Manga or Japanese visual language as a form of communication

Since the emergence of society, people have tried to communicate with their own kind, using various forms of communication. Constantly striving to interact with other people, the person needed to develop public communication over long distances, thus he was looking for different ways and forms of communication. New communication tools led to a variety of forms of transmitted information, and so began to develop visual communication. Visual communication is a type of communication in which the transmission of ideas and messages occurs through two-dimensional images, such as signs, drawing, graphic design, illustration, advertising and electronic resources. Specialists note that “nowadays, illustration is increasingly becoming an element of text formation. The level of integration of all visual forms, as well as of other iconic formations, into a single textual space of printed and electronic publications is very high”¹. By and large, visual communication derived from a sequence of images, existed, from ancient cave paintings to Egyptian tombs, as well as from Mayan friezes to medieval European tapestries. In cultures in which there was a written language, writing was often used in tandem with images for greater clarity of text. This same tradition is still alive today, which can be seen in comics. Comics are, first of all, images of the text in a sequential order. In different cultures, it is customary to talk about comics using the terminology used in their original languages, such as “manga for Japanese comics or comics for French-Belgium comic books of French”². The orientation of the modern world on the visual way of presenting information has led to the appearance of such a visual language as manga. Using a visual-text communication method based on visualization of information, comics (manga) occupy an important place among the media that allows them to be viewed as a special kind media text, integrating lexical and visual components, and as an integral part of the media communication system. This determines the formulation of the main goal of the article: to analyze the manga in the context of the current trends in information visualization, which develop the concept of “manga” through the expansion of the visual language. Caricatures and similar forms of illustration are the most common means of creating images in manga. The modern idea of the manga has developed under the strong influence of the Western tradition. Manga - is primarily pictures. Definition of manga was introduced by mangaka (artist, drawing a manga) Rakuten Kitazawa. He defined the manga as “a form of art of mass production, which is characterized by satire, humor and exaggeration, deliberately condemning the world and ridiculing it, і.є. manga is a caricature”. However, other scholars researchers (R. Gravett, A. Rommens) use “manga» as a visual language, which itself is freely perceived as an “aesthetic style”. Any language that has a written form is necessarily qualified as a visual language, because it depends on your own visual perception of the various markings that make up its written structure. The dual nature of the manga echoes the comparison of the process of reading the picture and the sentence, described by E. Feldman's footnote. If one picture can be considered as a “word”, grammatically speaking, the same can be said about a single image panel in a comic. According to W. Eisner “the panel is the main part of the comic story. But just as a word can be broken into letters, so the panel can be broken up into separate elements. S. McCloud calls these elements “icons”. “Icons” in S. McCloud's understanding refer to “any image that can be used to represent a person, place, thing or idea”³. He divides the “icons” into three categories: Practical, Symbolic and Fine. The understanding of visual creation as a language is due to the fact that the signs are often iconic - they resemble what they mean, which leads to a universal understanding. Consequently, comics are a graphical environment in which images are used to convey a consistent story. Comics are the same medium as cinema, theater, poetry or any other process of conveying a story about a wide variety of subjects for a different audience. This is a combination of art (picture) and literature (text). Comics have developed their own visual language, which can speed up understanding and significantly reduce the “cost” of decoding. Comics like visual communication work and, therefore, perfect visual literacy is required to understand all this. Drawings and sequential images are an integral part of the expression of the human personality and date back to the cave pictures that transformed in modern society into comic books.

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