R.J. Atkinson and Marc Leary joined Milton Davis and Hiroshi Kanatani for the Digital Media Track’s “The Fun in Fantasy and Sci-Fi–Write Your Own Manga” workshop on Friday at 10AM in the Hilton Galleria. Atkinson led the panel as the author of manga series The Seventh Kingdom: Fukushuu no Oukoku. Leary is a content creator known for Blerdography—a digital media brand focused on Black nerd and geek experiences. Davis published a historical fiction novel called Black Rose, and Kanatani has released several manga titles, graphic novels, and comic books across various countries. The panelists discussed the inspiration behind their artistic mediums, and the common pitfalls of character and plot creation.
Growing up, Davis was inspired by the comic books he and his cousins purchased at a local grocery store for less than a dollar. He further aged himself, adding that the dollar included candy, chips, and a drink with money to spare. While his cousins were excellent artists, Davis later discovered his talent for writing instead. His passion for comics never faded, though, and he’s since started translating his stories to different mediums, such as manga and audiobooks.
Love of art and storytelling inspired Kanatani since childhood, including Kaiju, which later became the central figure to the works he’d helped publish in Chinese, American, and Hong Kong markets, to name a few. He gained experience from studying other stories and writing his own. He drew a lot of pictures and shared them with others to gauge audience interest, and he encouraged aspiring creators to do the same.
When creating characters, the panelists discussed traits that impact their character’s decisions. Davis favors quirks and favorites that influence character reactions. He discussed how a House of Dragons character was killed when his sensitivity to scents caused him to hesitate in combat. Atkinson leans toward emotional obstacles. She referenced Clairabelle, the main character in her manga, as someone learning to survive a vicious world to exact her revenge.
To drive a story forward, Atkinson emphasized conflict, which can shape character arc. She introduced the audience to both short and long-term conflict as short and overarching plot, respectively. Using manga panels as a reference, she verbally illustrated how each manga panel equals several pages of prose, which inherently increases the pace of the story. Kanatani agreed that faster is better. He likes to get straight to the point, especially due to constraints in the mediums he published. He completed twenty manga pages in one week for Shonen Jump Magazine (at the time). Davis discussed the difference between long- and short-form writing as influence on character arc, something he learned when converting his story from novel to manga. Short form required the author to start conflict sooner and resolve it by the end of the story. In long form, the character’s overarching plot was built over multiple books in the series.
Atkinson leaned into character arc and taught the audience about moral ascending and moral descending character traits to help structure the story. She engaged the con-goers about examples for each. Some said Wolverine and others said Magneto and how both went from nonchalant to caring about something throughout their journey. Audience members questioned whether the arc is controlled or natural. Davis said, “When you start to speak to your characters, they start making their own decisions.” He listened to his characters and supported the traits that naturally came from experiences and friendships, but he made sure to keep them on track to a predetermined conclusion.
Kanatani had nodded throughout the panel, piecing together the English words he understood because he mostly spoke Japanese. Before the panel began, he and Davis discussed the challenges of learning different languages. If you knew three, you were trilingual. If you knew two, you were bilingual. If you knew one, you were American. Near the end, Atkinson showed her manga cover art and Kanatani pointed out the Japanese text, to which she responded in Japanese. His eyes lit up, and the audience erupted in laughter realizing that Atkinson could’ve translated the entire time. They exchanged formalities and took a group photo.
