I’m in the minority on this one.
Name: Fence
Author: C.S. Pacat
Artist: Johanna the Mad & Joana Lafuente
Publisher: Boom! Box
Fence is a pale shadow of the sports manga that clearly inspired it. Which is a shame, because I was looking forward to it.
When I first heard about Fence it had me excited. The promise of a sports comic that would follow through and verify the queer subtext that is there in most sports manga series had me genuinely excited. So, when it came out, I bought and downloaded it, started reading, and… Was severely disappointed.
So, what went wrong. The answer is, a bunch of things, but we’re going to start with the art. Johanna the Mad’s art is fine, when focused on the characters in downtime, they’re clearly drawn, and her expressions vary enough that they’re interesting to read. No, the problems with her art become apparent when the characters start fencing, which, for a comic about fencing, is a pretty big problem to have.
The easiest way I can say it; She can’t draw motion, the characters look as if they’re just statically posed there, with speed lines and blur effects added in for good measure. There’s a lot more to making a scene in a comic move, than just those two techniques, just look at this scene from Haikyu!!
Haikyu Volume 1, pages 44-45The shading intensifies, Hinata’s hand is taken off model, Kageyama is used to set relative position and yes, blur effects are used, but every technique I just listed help contribute to feeling of motion in that panel.
Fence does very little of that, and has terrible backgrounds.
The reason I used Haikyu!! back there is because the plot is almost the same. Rookie with talent goes to a tournament, gets kicked out in the first round by expert with an attitude problem, swears to get them back, only to find they’re on the same team. There’s enough difference in the small details that I won’t call it plagiarism, but it does highlight the main problem, not just with the story, but with the comic overall. It’s got too much story in too few pages.
Haikyu!! #1 is, not counting the three colour pages at the beginning: 51 pages, of which the main match is 22, which is 43%. Fence #1 tries to tell roughly the same story in: 22 pages, with 4 for the match, 18%. Had Pacat slowed down, ending this issue just before the climax of the fight, it would have allowed the Mad more pages to draw the fight allowing for better panels, to better express the motion. Changing this from a sub-par, but I’m willing to keep reading comic, to a good comic.
But the team did what they did, and I really can’t do anything about it.
Fence #1 is available from Boom! Box here
Haikyu!! #1 is available from Viz Media here
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