Paul Pope: Ripping The Face Off Manga
INTERVIEW: Paul Pope
Ripping the Face Off Manga
By Carl Gustav Horn
page one • two • three
When it comes to Westerners learning How to Draw Manga, the difference between Paul Pope and the other ninety-and-nine suggests the same gap separating the monk who studies for five years at the Shaolin Temple and the guy who merely checks out Game of Death on a two-night rental. As you will see from his interview, Pope, who had already attracted critical acclaim in the early nineties for his self-published comics Sin Titulo and The Ballad of Dr. Richardson, spent the second half of the decade on contract to manga publisher Kodansha, learning the spirit of the business--and the struggles amidst the overpressured world of editor-driven comics as mass media.
Pope was groomed first for Afternoon, the monthly that originally ran Dark Horse Comics titles Blade of the Immortal and Gunsmith Cats, and then for its much bigger Kodansha brother Morning, the weekly home of PULP editors' favorite Division Chief Kosaku Shima. In the end, Pope was published in neither, and has returned both to America and self-publishing and acclaimed work for DC/Vertigo and Dark Horse.
Note: This is a significantly longer version of the interview that appeared in the print version of PULP August 2001.
POPE: I wanted to get this story out about manga. I feel that a lot of the interesting stuff that I'm doing, that's coming from Japanese comics, that's got that manga fusion, it's kind of missing people, so I'm really happy to be talking with someone who's looking at this stuff and talking about it, you know?
PULP: I guess this would be a good place to start--correcting people's impressions about what "manga" is.
POPE: I should say what manga isn't. Manga isn't comics; it isn't big-eyed; it isn't this Americanized thing that people are taking--any manga artist that uses that big-eyed cliché, and for people to think that's the mechanics of manga--it isn't. I would begin by saying that. But to say it in the positive sense, I would say that manga is an attempt--it's a lot of things, because it's a huge art form--but I would say that the best manga attempts to recreate the psychological state of a character. So it's the character driving the narrative rather than the story driving the character.
PULP: So you think that manga at its best is character-driven.
POPE: Oh, absolutely. I mean, when I was working at Kodansha, they always said, "We don't care what the story's about--just give us a character that we care about; give us a personality that we want to look at, that we want to identify with, that we want to understand. And that was really the thing that they were always driving home. Everybody knows about this notion: "Oh, in manga, that's why the eyes are so big--you can see deep into a character's soul." I think, though, what they're really trying to articulate is that manga readers want the experience of another person's life, and they want the experience of another person's psyche. That's a big difference, because--for example, I'm a big fan of Ikegami's Spider-Man. And one of the manga people had told me that Marvel had tried to repackage the original Steve Ditko Spider-Man and sell it for publication in Japan. They said, "It's a great concept, we like the idea, we like the name, we like the costume--but, y'know, one of these pages would be told in twenty pages in manga." And I think that's the difference right there--manga will take a simple story idea, but they will give it more of a cinematic approach…I'm getting ahead of myself, but it's so exciting to be talking about this stuff. Let me go back a moment--let me put a cap on this, real fast.
When I was working for Kodansha, the joke was always, "A bad comic is where you have a panel where Superman jumps through a window, and the caption says "Superman jumps through a window," and he's saying, "I'm jumping through the window," and there's a sound effect that says, "JUMP." [LAUGH] Or you can imagine three panels: 1.) he's jumping through the window, 2.) he's landing on the ground, 3.) he says, "I've done it"--or something like that. I really have a sense from what I learned from manga, is that, rather than try to tell and directly tell the story where Superman is jumping through the window, that the best manga will try to give you the experience of jumping through the window--the tactile sensations, the speed of it, the rush of it--catch all the different moments in-between the three panels that an American comic might use to tell the story.
PULP: Well, I think it's interesting that you bring up the example of Spider-Man, because Peter Parker was supposed to be more of a "typical teenager," seeming to have the experiences of life that you characterize as being emblematic of manga. But are you saying that the conventions of American comics work against that type of expression?
