Why Do Manga and Anime Characters Look the Way They Do? by Margaret O'Connell A few months ago, a co-worker of mine mentioned that she had recently seen Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away  a fact which I found mildly surprising, since she had previously informed me that I was the only person she knew who so much as read science fiction. In the course of enthusiastically discussing the film, my co-worker expressed the opinion that Miyazaki had deliberately tried for a multicultural effect when creating the character designs in order to increase the movie's appeal to an international audience. I found this rather ironic, since, as anyone who has watched just about any of the more popular anime imported to the United States knows, the human cast of Spirited Away are perhaps the closest thing to realistically Japanese-looking characters in any anime seen here since Akira or Serial Experiments Lain. For one thing, they all have reasonably normal-sized eyes and black hair, unlike the human stars of more sweepingly commercially successful imports such as Yu-Gi-Oh!, Pokemon, and Sailor Moon. Although Yu-Gi-Oh! and Sailor Moon, at least, are clearly intended to take place in some approximation of modern-day Japan (Pokemon's setting appears to be some vaguely Japan-like region of a mildly-variant alternate world in which virtually all animal and marine life consists of cute, super-powered "pocket monsters", or pokemon), all of these shows' major cast members include at least one blond or redhead  not to mention the occasional lavender-haired teenage villain (i.e., James/Kojiro in Pokemon) or ziggurat-headed hero whose zigzag locks are an improbable mixture of purple, scarlet, and yellow (Yugi himself). Even the title character of the very specifically Japanese historical adventure series Rurouni Kenshin, the legendary imperial "battousai" (man-slayer) of the nineteenth-century Meiji Restoration, is a lavender-eyed redhead whom most Western viewers wouldn't have a clue was Japanese if he weren't dressed in a pink and white kimono and armed with a (reversed) samurai sword. These apparently un-Japanese character designs are not a new departure for anime, or for the manga that so many of them are based on. Although the earliest anime series to be shown on American TV, Osamu Tezuka's Astro Boy, Speed Racer, and (in some markets) Eighth Man and Gigantor, featured mostly dark-haired human characters, they were drawn in a relatively cartoony, Disney-influenced style which made it easy to assume that all the cast members were Caucasian. In fact, as more than one anime historian has pointed out, many viewers who were fans of these shows in the 1960's, when they originally aired in the U.S., never realized that their favorite series were actually Japanese imports rather than homegrown products. So why is it that there have traditionally been so many apparently Caucasian-looking characters in anime and manga, even the ones that are specifically set in Japan? According to noted manga authority Frederik L. Schodt, author of Manga! Manga!: The World of Japanese Comics (Kodansha International, 1983) and Dreamland Japan: Writings on Modern Manga (Stone Bridge Press, 1996), the roots of this phenomenon can be traced back as far as the forced "opening" of Japan to the West by Commodore Perry in the nineteenth century. In Schodt's words, "Before the Japanese came into contact with Westerners, they depicted themselves with Asian features, and often smaller-than-life eyes, in scroll paintings and woodblock prints." In contrast, "Prior to the Meiji period, which began in 1868,...'Europeans' were drawn as huge hairy freaks with enormous schnozzles." However, once Perry and his entourage arrived in 1853, introducing European-based concepts of art and esthetics along with their main objective of increased trade between Japan and the West, Japanese artistic ideals began to shift closer to Western models. Initially, this influence appears to have been somewhat gradual and fitful. Schodt cites the example of popular prewar (i.e., pre-World War I) Japanese romance magazines for young women, in which illustrations by artists such as Jun'ichi Nakahara depicted heroines with large dreamy eyes in a distinctly Western style. Yet in the 1890's, only a decade or two before these illustrations appeared, American writer Lafcadio Hearn, who spent much of his life in Japan and eventually became a Japanese citizen, commented in a letter to a friend, "When I show beautiful European engravings of young girls or children to Japanese, what do they say? I have done it fifty times, and whenever I was able to get a criticism, it was always the same:  'The faces are nice,  all but the eyes: the eyes are too big,  the eyes are monstrous.' " Obviously, the transition from this view to today's popular bias in favor of anime characters with oversized  even saucer-like  eyes did not take place overnight. Schodt considers the impact of the Second World War to be a decisive factor in this process: "Defeat in World War II caused a national loss of confidence that clearly extended to Japan's self-image. Western ideals of beauty were not only accepted but pursued, often to a ludicrous degree (operations to remove the epicanthic fold of