Postby classicalzawa » Mon Nov 28, 2011 1:59 am
I did more so at first, but now I don't. Still, it can be a case by case basis, for example, the artwork in Trigun made it damn near impossible for me to follow.
I'd say if you're having trouble following most shojo that you're just reading the wrong ones. Though I will admit I had some trouble on the bubble placement on Fruits Basket since I've never seen any other manga do the quite like that.
Now, as for the side mangaka talk panels? Yeah, that's definitely more of a shojo thing, but since what they write usually has nothing to do with the manga itself, you can safely ignore them completely or come back and read them later (I usually ignore them unless they're talking about RPGs, the Please Save My Earth ones did quite often). They're part of the page, but not part of the story.
The flower backgrounds or absent ones don't really seem to affect me. It's not like they're taking up valuable scenery space because it's often assumed that they're in the same location and I think the focus then is supposed to be on the expression and/or dialogue. They always seem to draw a new background when they're actually in a new location. Banana Fish did this a lot, you'd often see pages with background on maybe 2 panels normally (though during some of the more badass action scenes they'd be on nearly every single one). But I don't feel like it hampers Banana Fish at all since we know where they are already and that's not the interesting part, the interesting part was the dialogue and when the action was, there were more backgrounds. I do agree that it's more of a shojo thing than a shonen thing (unless you're reading Hunter X Hunter), but weekly shonen also have tons of assistants to get that stuff done. But I think it shifts the focus to the more important thing anyway, but if you're not used to it, it can be like "wuuut?"
