Roasting Apple Black, Chapter 3 (Part 2)

Mysterious introductions and bad page layouts

Cinnamon Roll Sano runs his mouth in an especially clumsy panel layout.

Yellow line is how I first read these panels. Blue line is how you’re supposed to read it. The red dot connotes the start point.

i realized i missed more text (bottom of second panel, near opal’s elbow) because this is so fucking dense and never stops.

Opal’s big face in the foreground adds to the confusion (so it’d be easy to confuse the “BUTTERFLIES? IS THAT WHAT IT IS?” dialogue box as something she’s saying). There’s such little consideration for balancing the panel and thinking through where someone’s eye naturally lands.

This is what I mean when I say this manga is “difficult”. It’s not just the extensive lore and everyone being a notch too mouthy. I mean Whyt thinks that simply having a panel read left-to-right is good enough and calls it a day. These little missteps add up and create a frustrating experience.

If I’m not rereading to try to suss out what information I need to remember, then I’m rereading because the language is clumsy, or I’m rereading because the paneling is outright incompetent. There haven’t been any pages where I can effortlessly just breathe in what’s happening.

We also learn that Opal has a roommate.

Where is Opal’s roommate? I haven’t seen her in any of the classroom scenes or around the school. By Sano’s logic, I can assume that Lily the White Girl and Neon the Goth Girl are roommates, since they’re always hanging out. This is the first I’m hearing about Opal’s roommate.

Opal seems more concerned with the tourist from Youta who “ditched” her, but a roommate being MIA seems like a bigger deal (he’s a tourist, so what, he probably found a killer match on Grindr and didn’t want to fumble it). The fact that Opal keeps bringing up this missing tourist means that He’s Going to be Relevant. I’m guessing Roommate-chan isn’t going to matter.

While I’m making guesses, I’ll guess that the Mysterious Guy at the end of chapter 2 is actually the tourist from Youta.

You know what, I’m so sure of myself, I’ll wager a bet against myself and this terrible series.

I’ll subscribe to Whyt’s patreon at the $50 level for 1 month if I’m wrong about Mysterious Guy being the tourist from Youta.

Here. I’ll show Mysterious Guy’s picture from the end of chapter 2, because now he’s relevant. Because now you care about him. Because now there’s a fucking purpose that can lead up to something and you’ll eventually get a tangible cause-and-effect payoff in this story.

When you keep setting things up and being vague and promising what’s to come, I can only feel frustrated seeing a new player enter the game.

I’m thinking back to all of the other greatest “mysterious character introductions” in anime. Usually they’ll mutter something to themselves like “Ah, so we finally reunite, brother…” and I’m slapping my forehead like, well shit! That’s the guy’s brother?! Now I care! Now I wanna see this mysterious transfer student!

There was one unfortunate manga that did a “mysterious transfer student,” gave her a super cute design, and the poor thing was cancelled a few chapters later. It was clearly a last-ditch attempt to interject a zany new element into the story, to try to get people interested in their serialization. And it didn’t work. Because just declaring “new transfer student” isn’t a guarantee that everyone’s going to shit their pants with excitement over this new story element. Not every character reveal is rolled out with the intensity of the Smash Bros character teaser.

I’d like to direct you to the wisdom of old, my favorite anime copypasta:

i got this new anime plot. basically there’s this high school girl except she’s got huge boobs. i mean some serious honkers. a real set of badonkers. packin some dobonhonkeros. massive dohoonkabhankoloos. big ol’ tonhongerekoogers. what happens next?! transfer student shows up with even bigger bonkhonagahoogs. humongous hungolomghononoloughongous

Do you know why this copypasta has withstood the test of time, why this is so memetic? Because when done well, in actual ecchi anime, this shit legitimately works for its intended coombrain audience.

This hypothetical anime pitch is an ecchi story where people are reading this for the girl’s figure, so seeing her out-classed is a surprising story element that would excite readers. There’s also the internal struggle: if you’re already attached to the first girl, would you break your waifu allegiance for a girl with even bigger breasts?

