Machine translation notice This English version was produced by machine translation and may contain inaccuracies or awkward phrasing.

Note: this piece is a loose critical reflection written after finishing My Broken Mariko. The original version was first posted on Douban.

I finished it while depression was hitting hard, which definitely intensified the emotional impact. I liked it a lot. The main plot really only has the scale of a short story, but it is stretched into the length of a mid-length work. In that sense, and also in its themes, it feels very close to Look Back. I have always felt that many comic tutorials in China obsess over compressing page counts, insisting that if one page can explain something then you should never use two, while ignoring the fact that this is often a compromise made for commercial reasons. Comics are an art of controlling time. The arrangement of panels and shots is a way of operating both time and emotion. If people decide that a comic is only “good” when it tells a complete story within a limited number of panels or pages, then that is the real waste of what makes comics special as an art form. That is also why works like these can have only the dramatic volume of a short piece while still unfolding with the breadth of a longer one. Using paneling and narrative arrangement to build an emotional current that moves the reader is one of the unique powers of comics, and also the greatest strength of these works.

Unlike Look Back, My Broken Mariko takes a different narrative strategy despite telling a somewhat similar story. Both works hinge on the death of a key character. In My Broken Mariko, that event is placed right at the front, and memories of the friend are interwoven into the narration through flashback, creating something like a parallel structure. Look Back, by contrast, tells the protagonist’s redemption in a fully chronological order.

From the standpoint of construction, My Broken Mariko is clearly less restrained from the very beginning. Its goal is to keep striking the audience with strong emotion all the way to the final moment. Look Back is obviously more restrained and more third-person in perspective. But it is worth noticing that the fantasy line and the memory panels in the final climax of Look Back are, in essence, doing the same kind of work that My Broken Mariko is doing almost throughout. From my own experience as a creator, the kind of script used in My Broken Mariko is actually easier to write. The difficulty lies in the images, the paneling, and the arrangement, because the memory line itself does not carry that much information. If you understand the method behind this kind of work, then aggressive intercutting is often easier to make effective. A fully chronological structure, on the other hand, requires a much stronger script and an accumulation of feeling that seeps in almost silently. In other words, it is more likely to expose weaknesses in the writing. This is only my personal reading.

Returning to the work itself: this is a very pure example of emotion-first creation. In its most important dimensions, arrangement, paneling, and performance, the author handles everything beautifully. The level of finish in the artwork is also so high that you almost fail to notice how relatively thin or flawed the script sometimes is.

That suddenly reminded me of another work by a Chinese author, which I think was called something like Manga Life. The subject is not similar, but it is also a work that prioritizes emotional output above all else. From my own perspective, though, that piece is nowhere near these two in terms of arrangement, paneling, and the other aspects mentioned above. More importantly, it lacks the understanding that comics are an art of using shots and paneling to control time.

I really hope more creators realize that comics are not just an art of telling stories, not merely plain sequential narration. They are an artistic method for expressing emotion through the arrangement of the script, the performance of the characters, the scale of the panels, the interaction between panels, and the overall composition of the page. That is one of the things that distinguishes comics from other artistic media.

Another thought: I just checked the ratings for the film adaptation of the same title, and they are a bit lower than those for the manga. There is something worth thinking about in that difference too.

One of the major characteristics of black-and-white comics is the use of screentones and grayscale. For me, grayscale in black-and-white comics should always serve expression before it serves realistic light and shadow. In this sort of emotion-first black-and-white comic, the handling of grayscale and lighting in the image is a devastatingly powerful weapon. That is also why I feel black-and-white comics have a special strength in emotional expression compared with color comics and film, which are often more faithful to realistic lighting. It is not that color-based media cannot do it. They can. But the method is completely different, and it is much harder for a creator’s own opinion to produce the same effect.

Another black-and-white comic I love and would mention here is Only Remembering You. It is European rather than Japanese, and it does not use screentones but pencil, yet it expresses the same kind of method very clearly.

Color comics can do this too, probably by working through color tone to reach the same end. One that left a deep impression on me recently was Spring Equinox, Autumn Equinox. In my mind, both of these are top-tier comic works.

Roughly speaking, unless a color comic is working in a documentary mode, I do not think it should begin by prioritizing the faithful restoration of light and shadow. Those color comics that simply use flat cel-style rendering to reproduce realistic lighting are also wasting what is distinctive about the medium and the subject.

In my personal view, the script of My Broken Mariko still has some weaknesses. For example, the role of the long-haired man is not really that important, his characterization is not sufficient, and his relationship to the main line is not integrated as tightly or as elegantly as it could be. His function feels too instrumental and too goal-oriented. The protagonist’s arc is also not quite enough for me. In my own thinking about writing character arcs, transformation needs both rational causes and, at the end, an emotional event that completes the arc. This work is somewhat lacking in the former. Personally, I think that if the protagonist had not moved forward quite so far by the ending, the ending would have felt smoother. From that angle, even though the spectacular motivation behind the arc in Look Back also arrives rather suddenly, it works much better because the conceptual leap is so large and the logic supporting it is so complete.

There are many works worth mentioning when it comes to writing character arcs. One comic I would recommend is Lulu by the Sea, which is centered on character arc and handles it beautifully.

There is also another quality in this author’s work that deserves respect. Generally speaking, it is very difficult to place a comedic drawing style inside serious expression, and doing so really tests the author’s skill. Many commercial creators cannot even handle serious expression at all. The moment they need to become serious, they fall back on cute deformation, chibi gags, or comedy to cover things up, or else they settle for blunt, flat narration. This is especially true of some flashy and visually noisy commercial comics in China. The moment they need to say something serious, they switch into chibi mode or inject comedy, and it makes me roll my eyes immediately. What amazes me here is that the author not only uses a comedic style and comedic content with complete fluency, but also places them very naturally inside a serious theme, even inside a work whose overall tone is deeply sad. Respect.