What's a Shaman to a Non-Belieeeeeever?

I got my first smartphone and I’m really excited about the camera, so I’m using it for the pictures instead of my scanner.

Hiroyuki Takei’s Shaman King has been on my comic radar almost as long as any other title.  With my introduction to comic reading essentially being a roommate chiding me into watching/reading Naruto during a bad breakup, all of the turn-of-the-century Jump titles were always in my peripherals, especially back in the days when I caught up on ~500 chapters or so of Naruto on illegal scanlation sites (back then I think it was mostly the now defunct Manga Fox?).  Anyway, I was weirdly stubborn back then: I insisted that Naruto would be my only anime/manga, out of some arbitrary Will to Douchebag.  That same friend changed that when he blared the Death Note dub at full volume sometime later that year, catching me in an event horizon of excellent Japanese storytelling in pretty pictures.  Yes, he is a good friend.

I could not be rediscovering Shaman King at a better time in my comic reading life: when younger, I might have been a little bored with how quintessentially shonen this comic really is.  I might have found Manta annoying, Yoh and Anna too powerful, and the art far too cartoonish.  Now, I don’t think any of those things are true (or really that interesting as opinions): I find Manta’s perspective to be a unique boon to Takei’s storytelling, and think that the skill, variety, and humor in Takei’s more cartoony depictions is one of the strongest, most important features of the work.  More than anything else, however, Takei’s layouts are sort of shockingly sophisticated from jump (GET IT?!).  I don’t know of any other creator—not even any of the holy trinity of Kubo, Kishimoto, or Oda—who were able to produce such great art within the confines of such consistently interesting pages as early as the first two volumes.

The many faces of Manta

For those who don’t know, it could be argued that in the first volume, the main character is actually Manta Oyamada, a short goody two-shoes with a dumb haircut and fantastically stubby legs.  The titular shaman, Yoh Asakura, is at a distance for the early parts of the series, with Manta wrapping up each chapter in a sort of narrative diary format as he learns more about Yoh and what it means to be a shaman.  A big part of any enduring shonen series is this process of finding out the fundamental rules of the universe; you know, being a saiyan, a ninja, a soul reaper, a pirate, etc.  Often this exploration happens by way of a teaching figure, and even where the world being explored is particularly interesting, the learning curve for enjoying a shonen series is usually a road paved with stilted explanations of chakra, haki, magical fruits, and power levels.

Manta helps tremendously with the feel of learning what makes Shaman King tick.  He’s essentially this complete nerd who has been dropped smack in the middle of a shonen story unfolding before his very eyes, which would be far less dramatic than it often gets made to be and is, in fact, completely absurd most of the time.  At one point, when Yoh first joins Manta’s school, Manta starts screaming about the fact that Yoh just showed up and started sleeping.  “Does he think he’s a god?!?!” Manta exclaims at Yoh’s brazen disregard for academia.  Mind you, Manta just saw this kid communing with dozens of spirits in a graveyard the day before, and that set of concerns is completely eclipsed by this kid sleeping in a classroom.  Manta keeps this story surprisingly grounded even as it quickly tries to pull the reader into its unique metaphysical take on spirits.  His reactions are often such exaggerated approximations of the skeptical reader that it’s really easy to buy what Takei is selling.

The quality of Takei’s cartooning has a huge role in this.  Melodramatic overreactions are part and parcel with shonen humor: just ask Oda about the way he draws Usopp freaking out with the same face half a dozen times every single issue.  Takei doesn’t have just one go-to face for Manta: he has dozens, all of which are fully realized and humorous in their own ways.  Going through volume one to find unique faces made by Manta that I thought were entertaining, I ended up with nearly three dozen examples, and probably could have found a few more.  Establishing something so central to the manga’s identity and tone so early on and so consistently is just one of many reasons Takei is impressive to me.  Approaching humor so deliberately and in such a detailed fashion as he does with Manta opens up possibilities for the depiction of every other character.

Another thing that really sets Takei apart among the crop of mangakas that sprung up around the turn of the century is how mature his page layouts were early on.  The cartooning is ahead of many of his peers, and the overall quality and consistency of the art is yet another thing that he was ahead of the curve on.  I think he falls behind a little bit on action sequences (at least in early volumes) but his pages are often thoughtful, and sometimes really quite clever.

Here’s Yoh reacting to a movie staring Shaman King’s proxy for Bruce Lee, Lee Bailong.  If you have any friends telling you about the similarities between film and comics as mediums, feel free to show them this page as proof that comics are quite different (and perhaps even more powerful, at least independent of sound): look at how much narrative power Takei is able to draw from putting a film strip to use as comic panels juxtaposed with the reactions of a viewer.  Of course, I adore what’s happening on this page, completely independent of any weight it might lend to weird esoteric formalist conversations about the medium’s capability.  Takei gets to show off as an artist and as a storyteller, adding particular weight to a scene that is really participating in some hardcore foreshadowing.

As if this sequence wasn’t already good enough, here’s the page after next.

Again, Takei is taking time here to front-end-load a lot of details so that when Lee Bailong’s corpse shows up to kick some ass, we have all this prelude about the character itself and how much Manta looks up to him.  But that’s not all the scene does, visually.  It uses the same kind of repetition-of-elements-in-parallel as the aforementioned page: main action proceeds in the middle, reactions to Bailong occur off to the left.  Shaman King isn’t just good by comparison—it’s good on its own—but I feel like I can’t stress enough that nobody else on the Jump mainstage, not even from the dream class of the turn of the century mangakas, was doing this much with their pages.

I’m especially struck by this because when I go and find reviews of the Shaman King manga, almost all of them focus on the content or general aesthetic, and none give Takei credit as a visual storyteller.  His page layouts are diverse, interesting, and often border on meticulous.  Asymmetry is a big feature of a lot of his pages.  Obviously not a lot of pages are actually symmetrical in comics, but the way that Takei alternates between lining up and juxtaposing elements vertically on his pages throughout different panels gives his pages this really sophisticated feel that is at the same time very easy to enjoy.  Anna easily could have remained in the center of the page in the bottom panel as she is prior, but offsetting her just… it just works.  The page just feels fantastic with her skewed off to the side, clutching her magical channeling beads in the page’s center.

Takei has a clear eye for style, but rather than transcending plot completely in order to show off (*cough*, Kubo, *cough*), he reinvests his keen eye for interesting composition into keeping the story grounded.  I’m still early in my Shaman King reading experience, and am interested to see how Takei develops over time; even so, I’m just short of being blown away by how substantial this comic is so early on in its run.