But, again: Apple Black is an ecchi-free zone, so I’m not expecting this mysterious guy to be secretly wearing a chest binder under that cloak and he’s concealing his breast-size powerlevel.

The most exciting twist is if this guy was the one who advocated for Sano to be kept in hiding. What will he do, now that Sano is in public and going to school?

When Sano was playing capture-the-flag with Mikael, we saw that he had genuine anxiety that he would lose the game, get kicked out of school, and have to go back to living on the island in relative isolation. If this Mysterious Guy played into our protagonist’s biggest fear, that’s an easy way for the audience to also care about Mysterious Guy.

But he’s not alluding to Sano’s isolation. I don’t know what he’s doing. I don’t know who he is. I don’t know who he’s waiting for or what moves he’s going to make. I just know he’s going to make a move, and I’m supposed to care.

Also, nice job on the top-down speech bubble placement, jackass.

There was a YouTube review on Apple Black that said they were confused if this reads left-to-right or right-to-left, since this looks so much like a manga, but it reads left-to-right. This is being far too charitable to Apple Black. I’m enough of a weeaboo that I have to mentally re-adjust when reading a comic that goes left-to-right, but I’m able to make the mental shift within a few pages. I can’t do that with Apple Black, because so many of the panels intuitively make more sense if they’re made to read right-to-left.

Before I knew any Japanese, I decided I would make all of my comics right-to-left. I tried left-to-right and I hated it, because it didn’t feel natural. I’m surrounded by manga, and that’s what I want to make.

There’s also the practical reason for myself, as a student of manga.

Using right-to-left wasn’t just a declaration of wanting to be seen “as manga,” but it meant I could more easily use manga as a resource. I look on my bookshelf, full of manga, and I can use their page layout and panel flow as reference, without needing to take that extra step to adjust it for left-to-right. Paneling and flow is one of the trickiest things to figure out. I could go to the library and find endless books on how to structure a story. There’s plenty of YouTube tutorials on how to design a character. If you want to master comic paneling, this is mostly met with a shrug. You’re told to read Scott McCloud and figure out the rest through trial-and-error. Why should I add this extra road block?

Panel flow is something I’m still trying to piece together.

Stellar Witch Lips, illustrated by Kotoko Ichi (released 2020) is a little-known shoujo series that got me to rethink paneling: make everything bigger, flashier, easier on the eyes. A few years later, I read “The Shonen Jump Guide to Making Manga” (released 2022) and I took with me the biggest piece of advice: every page should have one big panel to draw the reader’s attention, and you build around that. I saw how Kotoko Ichi seamlessly applies this principle to every page of Stellar Witch Lips, and their style made more sense.

I am still learning. I take to heart the advice of editors who are kind enough to critique my manga, and anons who give their brutally honest gut-reaction to why my work sucks. I see what other manga do right and wrong and try to expose myself to a wide range of manga. But by exposing myself to mostly manga, that in itself is limiting. I’ve read very little European comics and even less of the “Big Two.”

If I was a better artist, with a more worldly input, I would be able to make a comic that reads left-to-right. Boichi, Felipe Smith, and Juan Albarran have made comics of both left-to-right and right-to-left reading orientation. They understand the art form and have breathed in a wide range of influences. They may be outliers, but they have shown switching reading orientations is possible.

Whyt has defended his choice to make his manga left-to-right in the past: it reads in English, so he’s going to have it match that reading orientation. I see nothing wrong with that. But I’m not confident he’s sufficiently studied enough enough comics (left-to-right or otherwise) to have this choice be particularly meaningful.

Which I know must sound real fuckin’ rich, since he holds a master’s degree in fine arts. Seriously, how do you walk away with a fine arts master’s degree and continuously make this top-down speech bubble mistake in your comic book? Was every lecture just in one ear, out the other, as you were daydreaming about who could beat up who? Jesus christ, if I spent the cash for an art degree and still made a manga this fucking clumsy, I’d ask for my money back.