Manga Two-In-One

Over at Comic World News, David Welsh graciously invited me to talk about one of my favorite manga series, Bleach. I tried to include some scans to illustrate the sheer energy and sense of movement in creator Tite Kubo's artwork, but I completely forgot about an image that had been sitting on my hard drive for over a year, waiting for me to get around to writing about this sublime superhero-samurai series. This image encapsulates pretty much everything I love about Bleach into a single panel: kicking bizarre monsters in the face so hard that everything speeds up and slows down at the same time.


And here are links to larger versions of two scans I used in the article as examples of Kubo's amazing choreography and composition when it comes to fight scenes. (As an added bonus, here's a big two-page spread of Ichigo getting kicked in the face by a little girl.)

Thanks to David for asking me to participate in this discussion. David has long been one of my favorite bloggers, columnists, and reviewers, so I was honored to be a part of his wonderful Flipped column. It was a lot of fun to bounce ideas off each other, and hopefully our conversation will convince comic book fans to check out Bleach. And special thanks to Shawn Hoke for working out all the formatting issues and getting everything posted! 9:20 AM | |