The Art of Ginga

[Cato]

Sorry about the length and the fact that it's completely unneeded.

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Alright, i'm just going to get right to the point here - I'm writing something of a critique on Yoshi's manga art style. I'm not going to be writing about the anime, since that wasn't drawn by Yoshi himself.

 I'm going to try and put both the pros and cons of Yoshi's drawing style in the essay, feel free to correct me on something that you feel is wrong. I'm trying not put too much of a biased opinion here.

Sorry for any typos, the keyboard sometimes misses letters, and it takes one or five tries to get that key to work.

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First of all, Yoshi's Ginga style could be recognized by anyone. Though the mangas are not as popular as, say, Naruto or any other Shonen comic, the blue and white dog on the cover in unmistakable, especially if he has round, sparkling eyes, and three scars across his forehead. The dogs in Silver Fang are iconic for the way that they are drawn. Here, i'm going to try and put together a map of what goes into drawing the dogs. This isn't a tutorial, it's more or less pointing out the features that his characters show in his drawn works. (Does he even have written works?)

I'm not saying that Yoshi can't draw, because if I attempted something like this, I wouldn't be able to get past the first five pages without running out of ink and giving up. And that doesn't count the weekly deadline! Either he has chapters penned from early on, or he's drawn Weed and Co. so much that it's easy to scribble out a couple of plate-faced pooches on the paper.

Now, this might just be me being an idiot, but apart from the dogs, the rest looks kind of admirable. When I first read Meteor Gin on my kindle (manga reader app, I think) I often stopped to wonder how on earth he was able to get such a detailed snow effect on the trees. How he noted how the snow would cover one side of the tree and not the other, how the dog's paws would sink into the snow, etc. (Though he did seem to forget that in the background we see lots of pine trees, but close up, they're leafless birch or oak.) But other than that, the scenery is not just scribbles, or lazily done. It'd take me half a week to draw one panel with that kind of detail. And he has to draw entire books of these! Either all that, or dogs are much harder to draw than trees and that's why he better at the latter...?

The dogs themselves looked at the most like dogs, and you could tell that they were dogs. It's like Scooby-Doo, he doesn't exactly look like a great dane, but you could still tell he's a big dog. Granted most of the anatomy seems to be made up, and I don't think the Mr. Takahashi looked up dog muscle and skeleton structure, or what can or can not kill/injure a dog in real life.

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From what I've seen, Yoshi seems to have sorted out the types of dogs into 4 different categories-

    1 - Akita. This would be a short dog with stocky legs, a round head, short fur and the jowels don't droop. Pointy ears, and most often a curly tail, sometimes straight, like John's. (Weed, Akame, Kurotora, Sasuke, Koyuki, etc.)

    2 - Shepherd/Setter/"BigDogMcNotAkita". Taller and leaner than others, with long, skinny legs and big, pointy ears (GB and Smith are exceptions to this- please tell me if i'm missing anyone) Their tail is long and kind of bushy, unless the breed determines that it's not. Their necks are long, probably to make them look a bit taller. Their jowls droop a bit more than Akitas, in some cases. (GB, Jerome, John, Llydia, Ben and Ken, Cross. Hougen and P4.)

    3 - Tosas. It's almost always a Tosa Inu, Moss and Jaguar are a couple of exceptions. Big and hulking, they never seem to have a flat face, or the droopy eyes. Nearly all tosas are brownish, and have a "brute glare," little pupils and squinty eyes.) They are perceived as tough, and always a skilled fighter / feared for their strength or reputation.

   4 - Other. Basically dogs like Oliver, for being short and long, Rocket, for being tall and bushy with an odd snout (I think he was trying to draw his muzzle in an arc, like a bull terrier.) Hiro.

But, this seems to help sort out the kinds of dogs that appear, and so there would be a base to start from. If he wanted to make a Shepherd, he would have to look a John for reference.

Their mouths are almost always open, and there are those odd lines at the end of the muzzle that makes in look like the end of a square. But I can see how it can be a bit difficult to draw the muzzle of a dog from a front view, with just a pen.

The younger characters tend to have rounder eyes, and more eyeshine than anyone older. The older dogs have almond shaped eyes, and look more stern than the younger ones. Sometimes, dogs have eyes that are completely black, with a little white in the center.

Females have somewhat bigger eyes and visible eyelashes, but this could be the same for some male dogs as well (Pink Dragon, though a wolf. White Tiger, Kyoushiro.) Honou is something of an exception. The paws are big, and the toes are in line with one another, except when from an angle where only the toe pads are visible.

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 The humans seem to fall under something like this as well, having somewhat rounded faces and stocky build, with the exception of women. Boy children have heavy eyebrows, and Anju as probably the only girl child shown.

This is about the end of my rant, and I feel as though nothing has come out of it. But nonetheless, it's here for future reference. I'll try and clean this up and edit it once I get more facts and details to go into it.

[M-92 Mantis]

I really like this, I agree with the points made, too, on the pros and cons. I feel while Yoshi himself has said he wanted to improve on his art, recently it's taken a turn for the worst, but I won't get into that can of worms since we all know everyone doesn't like his newest work, either for good reason or because bandwagon hype.