POPE: Ah…actually, I don't think so. I think--I think--Again, let's talk about the best manga. We'll let people identify whatever that might be for them. There's great manga, and there's great comics, and let's just assume that they're different. I think the best manga is character-driven. Take, for example, Lone Wolf And Cub. A great concept, a great story. It doesn't matter that it's about a samurai. It doesn't matter that it's about a father and son so much. It doesn't matter, the setting so much, or the way that they look. You know what I mean? It's about the personalities that are coming through the stories. The stories seem very medieval in a sense, like The Cantebury Tales. He goes on a journey, and hears these various people's stories in these character sketches.
When I was working at Kodansha, they'd always want to reduce things to the most basic elements of character. You'd tell them, "I have this story…" and you'd start telling them all of these plot elements, and they'd say, "We don't care--just show us the drawing of the character." "This story is about a young girl, who's doing XYZ," or "This story is about a young man, who's an honest young man in a place where everyone's corrupt." You know what I mean? That's what they wanted to see. They wanted to see these characters.
And then, on top of that, you might have some sort of façade to make it more interesting, based on whatever people are interested in right now--you know, maybe this year it's going to be golfing, because of Tiger Woods. Or maybe this year, ships are popular because of Titanic. I will say that one thing they did really well in manga was to capitalize on topical trends, because the artists are trained to work so quickly. If there was some movie that was really popular, the editors would say, "Make your manga so that people would want to see it as a movie."
PULP: They keep their ear to the ground, and see what's going on in society, as befits a mass medium. I feel that comics in this country aren't created, let alone sold or marketed, as if they expect them to be a mass medium. It's odd; DC is owned by a company that almost literally has all the money in the world now [LAUGHS], AOL-Time Warner. If anybody would have the resources to try promoting and publishing comics on the scale of a Kodansha or Shogakukan or Shueisha, they would. But they haven't.
POPE: It's interesting that the inertia that happens in Japanese corporations hasn't worked against the art of manga, because it's such a strong money-making device that there's room to do such things as--in my own experience--bring forty foreigners over to create manga--let's put them through grad school for manga, and if any of them make any money for us, great, but if not, we're making enough money from other things that we have room for R&D.
PULP: As far as I know, Kodansha, of all the major publishers of manga, has experimented the most with foreign artists.
POPE: Yeah, I think so, I think so. The flip side might be that they're very reluctant to do any reprints of material that's been a proven success in other countries. You know, a case in point is Spawn. They didn't want to do Spawn as a reprint. They didn't want to do X-Men as a reprint. They didn't want to do any of this beautiful stuff from Europe as a reprint.
PULP: Is that because they prefer to develop their own artists?
POPE: Yeah, it's a pride issue. They would say, "We're one of the oldest, most venerable traditions in Japanese publishing, stretching back to the 1600s"--or whenever it may be-- "We published Mishima; why should we reprint Moebius?" When you really got down to it, there was a sense of cultural prejudice. The guy who finally fired me was a replacement for the guy who hired me. And his attitude was, basically, "If we're going to put all this time and money into an artist, let's make it a Japanese artist, not an American." And I really can't blame him for that, because it's a different culture, a different nation, a different set of concerns--and it was a different senior editor.
PULP: Of course; well, it just isn't an immigrant-oriented society, when you come down to it.
POPE: It's a homogenous society. But a country like Belgium is the same--they're so small, and they're surrounded by other cultures, other languages, other people with different histories, that there's a really strong sense of a close-knit identity; you know, "We're Japanese." But also, to look at themselves, they have to see themselves as part of a cultural framework, where, because they're so small, they're always seeing themselves in relation to other countries--particularly, the U.S. and China. And it's an interesting thing, you know, because you have a sort of creative friction there that is very good. When you get a Japanese "genius," you get a genius
--you don't just get someone who's talented. Because there's so many pressure to conform that--
PULP: --a genius in Japan had to assert themselves against greater odds?
