Titus by Studio Ivory

this shit Kicks Ass

Titus is an impressive first manga from Studio Ivory. You can read it on Manga Plus.

I’ll start by listing all of the basic elements it successfully executed: the art is solidly professional and it tells a complete story. The bit of sequel-tease at the end was just subtle enough that I didn’t feel like it was barking at me to tune in next week!!! and any lore and world building is kept to an absolute minimum. They want you to care about the characters, but they don’t shy away from this being a punchy action shonen.

The story begins with Surgeon Eva on trial for involuntary manslaughter, since she failed to save a life during surgery. Does it matter how she got there? Was the patient already a gonner? How hard did she try?

Doesn’t matter!

She’s in deep shit and being sentenced to 10 years in prison. We get an Anime Mindbreak moment with a creative art-style shift—

—but Eva steps up and requests a trial by combat. She’s taken to a slew of prisoners, and selects Titus as her proxy-fighter. From there, we learn Titus has a real slacker attitude and pyro powers, and he’s facing off with a more typical Barbarian-looking dude. It’s a decent fight scene, and it fully delivers on the incredibly fun “crouching moron, hidden badass” trope.

Another thing I absolutely loved were the character designs. I was surprised to see in the credits Jm_Flow_Arts “Assisted with character art and paneling”. There’s a lot of intricacies with these designs- and having extra hands for this task strengthened the final product. Even the background characters feel very “real” —we only see a slathering of the Mob Brush in bigger crowd scenes. Otherwise, everyone looks like they’re on the way to the Steampunk Convention. Fuck yes.

My biggest critique is the background art.

It’s all very clean and well-executed. I have a good sense of space for this manga and it’s able to properly convey where the characters are and placed in the scene.

However, there’s little things holding this back from being truly incredible background art. I know it’s almost there, which is why I can’t ignore it.

There’s one too many scenes where the background inks are too heavy. Even if I have a good spatial sense of what’s happening, this little detail makes the characters feel like they’re not “Really” there.

See what I mean? Its so close!!!

There’s also the issue of some backgrounds feeling a notch too rigid and polygonal.

On Uega Art’s Youtube video sharing behind-the-scenes for this manga, he shared how much he uses the ruler tool in Clipstudio. He’s remarkably skilled with the ruler tool. This is a good manga to look at if you want to see where ruler-tool mastery can take you.

But now that UegaArt/Studio Ivory has demonstrated they’ve maxed out the ruler tool path, they need to level up other technical areas I’d humbly suggest experimenting with different brush effects and being a little more conscious of inking weight. This specific brush set comes to mind. Integrating these effects into the background will make the manga feel much more real.

If you’re struggling with something similar: Paru Itagaki is a good mangaka to study.

Some time into Beastar’s serialization, she switched from traditional to digital art. I initially hated this aesthetic switch since it robbed a lot of the fun from Beastar’s world.

Beastar’s digital art was able to eventually get more of a grungy, organic feeling. Later Beastars was able to take the best of both worlds.

Early Beastars:

Later Beastars:

If you look closely at Beastar’s backgrounds, you can see it figure out through its serialization how to make a sturdy, but lived-in, digital background art. It’s a very interesting case study.

But back to Titus.

Another important note revealed in the behind-the-scenes video: there was some scariness about losing data, and honestly, I would’ve just given up if that happened to me. Just getting it out after something catastrophic like that is a miracle. Now that they’ve lived through that, I’m curious what they’ll make next.