Samurai Deeper Kyo: Double Visions (Kamijyo's Character Portraits)

[chomiji]

There's something that Samurai Deeper Kyo mangaka Akimine Kamijyo does that I haven't noticed in the few other series I've read, and I'm wondering whether this is something fairly common in manga or not. Basically, there will be an illustration that consists of a long pull-back shot of the scene with an inserted close-up of the face(s) of the character(s). A few of them have borders between the elements, but even then, there's usually some element bridging the two sections.

I didn't see any striking examples early in the series, but by vol. 6, they're occurring fairly regularly. Sometimes they're used when a character is introduced, and sometimes they're just used when a character appears dramatically (the kind of thing that would get a "ZAA!!" in Saiyuki). Anyway, below the cut are several examples (some pretty large), and I'll talk about the characters and scenes a bit as well ....

Samurai Deeper Kyo: Double Character Portraits

First off, here is Yukimura from vol. 6. We've already met him, but here we're seeing him on his home ground, in exile on Mt. Kudo. And we get to find out his current ambition:

Of course, he's going to need to wait in line: that's the ambition of an awful lot of people in this series. In this example, there's still a border between the elements, but his second speech balloon bridges it.

A few pages later, we meet Anayama Kosuke, Yukimura's kagemusha (body double), who has been disguised with a big hat for the last few pages (she's holding it in the picture, along with a musical instrument):

This is a good example, but it's the inverse of a lot of the others: the close-up is in the background. The usual joke about Kosuke is that she has great big ... tracts of land, and everyone cracks wise about how they can't see how anyone could mistake her for Yukimura. However, there's an extended scene late in the series where Kamijyo needs the reader to confuse her with Yukimura too, and all of the sudden, she's very petite in the chest ... I like Kosuke (I even wrote a little fic about her recently).

Here's Shiina Yuya, the heroine of the series, from vol. 9. The gob-smacked face at the top belongs to Kyo: he had just been told she was dead (and as you can see, the misinformation went both ways) -

The pitiful little moppet is Antera: she's actually decades older than she looks and is tremendously strong ... and she's actually one of the villains. However, she and Yuya have just shared a scary experience, and it's had the typical bonding effect.

This cheery dude is Benitora (in vol. 9), who gets a lot less love than most of the SDK guys because he's too normal and doesn't have a lot of angst. He's got a hopeless crush on Yuya, as you can guess from his dialog:

He's a source of a lot of comic relief in the series, which goes along with his Kansai-ben accent (hence "-han" instead of "-san").

This is one of my favorite pictures in the series so far, from vol. 11. This is Kyo's mentor Muramasa, who can read minds and is also a master swordsmith (he made that huge no-dachi, Tenro, that Kyo uses):

He's actually much, much older than he looks, and much less healthy than he looks: he's very ill with the mysterious "Mibu Disease" that's a critical part of the series plot.

Here's the entrance scene of a series favorite, Hotaru (vol. 13). I was going to crop the picture to just the top panel, but his distinctive one-tooth geta extend into the lower panels:

As Yuya notes, he used to be a friend of Kyo's. He's not in a very friendly mood at the moment, however ...

Finally, very sad and dramatic ... this is the last scene of vol. 13. That's Muramasa in Kyo's arms - he'd used a spell technique to restore his failing body, and it made his hair grow too:

He and Kyo have just spent a couple of weeks in a cave, where Muramasa has been completing Kyo's magical education.

I hope you've enjoyed the picture show! And if anyone can give me a little manga art context for what Kamijyo is doing with these illustrations, I'd love to have it!