skin over the eye, which creates the graceful, curved look in Asian eyes, are still popular). Nowhere was this tendency more pronounced than in manga." Osamu Tezuka, the founding father of the modern Japanese manga and anime industry, set the tone for post-World War II Japanese comics by adopting cinematic techniques inspired by animation, particularly American animation. As in much animation of this period, Tezuka's character designs usually featured disproportionately large eyes, a tendency which was further exaggerated when he began to draw girls' romance comics such as Ribon no Kishi (Ribbon Knight). According to Schodt, "Tezuka, and the other men and later women artists who followed him, found that a Caucasian look, with dewy, saucer-shaped eyes, was extremely popular among young readers and that the bigger the eyes, the easier it was to depict emotions ... Eventually, depicting Japanese people with Caucasian features and large eyes became an established convention; readers internalized the images, and demanded them." Japanese history professor and anime expert Antonia Levi, author of Samurai from Outer Space: Understanding Japanese Animation (Open Court, 1996), concurs with Schodt's view that the oversized eyes and generally Caucasian appearance of many anime characters stems from the artistic conventions established by early shoujo (girls') manga. However, she proposes a more specifically sociocultural explanation for how this came about. According to Levi, when the first generation of women manga artists took over the girls' comics genre in the 1960's, they wanted the option of doing storylines with more action and plot development than the stereotypically sugary, sentimental romances their male predecessors had assumed young female readers would prefer. However, since it was still socially impermissible for female characters to do anything particularly unconventional or adventurous if the story were set in anything resembling contemporary 1960's Japan, the female manga artists of this pioneering group resorted to setting a far greater proportion of their stories in Europe and the United States than their counterparts in shonen, or boys', comics did. In Levi's words, ...the first wave of shojo manga written by women for girls dealt with a never-never land called the West, preferably the historical West. In that never- never land, women were strong and ambitious. They still lived for romance, but they also led interesting and exciting lives. Often they masqueraded as men in order to do things that might seem otherwise impossible for women. Even the men they loved and often lost had a female look to them. They were pretty men with eyes as large and lustrous as any woman and sensitive, caring natures. Levi goes so far as to assert that the notoriously willowy, feminine look of many male manga characters, especially in shoujo manga, is directly attributable to what eventually became a sort of symbiotic relationship between shoujo manga and the uniquely Japanese institution of the Takarazuka theater, an all-female troupe which also caters primarily to a teenage female audience. The biggest stars of this troupe are usually the male impersonators who play the male leads. In fact, these cross-dressing actresses are often the objects of crushes by their young teenage fans  a development which Levi states most Japanese parents consider a normal part of growing up, and even regard as "nicer" and "purer" than the alternative of their daughters' first experience of puppy love being directed toward an actual male. In Levi's view, the sensitive, delicate-looking, sexually non-threatening male characters in the first wave of female-scripted shoujo manga were not mere variations of the androgynous pretty-boy pop stars from David Cassidy to the Hansen brothers who have held a similar appeal for many young girls in the West. What these shoujo manga boys and men really looked like "were not just idealized males, but the male impersonators of the Takarazuka theater." In fact, during the 1960's and early 1970's, when it was rare for any but the most overwhelmingly popular manga to be made into anime, shoujo manga became a significant source of script material for the Takarazuka theater, which was far more likely to express interest in dramatizing shoujo storylines than the still relatively small anime industry was. As early anime studios' preference for the more action-oriented shonen (boys') manga as source material suggests, manga and anime, although closely related, are two separate art forms whose audiences are by no means identical. Manga, which constitute approximately forty percent of all printed matter produced in Japan, have so pervaded every conceivable niche of mainstream Japanese society that, in addition to the action-adventure, romance, horror, and science fiction genres Western comics fans might reasonably expect, there are also manga for adults devoted to everything from cooking to business to golf. In Dreamland Japan, Frederik Schodt states that at one point in the early 1990's, there were no fewer than ten manga magazines revolving around the popular pinball-like arcade game pachinko. Anime, on the other hand, tends to be aimed at a younger and less specialized audience. In his "From