Style combination · Contrasts
Story Manga × Superflat
Murakami's Superflat lifts anime and manga figures out of the story onto one flat, glossy, polychrome plane for the gallery; story manga keeps the sequence, the depth of its backgrounds and its single black ink.
01
What each style brings
Each part of the design comes from the style with the stronger say in it, and each style gives at least two.
Story Manga (Postwar Japanese Comics) Superflat
- Type from Story Manga
- Colour from Superflat
- Form from Superflat
- Composition from Story Manga
- Surface from Story Manga
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Superflat avoids halftone & ben-day dots: this is where the two pull against each other, which is the point of the contrast.
02
The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Display · Story Manga
Yay!
Mochiy Pop One, standing in for Anchi-goshi balloon setting (gothic kanji with bold antique kana, アンチゴチ: the antique kana is a bold face of the 1890s from the kagomoji of Edo temple plaques, not a Mincho; the default for children’s manga by about 1960 and across commercial manga with desktop publishing)
Text · Superflat
The flat, saturated, cartoon-crowded look that Takashi Murakami named in his exhibition and manifesto Superflat (Tokyo, 2000; US tour 2001). It draws a line from Edo painting and prints to postwar anime and manga, and flattens high and low, art and merchandise into one plane. Smiling flowers, many-eyed characters and anime figures come in unshaded polychrome, smooth and glossy, cute and grotesque at once, sold as handbags and album covers as well as paintings. This entry follows the drawn core of Murakami and his Kaikai Kiki circle; the shows also held photography, video and sculpture.
Zen Maru Gothic; Superflat used Letters drawn into the character and Many-coloured repeated monogram
03
The colours
The ground and leading colours come from Superflat, with a counter-accent from Story Manga. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
Story Manga (Postwar Japanese Comics) Superflat
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#fbfaf5ground · 36% -
#1a1a1aink · 14% -
#ffd900accent · 18% -
#d32f2faccent · 14% -
#00a0e9accent · 10% -
#cfcfcfaccent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #fbfaf5;
--ink: #1a1a1a;
--accent-1: #ffd900;
--accent-2: #d32f2f;
--accent-3: #00a0e9;
--accent-4: #cfcfcf;
--font-display: "Mochiy Pop One", sans-serif;
--font-text: "Zen Maru Gothic", sans-serif;
}Use it with care
Story Manga (Postwar Japanese Comics): Manga characters and series, from Astro Boy to Dragon Ball and One Piece, are in copyright and belong to their creators and publishers, and manga is the living work of professional artists and assistants: draw original characters in the shared idiom, never ask an image model for a named series, character or artist's hand, and label generated pages as AI-made rather than presenting them as a manga artist's work. Some of Tezuka's own books drew foreigners, including Black Africans and Asians, in exaggerated caricature; after protests from September 1990 by the Osaka-based Association to Stop Racism Against Blacks, Tezuka Productions put a disclaimer slip into his books. Give every character the same drawing care, and never use skin, lips or dress as ethnic shorthand.
Superflat: Some canonical works use explicit otaku sexual imagery, such as Murakami's My Lonesome Cowboy (1998), and associated artists engage with lolicon art: Mr. describes himself as a lolicon and Henmaru Machino parodies it; never sexualise childlike figures. The mushroom-cloud skulls of Murakami's Time Bokan works and the title Little Boy, the name of the Hiroshima bomb, refer to the atomic bombings, and critics such as Dong-Yeon Koh argue that this victim narrative obscures Japanese aggression in China and Korea; do not use mushroom clouds or skulls as cute decoration. Handle borrowed Buddhist iconography and phrases, such as Kannon, with respect, and draw original characters and flowers: Mr. DOB, the smiling flowers and the Louis Vuitton monogram are owned designs.
04
The two styles
05
More combinations
With Story Manga
- Korean Webtoon Graphics Contrasts · The Korean webtoon turned manhwa, Korean comics shaped in part by Japanese manga, into a single full-colour scroll column with long empty gutters, first on PC portals and then on phones; return to story manga for a printed spread of black-and-white panels read right to left, with screentone and panels that bleed and break.
