Draw Manga Action shows all you need to capture epic battles, heroes in cool poses or charismatic sports figures. From the basics of drawing and the design of exciting heroes, to accurate representation of movement and perspective for drawing your own comic panels.

Whether as a standalone genre or a stylistic device, manga goes hand in hand with action. Action features most prominently in shōnen and seinen manga – titles primarily aimed at boys and young men. Battle manga – the ultimate action genre – thrives on intense, over-the-top combat. It provides the perfect basis for a potentially long-running, mega-successful series (such as Dragon Ball, One Piece, or Naruto). With dozens of extravagant characters and endless possible fight combinations, battle manga can fill pages upon pages with action. This tempting setup attracts many aspiring mangaka worldwide – all too often, however, they rush straight into the fights. That’s not how it works! It doesn’t matter how cool the action is, how exotic the characters, or how flashy their abilities and attacks are – without proper buildup, the reader won’t feel any real emotion. You need to slow down and start with the basics! In this book, we’ll cover the key fundamentals you need for drawing manga, always with a focus on action. Well-developed and believable protagonists, antagonists, and sidekicks constitute the backbone of any great story. Along the way, we’ll create a sample concept for an action manga, complete with its heroes and its own world, to help illustrate many of the lessons in a practical way. Before we dive in, however, a few words about myself. My qualifications for writing a tutorial book on the action genre, and on manga in general, come from my bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Media Studies at TU Chemnitz, and more than 20-years’ experience as a mangaka. Since my first publication in the legendary shōnen manga magazine BANZAI! in 2001, thousands more followed – many of them award-winning, and recently even a few bestsellers.