The first European Book and 'Experts'

The first book to be created in Europe is the Gutenberg Bible, by johannes Gutenberg. It was the first book to be printed by moveable type, there are 21 known copies left in the world and they are considered by many to be the most valuable books in the world, because of the impact their creation had on the way books would be printed from then onwards. The first book was printed in 1445. Gutenberg had been experimenting with moveable type for years before the first book was complete, but it is unknown how long it took for the book to be finished once he began printing it.

The most important aspect of the Gutenberg Bible is not the content (especially to athiests...) but the way it was printed, the technique involving moveable type. Moveable type means that you can move letters and marks and rearrange them into different orders to create different words, easily and quickly. This was revolutionary compared with the printing process that preceded it where whole blocks of text would be carved out and could only be used to print one thing repeatedly. This was extremely time consuming compared to moveable type. In moveable type each letter would be formed by carving letters and stamping them into iron plates, the impression that remained would have molten metal alloy poured into it, once this was cooled and removed you would have a replica of the original letter, or a stamp of that character.

The stamps where pressed into a frame in a mirror image of how they should be read, once the whole page was placed in the correct mirror image order, the stamps would be inked and because the letters were raised, once this frame was pushed against a piece of paper only the letters would leave an inked mark and in the correct order to be read. This became the standard for printing after the Gutenberg Bible was created, from the 15th century up until the 20th.


'Experts.' Its hard to choose one person who influences and inspires me as there are so many to choose from but if i must.... 
One of my favourite illustrators at the moment would be Kubo Tite. He is a japanese manga-ka who's most famous work is a comic called 'Bleach.' The reason why i think he is most suitable for me to write about is that he doesn't make comics really, thats just his medium, he tries to be as creative as possible with every aspect of a weekly comic, from the illustrations to even the title. He uses poems he creates, as a way of telling backstories, and experiments with words (more impressively he always uses english words even though he doesnt speak it, and changes them round in clever ways, for example, some chapter titles;' 'beLIEve', 'Deicide 8, End of the Chrysalis Age' and

'Quiet Chamber, Noisy Heart.' Most comics just put a name at the bottom or top of a page for the title but alot of the time, Tite tries to place the titles in the comic in some interesting fashion, often incorporating it into a background in some way.
He is quite controversial in the manga world, in the fact that he values art more than his story whereas, the majority of comics are story driven with the art secondary. Another reason is that he places alot more emphasis on the characters than backgrounds, some chapters do not contain even one background, this again is rare but as he views the comic as art there are no conventions he has to abide by.

Again unlike the majority of other comics these days, he uses alot of black and white to interesting effects as opposed to use tone which adds shades of grey elements to represent dark or light colours. Another aspect which is fantastic is that the sound effects he uses are all done by brush and calligraphy, it compliments his style well and its the only comic i have seen that does this.
These are a few of the reasons why Kubo Tite has an influence on my work, the best compliment i can give is that i don't even like his story but i read it each week because the art is always interesting and changes frequently.