the Inside Looking Out" behind the scenes anime-industry column in Animerica Extra, Vol. 5, No. 4, Scott Frazier asserts that, despite the widespread popularity of printed manga among every age group and every niche of society, in its native Japan televised anime is still primarily associated with and aimed at children and young people, albeit to a lesser extent than animated cartoons are in the United States. In Frazier's words, "The majority of anime shows are aimed at kids, and almost every show on the air is written for audiences 18 and under. A famous producer, who at the time had more TV hits than anyone else, said, 'Everything has to be written for 14-year-olds, no matter what the concept, or it will fail in the end.'" This does not necessarily have the bowdlerizing, sanitizing effect that might be expected by Americans accustomed to the kind of Saturday morning TV censorship which deems many 1940's Bugs Bunny cartoons too violent to be shown. Japanese ideas of what sorts of sights and concepts are suitable for children  or at least not unsuitable enough to be assiduously concealed from them  tend to be far more flexible than those prevalent in the United States, as one might surmise from the Cartoon Network's monotonous warnings that certain of its late-night Adult Swim anime programs "may contain material parents might not find suitable for viewers under the age of fourteen," and from the age ratings on many English-language manga paperbacks. For example, TOKYOPOP recommends Kodocha: Sana's Stage, a series about an irrepressibly cheerful eleven-year-old girl TV star, for audiences 13+  two years older than the story's heroine. Presumably this is due to the not-quite-as-sophisticated-as-she-thinks-she-is Sana's habit of referring to her handsome young manager as her gigolo  a term she picked up from her eccentric writer mother's novel "The Gigolo and I" without fully comprehending its meaning  or even her lover, although there is nothing pedophilic going on between them and Sana herself is shocked at the thought of any male's doing more than kissing her on the cheek. In vivid contrast to these better-safe-than-sorry warnings from the American packagers of translated manga and anime, Mitsuhisa Ishikawa, the head of Production IG, the Japanese animation studio which created the violent animated origin sequence for O-Ren Ishii, Lucy Liu's yakuza boss/assassin character in the Quentin Tarantino film Kill Bill Volume 1, remarked to an interviewer in the October 21, 2003 issue of the Financial Times that he was planning to take his seven-year-old daughter to see the R-rated-in-the-U.S. Tarantino film the next day. In accordance with this idiosyncratically broader, more lowest-common-denominator vision of the viewership for anime on television, Japanese anime producers have traditionally tended to avoid or alter any manga source material which they believed might be uncongenial to significant segments of the audience, particularly the male audience. Again, Japanese concepts of what young males might be willing to watch are somewhat less rigidly reductive than those of their American counterparts, some of whom still assert, despite the across the board popularity of characters such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Xena, Warrior Princess, that male viewers won't watch TV shows with female leads. It was this belief which provided the rationale for many of the extensive cuts and changes made to transform the girl-centered Japanese anime Card Captor Sakura into the somewhat more coed English-language Cardcaptors, which aired the original show's fourth episode as its American premiere because it was the first one in which heroine Sakura's boy rival, Li Syaoran, showed up. Up until the 1980's, when the reduced costs of computer animation and the overwhelming commercial success of such 1970's anime as Macross and Space Cruiser Yamato on Japanese TV led to a dramatic rise in the number of animated offerings, this attitude meant that even much of the more action-oriented shoujo material never got adapted into anime at all. However, once the trajectory from manga to anime became relatively standard for any reasonably popular manga with sufficient youth appeal, shoujo series such as the "magical girls as superheroines" titles Sailor Moon and Card Captor Sakura and the time-travel adventure/romance Fushigi Yuugi began to make the leap from page to screen. However, in order for them to do so, some of the distinctly shoujo stylistic features of the original manga were often altered for anime purposes. In Sailor Moon, the most notable change appears to have been the animators' usage of easier to follow, more linear scene layouts and action sequences, in contrast to the occasional pages of the original comics in which the heroines seemed to be hovering amongst indistinct swirls of mist in tableaux whose significance or intended impact was often unclear to the untrained eyes of Western (and, presumably, non-shoujo-reading Japanese) viewers. In Fushigi Yuugi, as in a number of other shoujo series, there was also a certain amount of alteration in some of the character designs  specifically, the male character designs. As Azure Blue points out in an article on the shoujo/yaoi website