Manga Pages Research Articles

Dynamic Manga: Animating Still Manga via Camera Movement

We propose a method for animating still manga imagery through camera movements. Given a series of existing manga pages, we start by automatically extracting panels, comic characters, and balloons from the manga pages. Then, we use a data-driven graphical model to infer per-panel motion and emotion states from low-level visual patterns. Finally, by combining domain knowledge of film production and characteristics of manga, we simulate camera movements over the manga pages, yielding an animation. The results augment the still manga contents with animated motion that reveals the mood and tension of the story, while maintaining the original narrative. We have tested our method on manga series of different genres, and demonstrated that our method can generate animations that are more effective in storytelling and pacing, with less human efforts, as compared with prior works. We also show two applications of our method, mobile comic reading, and comic trailer generation.

Multimodality and Language Learning in a Scanlation Community

We document the language learning outcomes of an informant affiliated with a community of scanlation when participating in practices of reading, translation, typesetting and proofreading of mangas. We draw on a social-semiotic approach to multimodality and we use ethnographic and discourse-analytic techniques to examine a corpus of semi-structured interviews, recordings of onscreen desktop activity and scanned pages of manga translated by the informant and the corresponding original pages in English. The findings reveal that the informant actively constructs meaning of texts combining verbal, graphic and typographic semiotic resources and that she achieves a remarkable awareness of the specific and socio-culturally situated nature of the use of these resources.

Boy meets world: the worldview of Shōnen kurabu in the 1930s

Shōnen kurabu (Boys' Club) was a monthly magazine geared towards young Japanese boys, founded in 1914. Managed by the Dai Nihon Yūbenkai Kōdansha (present day Kōdansha), the magazine was transformed to become a popular read and Japan's bestselling children's magazine, educating and moulding young minds. Aside from stories and educational information, splashed across the magazine were several pages of manga, which not only entertained the young readers, but also functioned to provide them with a view of the contemporary world. This study will focus on how manga in the magazine represented the non-Japanese other of the South Seas (Nan'yō), China, and its inhabitants. These representations contrasted stereotypes of ‘savage’ black natives and cowardly inept Chinese with Japanese as members of ‘white’ civilization and natural leaders of Asia. The study argues that through the manga, the magazine was able to influence its readers, who would become future adults, and hence helped to shape the future of Japanese society.

Look over here

Picture subjects and text balloons are basic elements in comics, working together to propel the story forward. Japanese comics artists often leverage a carefully designed composition of subjects and balloons (generally referred to as panel elements ) to provide a continuous and fluid reading experience. However, such a composition is hard to produce for people without the required experience and knowledge. In this paper, we propose an approach for novices to synthesize a composition of panel elements that can effectively guide the reader's attention to convey the story. Our primary contribution is a probabilistic graphical model that describes the relationships among the artist's guiding path, the panel elements, and the viewer attention, which can be effectively learned from a small set of existing manga pages. We show that the proposed approach can measurably improve the readability, visual appeal, and communication of the story of the resulting pages, as compared to an existing method. We also demonstrate that the proposed approach enables novice users to create higher-quality compositions with less time, compared with commercially available programs.

Detection of exact and similar partial copies for copyright protection of manga

Manga, a kind of Japanese comic book, is an important genre in the realm of image publications requiring copyright protection. To copy manga, illegal users generally focus on certain interesting parts from which to make partial copies to apply in their own drawings. With respect to their sources, copying of manga can be divided into two types: (1) exact copies, which duplicate specific contents of manga, such as scanned manga publications (printed copies) and traced outlines of manga (hand-drawn copies), and (2) similar partial copies, which infringe the copyright of manga characters based on their features. In this paper, we propose applying content-based image retrieval methods to detect both exact and similar copies based on two kinds of regions of interest (ROIs): generic ROIs and face ROIs. The method is able not only to locate the partial copies from images with complex backgrounds, but also to report the corresponding copied parts of copyrighted manga pages for exact copy detection and copied manga characters for similar copy detection. The experimental results prove high performance of the proposed method for detecting printed partial copies. In addition, 85 % of hand-drawn and 77 % of similar partial copies were detected with relatively high precision using a database containing more than $$10{,}000$$ manga pages.

<em>Lost Property Fairy Tales</em>: Ogawa Yōko and Higami Kumiko's Transformations of “The Little Mermaid”

The mermaid's tragic death is not usually censored, although many recent versions seem to prefer to play down overtly Christian messages. Since the introduction of Andersen's story to Japan, mermaids ranging from grotesque to girlish have found themselves in the pages of manga. According to Ogawa and Higami, then, the ambiguous process of reading involves a certain loss through disintegration as well as a certain gain through absorption.