POPE: Exactly.
PULP: Did you bring up the example of Belgium because a small country like that nevertheless produced Tintin, which has been an international success?
POPE: Sure. I mean, having been to Belgium, you know--it isn't France, and there's always this rivalry with France. And you see this a little bit, maybe, with Korea and Japan, or maybe with the Japanese and the Chinese. There's definitely a sense of cultural battle. By contrast, it's not like there's this sense in North America where we debate seriously about whether Canada stole its culture from the U.S., or vice-versa.
PULP: I'd like to ask how Kodansha got the idea to experiment with foreign artists in the first place. I would presume that they wanted to bring new life and new ideas into the manga industry?
POPE: That's a really good question. I honestly think what they found is that they don't need to look outside of themselves to make successes. I think it's probably like any corporate structure--there are some people who are very outward-looking, and some people who are very traditional. And that was the conflict that the people in Kodansha had; I saw it, and I had a lot of sympathy for it. But I think that in the long run what they found out is that they don't need gaijin manga-ka to make great manga. I think they learned a lot, themselves. Particularly about color; I think they were fascinated by the use of color. I brought over some old Terry And The Pirates clippings from the Sunday pages, and some beautiful European comics, and they were very interested in it. They'd always say, "Why do you think Europeans paint so well? Their linework is so brutal--in Japan, the linework is so sensitive, but the color's not as strong." They would phrase questions like that. So I think that they sort of took it as a research opportunity, where they could get a lot of information from some very serious, enthusiastic cartoonists. Mazzuchelli went over, Moebius worked for them for a while…
PULP: It's interesting they'd phrase it that way. I think of the beautiful coloring that went into 19th and 18th-century Japanese woodblock prints, which were an inspiration to European artists. My impression was more that Japanese comics aren't in color not because Japanese aren't capable of skillful coloring, but because of the demands of putting out 300-400 page magazines like Kodansha's Morning, or Shogakukan's Big Comic Spirits, or Shueisha's Jump every single week for $2.00 each…Fast and cheap is the model of getting it to the consumer, even if the production values of some of the manga itself might be quite high.
POPE: Absolutely, yeah.
PULP: I read a book by Sharon Kinsella, entitled Adult Manga. Have you heard of it?
POPE: Uh-uh.
PULP: She's from Cambridge; she's now lecturing at Yale. And she actually spent a year or so at Kodansha. I don't know--she might have been there at the same time?
POPE: Probably not, because I met most of the foreigners--whether they spoke English or not [LAUGHS]
PULP: Her main thesis was that in Japan, in the mid-‘80s, the editors actually began to see themselves as the main creative force in manga. That there had been this great generation of manga artists who had arisen after the war, and that all through the recovery, and even as far as the 1970s, they made good stories because they'd had to struggle in their own lives. But the editors felt that the manga artists who came afterwards, who had never known Japan as anything but a prosperous society, were merely copying those great earlier artists, or copying each other. And then Kinsella spoke of a social gap between editors and the artists, that the editors had gone to top schools, while the artists came from more humble backgrounds. The editors felt that if it was now an era of prosperity and a high-profile geopolitical Japan, then it was educated, cultured people like them who were more in tune with the currents of the time. The vast majority of people in Japan now describe themselves as middle-class. So if there's no more working-class struggle of the kind that produced great manga in the past, it's almost as if the editors feel that the real action today, the kind that makes for good stories, is in the struggles of the elite, and who's going to understand that better--the editor who went to Tokyo University, or the manga artist from the suburbs?
