Painting The Medium / Anime & Manga

---

• General: In manga, when there is a character who almost exclusively uses katakana in their speech, you'll want to pay close attention to them. Chances are, that character either has a strange accent, speaks with improper tone, is a robot or robot-like, or crazy. Similarly, if a character exclusively uses hiragana in a manga where kanji is expected, it usually means said character is childish or attempting to look cute.
• Ayakashi in Ayakashi Triangle are not only Invisible to Normals, but inaudible as well. This is indicated by their speech bubbles being drawn with a thick, double-line border. When ayakashi take forms humans can hear them in, their speech bubbles are drawn normally.
• Cells at Work!:
  • Cells at Work: Bacteria!, a Shōjo series, takes place in a high school girl's body, so the bacteria's appearances are more stylish or elegant than the ones in the main book. Their home is also shown to have a Victorian aesthetic, and a character is shown using magic to perform their cellular duties.
  • Cells at Work: Baby! takes place in a newborn infant's body, and has a Super-Deformed artstyle to reflect that the cells are still developing.
• Chillin' in Another World with Level 2 Cheat Powers: When Gholl explains the division between humans and demons, the manga adaptation neatly illustrates this by having the married duo of Flio (a human) and Fenrys (a demon) in one panel, but each on one page and the gutter between separating them.
• In the first issues of the Dragon Ball manga, Goku delivers a Megaton Punch to Yamcha, hard enough to send him flying, at which point he crashes into the top of the panel, shatters it, and bounces off.
  • Similar gags showed up from time to time in Akira Toriyama's earlier Doctor Slump.
  • Also in Dragon Ball, mechanical characters have their text displayed in angular speech bubbles. This was later extended to villains and Super Saiyans (but not the calmer mastered Super Saiyan Full Power).
• In Hellsing, dream sequences end themselves by panes getting smaller and smaller until they're pinprick-sized, as the dreams go weird before the character wakes up.
• Many Fan Subs play with the subtitles at least a little for various effects, though this can distract the audience from what's happening on screen.
  • Played by Order, a Fan Sub group, in their release of Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann: Every time Simon and Kamina are Calling Their Attacks, their subtitles get a different font as well as karaoke-like highlights. Also, when someone emphasizes the end of a phrase, the beginning appears first and then the emphasized part appears, and when they're yelling, you can see the words shaking.
    • This◊ (Caution: spoiler warning!) scene from the spin-off Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann — Gurren Gakuenhen shows off interaction across different panels (and involving a flashback scene no less)
  • Similarly, Arienai Fansubs's release of Futari wa Pretty Cure had some of the karaoke lyrics in the opening credits mimic the motion of objects onscreen, sliding across the screen or spiraling off into the distance.
  • A pioneer in these effects was Kaizoku Fansubs with their One Piece sub-work. Each character got an elaborate font for calling out their attacks, and sometimes different ways for the letters to appear. It's a bit over-the-top, but then again it's One Piece.
  • A somewhat humorous one is done in a fansub of GaoGaiGar. A certain energy source that greatly boosts the power of any mecha (potentially, anything at all) with mostly unknown origins goes by the name THE POWER. Whenever a character mentions this, the only subtitles that would show on the screen would say THE POWER! in gigantic orange letters (the color someone or something becomes when infused with it).
  • This Gurren Lagann scene is an example of the first technique mentioned (in the last few seconds).
• During Lucy's Start of Darkness from Elfen Lied, the moment when Lucy snaps and murders the cruel kids who have just beaten her little puppy to death has her final words ("...ARE YOU!!!") subtitled in red. In some Fan Subs, the font changes as well.
  • The same effect was used by at least one fansub group in the final scene of Higurashi: When They Cry's Watanagashi-hen, when Mion (apparently) murders Keiichi in his hospital bed.
    • They got that from the Visual Novel.
  • Yet again the same effect is employed by a fansub group in the SHUFFLE! OVA, when Kaede snaps and searches for a scared stiff Asa-senpai with a butcher knife in hand.
• One Pokémon: The Series fansub uses the typewriter-like font "Prestige Elite" for the Pokédex.
• Hoshin Engi is a shounen manga which loves to play with this, for example during a no weapons duel between two characters Street Fighter-esque health bars and names appear at the top of the panel and when the protagonist uses drunken fist to humiliate his opponent the panel arrangement becomes that of a 4koma (which greatly annoys his more serious opponent when he notices it).
• Kenichi Sonoda often plays around with panel orientation, for example turning the panel upside down, to indicate the use of the alien Artificial Gravity tech in Cannon God Exaxxion.
