Style combination · Pairs well
Story Manga × Taishō Roman
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.
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) Taishō Roman & Lyrical Illustration
- Type from Story Manga
- Colour from Taishō Roman
- Form from Taishō Roman
- Composition from Story Manga
- Surface from Story Manga
02
The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Display · Story Manga
Reverie
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 · Taishō Roman
The lyrical illustration (jojōga) of late-Meiji to early-Shōwa Japan, led by Takehisa Yumeji: willowy, large-eyed women in kimono drawn with an Art Nouveau contour, set among camellias and kimono patterns and lettered by hand. Made for sheet-music covers, girls' magazines, postcards and paper goods, it is intimate and melancholic rather than ornamental, and its eyes and moods passed through Nakahara Jun'ichi into shōjo manga.
Shippori Mincho; Taishō Roman used Hand-drawn title lettering mixing kanji, kana and Latin and Brush-written kana for lyric poems
03
The colours
The ground and leading colours come from Taishō Roman, with a counter-accent from Story Manga. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
Story Manga (Postwar Japanese Comics) Taishō Roman & Lyrical Illustration
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#f1e8d5ground · 36% -
#3b4a6bink · 14% -
#b8333aaccent · 18% -
#c9a548accent · 14% -
#8c8c8caccent · 10% -
#d98b8faccent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #f1e8d5;
--ink: #3b4a6b;
--accent-1: #b8333a;
--accent-2: #c9a548;
--accent-3: #8c8c8c;
--accent-4: #d98b8f;
--font-display: "Mochiy Pop One", sans-serif;
--font-text: "Shippori Mincho", 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.
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.
- Superflat Contrasts · 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.
- 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 Taishō Roman
- Ukiyo-e Woodblock Prints Pairs well · Yumeji's beauties continue the bijin-ga print; pair a woodblock-printed pattern ground with a lyrical modern figure.
- Japanese Postwar Modernism Contrasts · Postwar modernism replaced this sentimental figure with emblems and empty fields; set one against the other to calibrate warmth against austerity.
- Kawaii Design Pairs well · Nakahara Jun'ichi's large-eyed girls link the two; give kawaii characters Taishō's muted palette and wistful mood for an older, nostalgic audience.
- Art Nouveau Pairs well · Its source of line: keep Art Nouveau's contour but drop the ornamental excess, leaving one figure and a few flowers for an intimate Taishō register.
- Shōjo Manga (Japanese Girls' Comics) Pairs well · Its root: Takahashi Macoto took Nakahara Jun'ichi's large, doll-like eyes with highlights and long lashes and added dots, stars and colour to the iris. Borrow jojōga's single wistful figure, muted cream paper and hand lettering for a cover or title page with a period mood.
- Mavo Contrasts · The same Taishō Tokyo in two moods: pastel lyrical illustration of modern girls against Mavo's black linocuts, newsprint and price tags.
- Republican Chinese Book Cover Design (Lu Xun & Tao Yuanqing) Pairs well · Feng Zikai found Takehisa Yumeji's lyrical drawings in Tokyo; Yumeji's soft line suits the quiet, literary register of these covers.
- Angura Theatre Poster Pairs well · Angura recycled Meiji and Taishō imagery as found material; cut a Taishō beauty into an angura collage for ironic retro nostalgia.