So I’ve been reading the manga version of flying Witch today after being well impressed by the anime adaption. An adaptation always changes things and it was interesting to see how the anime had changed and improved on some the gags in the manga like the weed pulling gag or Makoto getting lost on the way to her own bedroom. Just by having more control over timing these jokes have a better comic beat. There’s only so much you can do in a manga to control the reader’s flow of time: it works better to see somebody go left, wait a second and two then go right than to see the same thing in two side by side panels. Nevertheless timing in a manga can be perfect as well, as we can see in the two pictures shown here. First we have the setup above, which comes a few pages before the payoff below, which takes up an entire page. By using full length, short panels the mangaka perfectly controls the reader’s timing: each panel takes about a second to read, gving you three seconds of build-up before the payoff in the last one.
It works perfectly, but in the context of a monthly manga that has twentytwo pages per installment, it comes at a significant cost: the payoff itself is an entire page and including setup it’s five pages of story being used for a single joke. That’s a lot. It’ll be interesting to see if and how the anime adapts this scene, which may be a minute long, if that? A lot less costly in the context of a twentytwo minute episode. Which also explains why the anime could expand on these jokes whereas the manga couldn’t: it’s more efficient.