- American Four-Colour Comic Book (Golden to Bronze Age) Contrasts · Both are mass-market pen-and-ink comics with balloons and sound effects; the American comic book reads left to right in four-colour dot tints with hand-lettered capitals in a steadier grid, while story manga stays black and white, reads right to left, greys with screentone and sets its dialogue vertically.
- Lianhuanhua Picture-Story Books Contrasts · Both are cheap, widely rented East Asian picture-story books; lianhuanhua gives each palm-sized page one framed drawing with a caption beneath and no balloons, while story manga packs a page with panels of changing size, balloons, speed lines and drawn sound effects.
- Taishō Roman & Lyrical Illustration Pairs well · Jojōga's large, highlighted, long-lashed eyes passed from Nakahara Jun'ichi to Takahashi Macoto, who added stars and dots to the iris, and so into shōjo manga; add Taishō lyrical faces, kimono patterns and soft lines to a manga page for a period romance.
- Ligne Claire (Franco-Belgian Clear Line) Contrasts · Ligne claire closes every form with one even contour and flat colour, with no hatching or tone; story manga varies its line weight and builds grey and mood from screentone, solid blacks, speed lines and focus lines.
- Kawaii Design Pairs well · Kawaii takes manga's round faces and symbols but not its page; borrow its pastel mascots and rounded type for a comedy chapter, a character goods tie-in or a super-deformed aside, and keep the panels and screentone.
- Shōjo Manga (Japanese Girls' Comics) Pairs well · Girls' manga grew out of story manga from Tezuka's Princess Knight on and took its flowers, screentone moods and floating monologues furthest; borrow those when a story-manga page needs interior feeling rather than action.
- Arab Independent Comics (Samandal, TokTok, Lab619, Skefkef) Contrasts · Manga is one codified visual language read right to left. The new wave of Arab comics counts it among its sources, beside European comics and American cartoons, and some artists build a style on it (Hanan al-Kararji, who drew the Cairo graphic novel 18 Days, calls hers 'a blend of manga and Arabness'), but these anthologies set it beside brush caricature and fine-art pages, and may run both reading directions in one issue.
With Superflat
- Kawaii Design Contrasts · Kawaii offers sincere, simple, pastel cuteness for fancy goods; switch to Superflat when the cute should be saturated, crowded, many-eyed and ironic, a comment on consumer culture rather than a product of it.
- Pop Art Graphics Contrasts · Both turn commodities into art; take Pop's repetition and frontal commodity but swap its halftone and off-register silkscreen for Superflat's smooth vector fills and anime characters, so the print process disappears.
- Minimalist Graphic Design Contrasts · One dense field of smiling flowers on an otherwise empty white page gives a minimal layout a single loud focal point without giving up its calm.
- Ukiyo-e Woodblock Prints Pairs well · Murakami traces Superflat's flatness back to Hokusai's prints; borrow the woodblock keyline, the stylised wave and the cropped composition and fill them with Superflat's saturated characters.
- Techno-Futurist Graphics Pairs well · groovisions, whose Chappie figure showed in the 2001 Superflat exhibition, links the two; set Superflat characters inside techno-futurist logos, grids and katakana captions for a slicker, more corporate parody.
- Angura Theatre Poster Contrasts · Both quote ukiyo-e and Pop from Japan, but angura crams photographs and fluorescent silkscreen into a rebellious collage while Superflat draws everything smooth and flat; set one flat Superflat character against an angura photomontage for a clash of eras.
- Lo-fi Anime Aesthetic Contrasts · Both draw on anime, but superflat flattens otaku imagery into ironic, polychrome, all-over fields with no depth; choose lofi for one sincere, softly lit room with depth, and superflat when the brief wants pop density and knowing play.
- Light Novel Cover Illustration Contrasts · Murakami's fine-art quotation of the same otaku idiom, flattened and ironic, where the cover sells a book sincerely.