Attack on Titan is a Japanese manga series with dark fantasy and a post-apocalyptic theme. It was written and drawn by the artist Hajime Isayama. The comics were published by Kodansha, which published them in its magazine Bessatsu Shōnen Magazine. They were published in series from 2009 to 2021 inclusive and took up 34 tankobongs in total. At the same time, there was an animated film, which started in 2013 and is still unfinished, as the series consists of four seasons with several episodes each. Overall, the manga was an unprecedented commercial success because its circulation at the end of 2019 was over 100 million copies of tancobones. So it became the best-selling manga globally and was awarded several prestigious awards: the Kodansha Manga Award, the Harvey Award, and the Attilio Micheluzzi Award. In 2012 Attack on Titan was listed on Guinness World Records as the biggest published comic book.
Meaning and History
The events in the manga take place in a universe where people live in closed cities surrounded by triple walls to protect them from Titan, the ogre giants. In particular, the action unfolds around a young man named Eren Yeager, who has sworn to destroy the humanoid giants for destroying his city and killing his mother. The Kodansha editorial staff produced regular chapters of the comic.
In addition, an animated series consisting of four seasons emerged a little later. Three of them were released by Wit Studio. The first one was broadcast in 2013, with 25 episodes. The second was launched in 2017 and included 12 episodes. The third is divided into two parts: 12 episodes appeared in 2018, 10 in 2019. MAPPA is working on the fourth season. In 2020, it already rented out 16 episodes. The rest are scheduled for release in 2022. According to the idea, these will be the final episodes.
The literary work is inspired by Japanese culture, as the author admitted, its key theme – the inner experiences of each person, which he presented in a fascinating and entertaining form. In the course of the plot, tied around Eren Yeager, the main character and his friends make a lot of discoveries for themselves and for the world in general. For example, it turns out that they live on an isolated island, where their people have long been exiled for crimes committed against other people. In general, the further the manga goes on, the more mysterious it becomes. The energy of the mystery going on in it is reflected in the emblems.
2009 – today
The basic element of the logo was the name of the manga. In the beginning, it was depicted in the Japanese style – with hieroglyphs. They have the structure of a broken stone wall and resemble the flying away pieces of masonry of a once-powerful fortress. A wide range of gray colors was used: ash, graphite, silver, and metallic. There are also purple flecks in local spots and elongated lines that run through all the characters. Underneath them, in small print, is the English-language title of the comic. It is written in white Old English letters in lower case and is set on a red-orange-yellow background shaped like a long band with narrowed ends.
2014 – today
In 2014 there was an adaptation of the logo in the English manner with the lettering translation. They were indeed changed, although their style remained the same: gray-petal letters with purple spots. But some changes did take place. For example, the designers removed the red-yellow line at the bottom, made the texture of all the elements smooth, added dark blurred shadows to the signs, and sharpened the ends. The manga title is in Old English script. The letters are tall and elongated, with spectacular thickenings replacing traditional serifs. The Japanese characters are below the main text. This time they are small and not as distinct as before.
Font and Colors of the Emblem
In addition to the text logos, the Attack on Titan manga has a graphic icon. It is associated with the characters, representing two wings, feathers that look like knife blades. There are nine of them on each side. And the feathers have a segmental structure and consist of three segments, except for the lower ones – they only have two fragments each. The right-wing is white, contoured, and the left-wing is blue, solidly filled. They are partially overlapping and enclosed in a pentagonal gray shield with a white border, the design resembling a window.
For the emblem, the developers chose a typeface called Linotext. Its author is the designer Morris Fuller Benton. The logo’s color scheme is restrained and consists of a wide palette of gray. It is dominated by ash, metallic, graphite, pewter, platinum, zirconium. The first version also features purple, orange, yellow, and red.