In preparation for drawing this series, Seth, who was living in San Diego at the time, spent two+ weeks in Tokyo taking photos. He wanted to be sure to get all the details right of the styles at Harajuku, but also the details of the streets of Tokyo, the inside of trains and shopping malls. He wanted to be sure that the backgrounds in his images were Tokyo and nowhere else--slightly exaggerated, but exaggerated towards the particular excesses of Japanese pop culture.
The center panel in this page shows our protagonists in the center of the page, but smaller than the other figures, who are setting the scene. The girl at front left is regarding a very peculiar undergarment, the girls on the right are wearing the dress-up style that Maki prefers. Other details are pure Seth: a small sign that says "Magic Egg", a sign in the upper panel that says "Magic Mush", a child carrying a balloon with a Plain Face (: l), the friendly but not cuddly animals on the photo machine in the bottom panel.
One of the wonders of Seth's art is that he paid attention even to throwaway details, so that you believe that each of the people in each of the panels has his or her own thoughts and style. There is a tiny image, cut off by the panel of Maki hugging Hike at the top, of a pair of plaid pants. Even the person wearing those plaid pants has some personality, which we would see if we met him.
1 comment:
Strange, I wrote my reply to the last post before reading this and the phrase "Pure Seth" just came naturally.
And now you use it.
I guess that's the beauty of being, truly, one of a kind.
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