Aestheticism, "a large number of shoujo manga heroes tended to appear bulkier in their anime incarnations (i.e. the boys from Fushigi Yuugi). This is done so that muscle-craving male audiences (especially the 'straight' ones), who'd stay away from shoujo manga but might nonetheless watch their anime counterparts as they show up on TV, will not be turned off." Blue, along with Antonia Levi and a number of the guest speakers at the 2003 Big Apple Anime Fest, including the director of the anime version of Alien Nine, goes on to assert that of late the originally polarized shoujo and shonen genres have begun to blend together to produce a greater number of anime and manga which attempt to appeal to both genders by featuring elements of the two styles. In fact, she asserts, "in recent years ... it's the mainstream shounen manga that are adapting a shoujo-ish art style to appeal to readers of both sexes. As the line separating shoujo and shounen begins to thin, so increases the number of prominent boy waif characters in boys' comics." The examples Blue cites of this that would be most familiar to the average American manga fan not fluent in Japanese include some of the more slim and boyish-looking demon opponents of the heroes of YuYu Hakusho. However, a similar, though less extreme, noticeable skinniness is also evident in the protagonists of the manga versions of the shonen series Trigun and Big O, at least compared with their anime counterparts. Whether because of the aforementioned Japanese anime producers' belief that excessive willowiness in heroes is off-putting to the male half of the prospective homegrown audience, or due to the unusually prominent involvement of Western markets such as the Cartoon Network in the very production of this particular series, the TV version of Big O's protagonist, negotiator/giant mecha-driving crimefighter Roger Smith, looks something like a slightly less musclebound, more GQ-clad version of the exaggeratedly broad-shouldered, powerfully built male superheroes of the current American-produced animated Justice League series. The Roger in the Big O manga series (which, according to a note at the back of the Viz edition, was actually created as an after-the-fact adaptation "based on the animated series from Sunrise") is also conspicuously broad-shouldered, albeit more in the style of some of CLAMP's more selectively anatomically exaggerated heroes such as Dr. Shuichiro Kudo in Wish. However, the TV Roger has a less youthful-looking face and a stronger chin, and his trademark black business suits seem noticeably more well-fitted and expensively cut. By comparison, the manga Roger is scrawnier and more immature-looking. In a number of panels, artist Hiroshi Ariga's habit of drawing the hero's starched shirt collar so conspicuously oversized that it appears to be a couple of sizes too big for his rather skinny neck makes the manga Roger look like the TV version's teenage kid brother wearing his anime counterpart's slightly too loose hand-me-down clothes. There is a similar discrepancy between the anime and manga versions of Trigun's pacifist sharpshooter protagonist, Vash the Stampede. The anime Vash is not particularly muscular and, when not in the middle of one of the many gun battles forced on him by various bounty hunters, Gung-Ho Guns, and other enemies, often presents a rather harmless and even goofy appearance. However, he does at least look the estimated age of twenty-four listed on his Wanted poster at the beginning of volume one of the Yasuhiro Nightow manga (English edition published by Dark Horse Manga). For the most part, the Vash in the manga version doesn't. As with Roger Smith, the manga version is noticeably skinnier, and in many scenes is drawn with more unformed-looking facial features than his more adult-looking anime equivalent. In some panels, he is even depicted with eyes fully as large and round as those of Kite, the twelve- or thirteen-year-old boy who plays a pivotal role in the sandsteamer-hijacking story arc. This is actually quite logical in terms of the visual shorthand of manga and anime, in which the size of a character's eyes is often a clue to his or her personality or even moral alignment. As Levi puts it, "Eyes ... are a way of indicating emotion, something that is not always easy to do with a black and white drawing, or even with the greater flexibility of animation. That has carried over into today's anime where sensitive, sympathetic characters usually have larger eyes than other characters." Conversely, evil or cold-hearted characters usually have narrow eyes, while (theoretically) innocent children, even when they are juvenile delinquents or pickpockets like Bikky and Carol in Sanami Matoh's police drama/shounen-ai romance FAKE (TOKYOPOP), often have enormous eyes compared to adults. In shoujo manga especially, teenage girls are frequently depicted with such disproportionately large, glistening, or starry eyes that it often strikes Western readers new to the genre as distractingly weird. (One Tart reviewer described Kira Aso, the heroine of Fuyumi Soryo's teenage romance series Mars, as "a bloody freak" whose "scary eyes" are "the reason why I'm afraid of most manga.") In fact, no less a luminary of the Japanese comics world