Finding The Root Causes of the Effects of Japanese Manga Visual Elements on the Pictures of Iranian Comic Entitled Marz

 
The illustrated story is the expression of a narrative through a series of pictures; for this reason, it is also called a consecutive illustrated story. In order to take a deeper look at the realm of story or illustrated narratives, their history goes back to cave murals as well as ancient paintings. But in modern ages, comics refer to a particular type of painting that carried several pictures with text and are periodically published in magazines, newspapers, or comic books in different societies. The collection of comic books in their modern meaning consists of two major sections: comic strips and manga. Comic strips originated from the West and manga, which is a Japanese art production, is one of the manifestations of folk art, and in Japan, it has become part of the culture and life of the people. Comic strips and manga are even influenced by each other in some cases, including in the creation of heroes, the appearance of some characters, and even in the composition of text and pictures. Nevertheless, both series have retained their identity and have impressed many audiences around the world. As McWilliams points out in the introduction to the book Visual Japanese Culture, about 2.4 million Japanese people are fans very into Manga that they are called otaku. Otakus are people who spend most of their day and night reading manga or even watching anime. It should be noted, however, that due to the high popularity and high production of manga in Japan, to save money, the producers published most of the manga in black and white and only the cover and catalog of the manga were in color. Today, manga is also globally glorified and has become part of the popular global culture. In recent years in Iran, the number of people interested in Japanese manga and comics is increasing. For this reason, some of our country's artists have recently started to create illustrated stories with Iranian themes and characteristics among them, we can mention the illustrated story of "Marz" written by Sadaf Faqihi and illustrated by Mahour Pourghadim which, as an Iranian hero, they refer to a Safavid painter named "Mazdak" and his slave "Sabra". In the illustrated story, although the artists tried to create a native work with Iranian traditional visual features, which was also borrowed from Iranian painting, it seems that some of the visual rules of Japanese manga are still more or less the same. If in the past Japanese culture was known to the world due to things like tea traditional ceremonies, samurai, etc. today, its popular culture has spreaded through manga and anime, making it popular with the younger generation around the world. So much so that November 3^rd is named "Manga Day" in Japanese culture. With this in mind, Japanese manga can now even serve as a source of inspiration for making a native comic strip. Based on the above, the question that arises in this article is: The visual elements of Japanese manga based on what backgrounds were used in the illustrations of the Iranian illustrated story and created influences?. And aims to examine the effects that Japanese manga visual elements have created on Iranian illustrated story pictures. This research is of descriptive-analytical type and has been done through library tools as well as a study on a collection of Japanese manga and Iranian illustrated stories. In different parts of this article, it is stated that: A manga is a phrase used to refer to a particular type of comic book in Japan, which means a series of sequential pictures dating back to around the twelfth century. In other words, the comic book industry in Japan is called manga, which has distinctive characteristics compared to the productions of other societies in this field. The real emergence of manga took place in the twentieth century when they became so popular that a special manga was published for each age group. Like the manga, the comic strip is a narrative of several pictures next to the text in a row, in comic strips, pictures are usually placed horizontally next to each other, and a few sentences that illuminate the picture are used inside or in the middle of the picture frame. In Iran, the method of illustration in the form of comic strips or illustrated stories can be seen in the reliefs on historical buildings that show a kind of visual sequence about historical narratives. Examples of these include Persepolis, paintings on pottery and clothing, and many ancient objects. In some paintings, the images were stacked in a row, and in later periods, it was the turn of the carpets to tell the stories like a comic strip. In the Marz illustration, the round and large eyes of the characters are completely manga like and the only difference with the manga form is that in the color of the eyes in the border effect, it seems that the artist intended to induce a sense of reality. But in the manga, the same eyes may be seen with unusual colors, including colors: purple, yellow, red, etc., but the open and closed forms of the lips are designed same as a mangas. In Howell's Japanese animated castle, which features both manga and anime, Howell is portrayed as a male protagonist with full costumes, jewelry, hair, and a slender, girlish body. Mazdak, as a male hero in the Iranian comic book, has a small and delicate body along with the rest of the men in this bodywork. Thus, based on the mentioned cases, it can be said that in the field of the sexualization of the illustrated protagonist, similarities are also found with manga, along with Iranian beauty components such as black hair and eyebrows with light skin. Kiga style means dramatic pictures while being influenced by previous manga styles, by creating new paths in this field including addressing adult issues as well as realistic approach, have a great impact on the world of manga and even launched the comic strip. It can be said that this style of manga contains dark scenes or pictures in some ways. In one part, when Mazdak and his slave reach a village on the way to provide food, they find that famine has spread everywhere and the villagers are eating dogs, cats, and human corpses due to severe dehydration and lack of food. Unlike other pictures that are fully colored, this section is displayed in black, white, scary, and disgusting. What emerges from Iranian paintings is that Iranian artists had no desire to explicitly represent nature and their emphasis has been more on expressing symbolic and subjective concepts. For this reason, decoration, abstract painting, and sometimes abstraction can be considered as general features of Iranian painting. In order to take a deeper look at the visual features of Iranian painting, we see factors such as simplicity in creating the design, flat compositions, no shadows, diffused lighting, and the use of pure and bright colors. To achieve pure form, painters seem to have simplified forms, created gentle mazes and applied subtle, youthful faces. One of the basic principles of Iranian painting is space creation. This principle is called multi-dimensional specialization because each part of the image can contain a specific, independent event. For this reason, it can be considered synchronized with Japanese manga because, in manga paintings, we also see fragments of images, each part of which can be the narrator of a particular story. More interestingly, in some Iranian paintings, the frame is broken, in such a way that a certain element is rooted inside the painting frame and its continuation can be seen outside the desired frame. In the manga pictures as well as the illustrated story, like the paintings, the failure of the frame is seen, so that the element outside the frame can be a part of the body, a branch of a tree, and even a part of the architecture. It should be noted that in the Marz illustrated story, in addition to the effects of the Japanese manga, elements such as old trees as well as hills painted with snuff form have a direct reference to the use of Iranian paintings' style.