• Played for Laughs during one scene in Juuni Senshi Bakuretsu Eto Ranger, Nyorori is jealously imagining Peter Pan and Wendy flying. Acrophobic Peter Pan yanks his thought bubble away, crumples it up, and tosses it aside. Nyorori then desperately tries to iron it back together as Peter tells his story.
• In the first episode of Princess Princess, Akira jokes that the school is from another dimension, whereupon Tooru pictures the background changing to a picture of space. Akira comments that he said another dimension, not space, and Tooru changes the background so it's all swirly. He asks if thats better, Akira says yes and they continue on with the story.
• In the second volume of Return to Labyrinth, Mizumi "steals" the speech bubbles of Mayor Spittledrum, rearranging them to say something entirely different.
• In Gunsmith Cats, one of the protagonists is wearing ear protection while shooting. She and the audience can barely hear what an another character is saying until she takes them off.
• Tamaki in Ouran High School Host Club's first episode is seen leaning on one of the notices that pop up every now and then.
• Interestingly, One Piece has an example here. The so-called "Levels" of Impel Down are written with Roman letters by Oda himself, katakana spelling shown above, and are also written with Roman letters when the characters mention them. However, in Luffy's speech bubbles, they're written purely with katakana. The reason for this is unknown, but might be related to Luffy's rather childish speech pattern.
• In One-Punch Man, Saitama's face is usually drawn in a very basic style, as if to give the impression that he's so lazy the artist couldn't be arsed to finish drawing him. He gains an Art Shift to the detailed style of the rest of the cast on the rare occasion that he takes something seriously.
  • "Tornado of Terror" Tatsumaki is usually drawn in the detailed style the rest of the cast get, but occasionally she'll revert to a ONE-esque doodle.
• The second, remade Tokyopop translation of the Magic Knight Rayearth manga features a different font for each kind of character.
• Medaka Box: Most of Kumagawa Misogi's dialogue (even his thoughts) are marked with quotation brackets. This is to highlight that every one of his words is a fabrication that may or may not be true, making even the honest truth indistinguishable from a blatant lie. Apparently, this habit is a "cool act" meant to keep his true feelings distanced from others. But on the rare occasions when he drops the brackets, it means he's being entirely up-front about his feelings.
• Every speech bubble to be connected to Ichiya in Fairy Tail is full of sparkles.
• In Kill la Kill, while Cute But Psycho Nui never directly breaks the fourth wall, she does make liberal use of Ninja Props (like leaning on her Boss Subtitles and stroking Satsuki's hair through a split-screen divider) and Limited Animation to make her appear more creepy and inhuman.
• Chapter 74 of Kaguya-sama: Love Is War (which was one big Affectionate Parody of Shoujo manga), had a page with massive ads that took up a third of the space, much like in an actual Shoujo magazine.
• Anything involving the witches in Puella Magi Madoka Magica has an Art Shift. It's clear the characters think what they're seeing is disturbing, but you also get the impression that what we the viewers are seeing, no matter how jarring, is really only an approximation of the horror actually witnessed by the girls in the anime.
• My Hero Academia: When Izuku starts muttering to himself (something he does a lot since he tends to overthink things), his word balloons are surrounded by "butsu butsu", the Japanese onomatopoeia for muttering, instead of the solid linework used for normal speech.
• Anime-Gataris: The Reality Bleed of the anime world to the real world is represented by the fourth wall gradually being whittled away until nothing's left while the Anime Club's antics become increasingly Troperiffic. This comes to a head in episode 11, where the world starts turning the series' formatting (jump cuts, credits, Art Shifts, Retcons) into tangible, real concepts that are accepted as a part of everyday life... at least until it goes absolutely haywire.
• In the English localisation of The Girl from the Other Side, the Outsiders speak using a different font to that of the other characters. Then, when Teacher gives up his soul in order to save Shiva, he starts speaking in the same font.
• In Yotsuba&!, five-year-old Yotsuba speaks entirely in hiragana (the simplest form of Japanese writing and the only one she knows) using a bold, curvy font that reflects her age and energy. Everyone else speaks in a standard manga font with an appropriate amount of katakana and kanji. The English localization by Yen Press uses a similarly bold and cartoony font for her, which carries over to ten-year-old Child Prodigy Chiyo Mihama in the author's other work, Azumanga Daioh.
• Shimeji Simulation: Invoked in one page of Chapter 44, where the whole page transitions from a vanilla pictorial manga into a text-based interaction between Yomikawa and Shijima. Marking the contrast is the page in this said chapter is peppered with philosophical contexts uttered by Yomikawa.

---