than Rumiko Takahashi spoofed this glamorously bug-eyed look for cartoon girls in the Urusei Yatsura OVA episode "The Terror of Girly-Eyes Measles". In this video, Ataru Moriboshi, the teenage-boy protagonist of the famous shonen science-fiction comedy series, becomes infected with an alien disease called "the Girl Measles", which turns his eyes as huge and twinkling as those of many female manga and anime characters. Although this condition, which strikes Ataru himself as distinctly grotesque, would seem to be something of a handicap to the high-school horndog's usual girl-chasing ways, he manages to spread the highly contagious virus all over town anyway before the status quo is finally restored. For the most part, it seems to be only in what could somewhat unfairly be described as teen soap opera-type shoujo manga such as Yoko Kamio's Boys Over Flowers/Hana Yori Dango (Viz), Miwa Ueda's Peach Girl (TOKYOPOP), and the aforementioned Mars (TOKYOPOP) that teenage girls' or women's eyes are consistently drawn as much as twice the size as those of boys. This tends to be the case in such series whether the individual female character in question is actually as sensitive and sympathetic as the oversized "windows to her soul" suggest or not. For instance, in Peach Girl, heroine Momo Adachi's alleged best friend, Sae, is a two-faced backstabber who will literally stop at nothing to spoil Momo's chances with Toji, the boy they both like. Yet Sae's eyes are drawn to look just as disproportionately enormous as those of the more genuinely loving and tender-hearted Momo herself. The only exception that I am aware of to this strong correlation between manga which are largely dominated by teen romance and the shoujo technique of portraying the heroine's eyes as literally the size of saucers is the work of Yumi Tamura, an unusually gritty shoujo artist whose thematic preoccupations have been compared to those of Frank Miller. Although Rei, the Japanese Self-Defense Force rescue expert protagonist of Tamura's recent series, Chicago (Viz), is an adult, her perpetually glistening eyes are easily two or three times the size of those of any of the male characters in the strip. If anything, the gender-based ocular discrepancy is even more pronounced in this series than it is in Tamura's earlier political/post-apocalyse fantasy Basara (Viz), in which the adolescent heroine spends much of the story masquerading as her dead dissident-leader twin brother. The teen-romance manga's dramatic difference in the portrayal of the adolescent female and male gaze is rendered even more noticeable by the fact that in such series the female characters' eyes are drawn much rounder and with far more conspicuously dilated irises and pupils than those of their male counterparts. Rei Kashino, the sensitive tough guy male lead of Mars, has eyes that are larger and more luxuriantly-lashed than those of the female characters in many other manga. But they look downright ordinary in comparison to those of the shy, introverted heroine, Kira, whose eyes consist almost entirely of pupil and occupy such a disproportionate amount of her face that she resembles a more refined version of one of those notorious 1960's Keane paintings of tragically bug-eyed waifs. Although the sex-linked ocular dimorphism is not as obvious in non-shoujo works, in shonen (boys') manga as well, once characters hit the age of puberty, girls' eyes generally tend to be depicted as at least slightly larger than those of boys, especially among supporting characters. Interestingly, there are a number of significant exceptions to this rule among shonen manga involving junior high school students, even in series which are, or eventually become, essentially battle manga  i.e., manga revolving around tournament-style combat (such as Pokemon and the later installments of Yu-Gi-Oh! and YuYu Hakusho) or otherwise heavily involving fight scenes in virtually every episode. For instance, in Kazuki Takahashi's manga version of Yu-Gi-Oh!, currently being serialized in the English-language edition of Shonen Jump (Viz), the disproportionately short, still neotenically childish-looking (at least when not possessed by his adult ancient-pharaoh alternate personality) hero, Yugi Mutuo, has eyes which are conspicuously larger than those of any of his classmates, including his female friend Anzu Mazaki (Tea Gardner in the American version of the TV show). In Nobuyuki Anzai's Flame of Recca (Viz), Recca Hanabishi, a boisterous but chivalrous boy who dreams of becoming a ninja when he grows up the way a kid from a European background might fantasize about being a knight, is conspicuously scruffy and roughnecked in appearance and is usually depicted wearing a backwards baseball cap with a bristling shock of hair untidily sticking out of it. However, in many scenes, the idealistic, compassionate Recca's eyes are comparable in size to those of Yanagi Sakoshita, the shy, artistic girl whom he designates his "princess" and swears to serve as her personal shinobi, or ninja bodyguard. In contrast, Tokiya Miyagami, his misguided swordsman schoolmate who becomes fixated on Yanagi because of her resemblance to his beloved dead sister, is a glamorous pretty-boy type, but has relatively small, narrow