I however am a fan primarily of his GDW artwork, from the beginning and at the end of the Hougen arc (although most of the Yukimura/Shougun arc is decent, too). Not just because it's before GDW kinda started to go in a downward slope, but because I liked his idea of his styling of the more... I don't know how to describe it... humanized anime eyes and heads? I didn't mind the rounder heads or shortened legs. In GNG, a character looking at a 3/4 angle had a weird oblong pumpkin head to me, with the muzzle not feeling like it was symmetrical. In GDW, I felt the character angles with heads and faces were done better, along with most expressions. I liked the diversity of breeds that GNG and SSY had also had while still all connecting in the same sort of style. Some character designs were wonky at the beginning, like GB getting a broader head with tiny ears or Mel being long-furred or suddenly short-furred, but it was cool to see Yoshi experimenting with something new.

I liked seeing how much beautiful detail could go into the anatomy and make all the dogs look how they should by breed or character. Weed had the build of an Akita, stocky but swift, while still looking like a very young and vulnerable puppy. GB had the silky fur and lithe body, and Rocket had very curly fur and powerful long legs and muzzle, both looking like they were built for speed, as their breeds are. Heavier characters like Hiro and Hougen looked like massive tanks, making their strength and durability in battle more believable. When you saw a character, you could sort of tell what their skill was: strength, speed, or endurance. Just looking at John or Sniper or Kyoushirou or Toubei (in random examples) just instantly looked like experienced or battle-worn challenges. A character's debut just through art alone made them look imposing, heroic, menacing or friendly. Weird, outlandish designs weren't used as a gimmick of "well you haven't seen anyone look too much like THIS, before," the designs were (usually) trying to correctly portray a breed or build, and also give the character an advantage in some way.

The issue is with Yoshi himself. In his interview in the first BIG Special volume, he says he was embarrassed by Shiroi Senshi Yamato's art, because he was new to drawing dogs. I can understand this, a lot of the very first stuff from SSY is pretty goofy, but later on I loved seeing the detail and realistic anatomy while still having a charming style to it. He said that the art near the end of GDW is where he "improved." I'm sure tons of people now will suddenly agree with him, despite GDWO being notorious for its lackluster work in some volumes, along with anything new after GDW ended, but I will stick by my opinion that this is exactly when his art stagnated and became very basic and hurried. Characters and breeds will look the same in very basic groups like you described above. The only way Yoshi knows how to make them look different now is to add the ridiculous design choices on them, like Masamune's head scarf and Fabio hair and Tenka's vampire fish ears, in example. Sometimes you can't even tell who's who depending on who is standing next to each other.

This goes for humans as well. There's a reason "Daisuke Clone ___" is a saying throughout the fandom. If some characters just decided to cut their hair, we'd be in trouble if they stood next to another guy, because there's a 70% chance they have the exact same face.

[Deleted]

You both make good points, and although I'm really bad at anything art-related, here's what I think...

I admit that Yoshi's art is not the best I've seen in my life. Especially in this new TLW chapters, some poses and drawings look a bit awkward to me (I haven't read anything past GNG). Like the bears, who look really weird to me, and I haven't seen any epic panel like I have in GNG and other random scenes I saw from early GDW. So this leads me to believe Rascal's right about Yoshi's art decline.

And to me, all the dogs look pretty much the same. There are minor differences, but other than the color, I often get confused about who's who. I admit I'm bad at recognising faces, but because Yoshi's style is so peculiar when he draws dogs, I focus on that rather than the differences between a dog and another. This being said, I really like how Yoshi draws dogs. It's a very peculiar style, and although at first it looked really weird and I didn't like it very much, after I got used to it I started liking it more and more.

As for humans... Well, they're generic humans. I don't have much to say about them, since they're not the protagonists in the Ginga universe.

[Kit]

I'm finally contributing to this thread because as I've been practicing dogs and looking at different references, I've noticed quite a few things that have always driven me crazy, but I never quite was able to pinpoint, before.

The biggest is heads. Like M-92 Mantis said, the shape is very weird, but more than that is the placement angles. The angles are always the same, like... two, even when the body angles don't match it. It wasn't as noticeable with his earliest stuff, but it happens almost all the time with a lot of angles.

(Browsed through our IG to find some examples...)

SPOILER: Click to show

You get the idea. The heads just end up looking disconnected and... like they're kinda just half-floating there. Yoshi tends to draw most of the face intact, where it should be obscured, even if the pose calls for more obstruction on one side. Even the thickness of Ginga necks isn't always enough to save it. This is probably my biggest gripe, ever.

The rest is just styling nitpicks, but the paws and shoulders drive me crazy, too, from an anatomical point of view. The shoulders are often mistaken for chest muscles because they are so much higher than the legs, and the two don't match up, at all.

Adding to the decline in art thing, it's just so frustrating, because the weekly chapters should not be an issue, as far as quality drops. He has ALWAYS done weekly chapters. GNG's were weekly chapters, and look at how much everyone praises that art. And at that time, he was working on TWO series. But I won't get into that much, because it's pretty much a dead horse, at this point.

I agree with everything else that has been stated. Especially the lack of variety in breed body types, and the humans all looking the same. In later series like GDA, sometimes I literally have trouble telling who's talking, unless they have distinctive traits like a beard or something. That's one reason I love SSY and BnF's art so much. Both the people and dogs were very distinctive.

[itraka]

imo, while Takahashi's anatomy wasn't as good in GNG as it was in GDW, there was more effort put into GNG than the subsequent series.

It's sometimes hard to tell characters apart aside from scars and hair because he's trying to draw realistic dogs and a huge cast of them.

I do like his style, but the anatomy indeed is awkward from time to time.