One Great Panel: Red Flower

That's a tall ask. And a tall man.

I love stumbling on an exceptional manga from a small press. It’s one of my favorite things. I immediately shove it in the hands of everyone even remotely interested in manga and force them to read it.

That’s what happened with Red Flower, by French mangaka Loui, published by FairSquare Graphics. This is a story steeped in African folklore, populated by exciting and fun characters, full of gorgeous artistic design, with all the exciting beats of a mainstream Shonen manga. And yet there is so much more.

This is one panel that really captures just how beautiful this story is.

Context: Keli is a headstrong young kid, trained in martial arts, ready to be a man for his tribe. In order to do that, he has to pass the Katafali ritual, just like his brother did. His brother is seemingly perfect, super strong, super sharp, super reliable. Keli is not that, and in this panel, he’s facing his reckoning—will he ever be as good as his brother?

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I can’t not obsess over the artistic choices in this panel. Sure, it’s a simple concept and resonant story-wise—a brother living in the shadow of a ‘superior’ older sibling—but the artistic choices are wonderful.

For starters, little Keli in the foreground is even smaller than he normally is. This is one of those “how he feels” panels, not what he actually sees… in case that wasn’t obvious by his gargantuan brother.

Also note that there is nothing else here. It’s basically a desolate wasteland, the only thing that exists here is Keli’s frustration that he isn’t more like his brother. Nothing else matters to Keli. Nothing else exists in his psyche.

Now onto the apparition of his brother. I want to focus on the texturizing of him for two reasons. First of all, his brother is essentially a landmark in the wasteland of Keli’s psyche. His bottom half blends into the ground, his upper half blends into the sky. He is a fixture, a giant mark of superiority that Keli will never measure up to.

But, personally, I took the texture of his brother in another direction as well. Keli is grounded—literally—in this landscape. He can feel the ground, touch the ground, he’s on the ground.

So his brother exuding the same texture as the ground feels like how much Keli can comprehend, or measure himself against. Like the rest of his brother, without that texture, is so far beyond Keli’s comprehension that he can’t even wrap his head around how monumental his brother is.

Essentially, this one panel comprehensively conceptualizes Keli’s psyche. It’s reminiscent of the tightrope panels in Wind Breaker, that conceptualize Sakura’s isolation. It’s difficult to capture a psyche and really give readers a tangible feeling that grounds them in that character’s plight. This panel does that.