eyes. Similarly, in Masashi Kishimoto's Naruto, also serialized in Shonen Jump, the title character, a goodhearted but mischievous boy who is widely regarded as a troublemaking pest by most of the people in the mythical village where he attends a sort of Hogwarts School for aspiring ninjas, has eyes which appear to be the same size or larger than those of Sakura, the pretty but snippy female classmate he has a crush on. (In another interesting parallel to Flame of Recca, Naruto also has a narrow-eyed, but conspicuously better-looking, male rival in the form of his teammate Sasuke, although so far the personal conflict between them has played a much smaller role in the story than it does in the corresponding situation in Recca.) However, both Recca and Naruto spend so much of the time with their eyes either squinting in suspicion or anger or crinkled shut with merriment that the surprisingly soulful relative largeness of the orbs in question is far easier to overlook than it is with the more strikingly obvious disparity in ocular size between teenage shoujo manga heroines and the boys and men around them. Another shonen series featuring wide-eyed boys and a rather snippy girl is Hiroyuki Takei's Shaman King, yet another of the manga being serialized in Shonen Jump. The protagonist of this series, Yoh Asakura, is a laid back junior high school slacker type who is also a gifted medium and shaman capable of both communicating with and channeling the powers of ghosts such as the formidable fifteenth-century samurai Amidamaru. Perhaps as a visible mark of their unusual receptivity to the spirit world, both Yoh and his rather panicky bookworm boy sidekick, Manta Oyamada (Morty in the English-language version of the anime currently shown Saturday mornings on Fox), are usually depicted with noticeably large, round eyes. In fact, the nebbishy Manta, who has just enough sixth sense to see, but not channel, ghosts, and is drawn in a more exaggeratedly cartoony style than most of the other characters, has bug eyes which are frequently rendered as simply lidless oversized circles with small dots for pupils. (The most consistent difference between large-eyed boy characters in shonen series and their more conspicuously ocularly-overendowed shoujo teenage girl opposite numbers is that, even in the case of the enormous-eyed Yugi, the boys' irises and pupils tend to be smaller in proportion to the overall size of their eyes. Shoujo girl characters like Mars' Kira and Hana Yori Dango's Tsukushi Makino, on the other hand, frequently have such immensely dilated-looking pupils that in some panels the whites of their eyes are barely visible.) Shaman King's main continuing female character, the peremptory Anna Kyoyama, in contrast, has heavy-lidded eyes which are usually portrayed half-closed with impatience or disdain. However, it is clear from the shape of her eye sockets and high-arched brows that on the rare occasions when she fully opens her eyes, her gaze would be equally as wide as Yoh's. This is only logical, since Anna, too, is a shaman, albeit of a type whose abilities are less suited to the supernaturally-powered battles involved in claiming the title of shaman king from which the series derives its name. Accordingly, Anna, who has been betrothed to Yoh since childhood despite the fact that both of them are still only in junior high, has made it her mission in life to light a fire under the excessively easygoing Yoh to ensure that he lives up to his potential. Specifically, she is determined to make sure that he is in good enough shape to survive and triumph in the potentially deadly upcoming "shaman fight" worldwide competition  thus enabling her, as his fiancee, to become the first lady of the shaman world. (Although Anna's pushiness and unconcealed vicarious ambition can sometimes make her seem about as sympathetic as Peanuts' Lucy Van Pelt on a bad day, especially in her initial appearances in the strip, in an interview in Shonen Jump No. 9, creator Hiroyuki Takei advised the interviewer to "Please think of her as my signature character" and stated that the relationship between Yoh and Anna was "quite an ideal relationship". Presumably this all comes across somewhat differently to readers in Japan, where there is evidently great national reverence for take-charge nagging mother figures, whether or not this sort of personality would necessarily be the average shonen manga reader's first choice for his fantasy fiancee.) In at least one other shonen strip, Yushihiro Togashi's manga version of YuYu Hakusho (also appearing in Shonen Jump), the protagonist, Yusuke Urameshi, starts out as a narrow-eyed sneering punk with few visible redeeming qualities. However, after being fatally struck by a car while trying to save the life of a small child  an altruistic act so unexpected by the afterlife authorities that they are unable to decide what to do with him without further testing his mettle by means of a series of ghostly tasks and labors  Yusuke gradually begins to temper his derisively defiant attitude. As his afterlife experiences cause his personality to evolve in a more constructive direction, Yusuke's eyes shift to a more stereotypically soulful shape and size as an outward sign of his spiritual