining his stoic expression in spite of the spirit’s powers, tries to leave only for Dimple to challenge him to a no laughing contest. Dimple puts something in Mob’s drink which causes him to sputter, the moment taking up a whole page. ONE casts Mob’s face in full shadow, his eyes and spit making use of Dürer’s white line by carving dramatic white shapes into the black field. The white, in contrast to the black shading, represents to Mob an expression of emotion – a break in his dark, repressive wall. Dimple tries to make him seem like an emotionless freak, a damaged soul that just needs a little force, but he only succeeds in pushing Mob over the edge. Just before Mob reaches 100% of his emotional capacity, ONE’s representational tool bleeds into the very fabric of the comic structure when the page gutters turn black. It serves as one final, desperate attempt to lock away his outburst before violently expanding into a 2-page splash spread, the exact opposite of the previous small, black containers. On these pages, the ground fragments outward from Mob, the crowd thrown into the air in a parallel splay of lines. In thick, black letters read the kanji for “anger,” though the caption is hardly necessary; ONE’s embodied, visceral drawing speaks for itself. Furthermore, when Mob moves to slice Dimple’s arm off, rather than showing his body in motion like the sculpted forms of muscle in The Amazing Spider-Man, ONE captures a moment of complete emptiness where his body burst from – an explosion of white so different to Mob’s black facial cloak. The next frame in which the viewer sees Mob, he looms over Dimple in almost full white. In the following frame, returning to his usual dark, cloaked non-expression, Mob tells Dimple that “this is [his] emotion,” referring (in my opinion) to both his ferocious outburst as well as his empty expression. Excerpts from Chapter 8: Breakdown" leading up to Mob's emotional explosion Here, ONE seems to argue that while it is unhealthy for someone, especially a child, to willfully contain their emotions, it can also be true that those who struggle to express their emotions can live happy, fulfilling lives without needing to change for other people. As Reigen so aptly declares to Mob:
Reigen tells Mob that he can find his own way to navigate the world independently without necessarily changing who he is, because, as he says, “why do you need to be like them” (151)? Many fans of the show have expressed how comforting it was for them to see a shonen character (or any character in the media, for that matter) succeed and have meaningful relationships despite struggling to conform to society’s social standards. In particular, autistic fans expressed how much of their own traits they see in Mob, though no formal psychological evaluation exists. Doctor Mahdi uploaded a breakdown of the ways in which emotions affect our physical performance and personality in regards to Mob Psycho 100, though he does not mention autism, either. Regardless of the lack of formal diagnosis, ONE uses Mob to embody the struggle to navigate, channel, and express human emotions in socially coherent ways, and those struggles resonate greatly with fans.
There does not exist much scholarly writing on Mob Psycho 100, but given that its serialization ran from 2012 to 2017, it might be too new to receive academic attention as of yet. In my opinion, ONE’s philosophy and representational techniques deserve a little more credit, especially given Mob Psycho 100’s relation to art market superstar Takashi Murakami’s theory of nuclear trauma and emotional repression in Japanese media.
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AuthorFiona Murphy. Artist. Student. YouTube fanatic. ArchivesCategories
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