Material Conditions and Semiotic Affordances: Natsume Fusanosuke’s Many Fascinations with the Lines of Manga

Comics and manga, in all their generic and cultural variations, are typically considered multimodal forms of expressions. Although many wordless variants exist, they typically combine written and pictorial modes of expression to represent worlds, as well as characters and sequences of events located within these worlds. The specificity and distinctiveness of pictoriality, however—of “being an image”—remains extremely hard to define. Since pictoriality is often treated as a material given, at core “untranslatable” in other semiotic modes such as the written language, it should come as no surprise that many picture theories dissociate themselves from semiotics as clearly as possible. James Elkins’s highly insightful study On Pictures and the Words that Fail Them (1998), for instance, is opened up by the following words:

This book might well have been titled The Antisemiotic, since much of what I have to say here runs against the tendency to interpret pictures as systems of signs, or—in the looser but more prevalent formula—as examples of visual language.¹

In striking contrast, it has been argued within Japanese manga discourse—by practitioners as well as by theorists, maybe most prominently by Ôtsuka Eiji—that the pictures of manga should not be considered pictures at all but rather a form of “hieroglyphics” or a “semiotic code.”² Since around the mid-1990s, a strand of theory became visible that is now called manga hyôgenron. It is usually translated as “theories of manga expression,” understood in a rather narrow sense as “stylistics” or “aesthetics” of manga. Nearly at the same time when Scott McCloud published Understanding Comics (1993), in which he separated any “contents” of comics from their “form,” Natsume Fusanosuke and Takekuma Kentarô expressed a similar interest with Manga no yomikata (How to read manga, 1995).³ Here, they developed fundamental theories, taxonomies, and typologies of basic manga elements such as speed and impact lines, pictograms (kei’yu), sound words, speech balloons, background patterns, and so on. Within this line of discourse, highly sophisticated semiotic theories have since been developed that focus on formal functions, internal structures, and the meaning of discrete elements within the medium. On the first glance, our everyday understanding of comics as, say, “sequential images,” should apply to Natsume’s conception of manga as well:

At least the contemporary manga (including the one-panel-manga) is composed in the format of frames [koma] with contents of pictures [e]. To Japanese people today, manga is a particular form of expression [hyôgen] based mostly on pictures included in consecutive frames. If one of both elements disappears, no manga emerges.⁴

Why, then, is Natsume insisting that we should not mistake the “manga expressions” (manga hyôgen) for anything but “an accumulation of conventions”?⁵ Why, for that matter, does his collaborator Takekuma Kentarô state that “any manga-frame does not merely contain ‘pictures and letters,’ but actually various structures of accumulated, heterogeneous signs [kigô].”⁶ Many manga theorists, in fact, build their conceptions not at all on the idea of a verbal/visual-divide but rather on an emphasis on “line-pictures” (senga) with clear “outline borders” and “demarcations” (rinkaku, sakaime, or kyôkaisen):⁷ “The line is the most important element for the emergence of pictures.”⁸ What, then, are the very material conditions at the core of the Japanese media mix, and in what way can they be addressed as semiotic “affordances” that might cross a threshold toward pictoriality?⁹

I argue that Natsume’s “emergence” of pictoriality in manga constitutes in fact not one but two threshold conditions and that these must be addressed independently from each other, one way or the other; at least, if we are to make sense of the author’s manyfold “fascinations” or “attractions” (miryoku) that “capitalize on the ambiguity of the line.”¹⁰ And, if Natsume is right, the same “primordial attraction of the line” that we can observe with respect to certain visual puns must also be taken into account in most (if not all) works of the medium.¹¹ Natsume’s overall fascination rests...