growth. The most basic constant in all of the examples above appears to be that however large the eyes of the protagonist (and, occasionally, one or more other exceptional male characters such as Manta in Shaman King and Yugi's equally short, large-eyed grandfather in Yu-Gi-Oh!) may be, most of the other boys and men in the strip will follow the "normal" pattern of having eyes which are noticeably smaller than those of the corresponding female characters. In contrast with the more formulaically sex-linked "girl = naturally sensitive and emotional character = oversized eyes" approach typical of some of the more soap operatic shoujo teen romance manga, the more variegated range of ocular types among male characters in some shonen manga seems designed to subliminally clue in the audience that the one or two exceptionally large-eyed males have hidden depths and should be followed with particularly close attention. (This would also explain at least one aspect of the unusual appearance of Kenshin Himura, the pacifist swordsman title character of Rurouni Kenshin, whose eyes are usually depicted as much larger and rounder than those of any of the other adult male characters in both the anime and the Nobuhiro Watsuki manga, except when he goes into warrior mode to actually do battle. Under those circumstances, as with a number of the large-eyed boy characters discussed above, his eyes change to a more conventionally narrow male configuration.) In this sense, individual variations in eye size among male characters in shonen manga can be seen as a somewhat less obtrusive analogue of the floating flowers which, among other functions, often show up in the background in shoujo manga to spotlight the heroine and other significant characters soon after they first appear (per Matt Thorn's "Shoujo Manga: Comics by Women for Girls of All Ages," Part2). As a further gender-stereotyped corollary to the "eyes as windows of the sensitive soul" concept, adult female characters also generally have larger eyes than men. However, as with most such stylistic "special effects" in manga and anime, there is considerable variation from artist to artist, and sometimes even from panel to panel, in the range and degree of expressive distortion employed to distinguish different types of characters ocularly. For example, in Maki Murakami's Gravitation (TOKYOPOP), scathing-tongued romance novelist Eiri Yuki and his bossy, manipulative older sister Mika both have conspicuously narrower eyes than a number of the more warm-hearted characters, including Mika's noticeably large-eyed husband, Tohma Seguchi, who is at least outwardly much more considerate and concerned about others' feelings than she is. Similarly, in FAKE, volume three, when brash, tough-cookie FBI agent Diana Spacey first appears, barging into a New York City police station insisting on being directed to the chief of detectives' office, her eyes appear to be slightly smaller than those of Detective Randy "Ryo" Maclean, the more gentlemanly of the series' two cop protagonists. (This makes perfect sense, since Ryo is possibly the world's most empathetic and nurturing police officer of either gender, to the point that at the end of the first story arc he more or less adopts Bikky, the ten-year-old street urchin son of a drug dealer whose murder Ryo and his partner, Dee Laytner, had been investigating.) However, in subsequent scenes throughout the story, both Diana's and Ryo's eyes, along with those of most of the other characters, change apparent size for dramatic effect depending on the situation and emotional context. Similarly, in the Trigun, volume one, scene alluded to previously, as Vash reflects back on his own childhood after the latest narrowly-averted crisis, his eyes momentarily appear to be as innocently large as those of the young boy who has just helped him foil the Bad Lad Gang's attempt to hijack and crash the sandsteamer. However, neither this nor his usual innocuous, happy-go-lucky demeanor prevent Vash from occasionally assuming a quite convincing version of the more stereotypical steely-eyed gaze one might expect from a notorious outlaw with a sixty billion double dollar bounty on his head. This often-exaggerated expressive variability in characters' appearance is just one example of the wider range of the visual vocabulary of manga and anime compared to that of most mainstream English-language comics. The much more extensive range of mood-setting "special effects" and strategically-distorted character designs employed in most manga and anime has virtually no counterpart in most areas of the American comics universe beyond the expressionistic architecture of some artists' rendition of Gotham City and the theatrically chameleonic variations in shape and length often assumed by Batman's cape at particularly dramatic moments. The stylistically Silly Putty-ish techniques of most Japanese manga artists tend to have far more in common with the surrealistic extremes of, say, old Warner Brothers cartoons featuring Elmer Fudd, Daffy Duck, and Bugs Bunny than they do with the more limited, "realistic" palette of most mainstream American comic books and even non-gag-a-day daily comic strips. Scratching your head over a word or phrase? Check out our glossary!