Takehiko Inoue is a Japanese manga industry titan renowned for his works such as Slam Dunk and Vagabond. Manga is an art form that combines the visual and the narrative. My interest in manga motivated me to pursue art classes with the future goal of creating my own visual stories. Inoue is my favorite artist and has a style that I most wish to replicate. Inoue’s visual storytelling is particularly kinetic and makes full use of manga’s grayscale nature through perfect shading and crosshatching to heighten emotion. In the attached Slam Dunk page, note how Inoue only uses motion blurs on the ball and #11. This causes your eyes to flow right-to-left across that panel (manga is read right-to-left) and rest on the panel of #10 receiving the pass. Following #10’s eyeline and momentum brings you down the page to various player reactions who face towards the next page. The particular chapter this page is from uses very little words and relies on the kinetic artwork to carry the reader from page-to-page. Kinetic panel flow strongly differentiates Japanese manga from its western comic counterpart.
Zachary Holloway 
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