On my trip to Tokyo in June, 2013 to teach about the Economics of Risk and Time at Keio University and to gives seminars about electronic money at the Bank of Japan, Keio University and the Ministry of Finance, Masao Ogaki gave me an intriguing account of how famous Manga author Osamu Tezuka achieved some of the subjective effect of a motion picture with a stationary manga page. He kindly agreed to write up a paragraph for supplysideliberal.com. Here is what Masao has to say:

My son, who grew up in the United States, loves to read Manga in Japanese but does not read Manga translated into English.  I asked why, and he explained to me that eye-movements are important for Manga. I got interested in this and searched for internet articles.  An article,  http://shuhosato.mangareborn.jp/blog/?p=59, explains that this technique is called “visual guidance,” which has been used to create a rhythm and sometimes an illusion of motion.    I am not an expert, but think that the first Manga artist who started to use this technique was Osamu Tezuka in 1940s.  He started to use complicated layouts that calculate and guide the reader’s eye-movements of reading sentences and watching pictures.

Because the way the illusion of motion is created depends on habits of how one’s eyes scan a page, the technique would have to be adapted to work for comics or manga in English. I am hoping will try to achieve this affect in a way that works for native English readers, or even better, that someone has already.