POPE: Wow, we're really ripping the face off of this. I actually would agree with you. And let me also say that having seen this empirically, that is not the case in the United States. Let me just say that. But, in Japan, the way I learned to make manga is with a team. I had a role to play. My editor, Kinjiro Higashi, was essentially a producer. He actually has been transferred to the multimedia section, along with most of the other people who worked with the foreign artists. But at the time he was working on Morning and Afternoon. When I first started to work for Kodansha, I was supposed to be in Afternoon, because I was doing sci-fi, and that was more appropriate for Afternoon --plus, the stories in Afternoon were a lot longer. And then when I transferred over to Morning, there was also a shift in middle-management. The guy who hired me was also shifted over to multimedia. The new guy came in--his name was Kurihara--and he came from one of the women's romance comics, the biggest one that Kodansha publishes. They're frequently not very interesting, but they're money-making; they're very bland, very formulaic.
But the reason he was brought over to Morning is that the sales figures in '97 and '98 for the magazine dropped from like, a million weekly, to around 700,000
PULP: Yeah, I've heard actually that 1995 was the high-water mark for manga sales in Japan, and since then there's been a steady decline.
POPE: I would think so. I mean, my contract was signed in 1995, and undoubtedly then someone gave the green light to a lot of experimental projects. And they published a lot of beautiful stuff; John Muth had a beautiful book published there a couple of years ago. They have had some successes with foreign artists, but they've been creative successes. To pull it back to editors, our senior editor was in charge of the magazine. These guys really take it seriously--it isn't like you work four days a week, and then you go home and take care of your kids on the weekend, that type of thing. They lived, ate, and breathed manga, and subsequently they were all alcoholics. It's amazing. On a social level, these guys were just--there's a level of ferocity about their approach to work that was really--it doesn't translate, and you don't see people like this very often.
PULP: Was it somewhat frightening?
POPE: I would say it was frightening, but I wouldn't say it was admirable, either. It was distinct. It was peculiar. And I got the feeling that this would also be the personalities you would see from the people who run car companies, or video game companies.
PULP: Once the major publishers started doing weekly manga magazines in 1959, where they hoped to reach a million or more people, I think it must have become this high-pressure world, like network television. There's a lot of money at stake. What you saw was part of the true meaning of comics as mass media.
POPE: Oh, absolutely. And I have to say that I really have no problem with that. Because they know what makes money; every season they'd have a new hit. A hit for Kodansha would be something that would sell 500,000 per tankobon. And you'd have eight or nine volumes of these collections in paperback. Meanwhile, the circulation spike you'd get from such a popular weekly series as it ran--something like King Gonta's Dragon Head, which ran in Young, I believe--would be in the hundreds of thousands. And that meant a lot of money. Have you seen Dragon Head?
PULP: I haven't.
POPE: I'll have to send you some xeroxes. It's a very interesting, very strange, kind of a sick manga, that was very popular when I was over there. But then it also becomes this merchandising phenomenon where you've got video games, CD-ROMs, live-action and animated TV shows. I had a separate contract for merchandise rights which alone was worth--on paper--a million dollars. If you get a series that's popular, and you get the merchandise--that's when you're Tatsuya Egawa.
PULP: So they don't cut the artists out of the merchandise, like they did guys like Siegel and Shuster.
POPE: Oh, absolutely not. I must say, that, because of Tezuka, they have tremendous respect for the manga artist. But they also don't give them free reign. It's funny, because in the West, we have this idea that the artist is either Picasso or Van Gogh. He's either this financial success, a prolific talent who's creative every decade of his life, making millions of dollars--or else he's an insane person who dies at forty from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, never having sold a single painting. And it's not a very realistic picture. Whereas in Japan, it's more of a business, where you say, "This is a very talented person, and he's part of our team, and we're going to make something together." And in that case, the editor really would have a viewpoint. The senior editor would say, "We need to bring our sales back to a million--how can we do that?" And they'd have some meetings about this; they'd tap a few sources in pop culture to see what's popular, and then it would be up to the various editors beneath him--20 or so, in charge of the anywhere from 40 to 60 things appearing weekly or biweekly. Every editor would have a different thing. Higashi, for example, would have some of the more experimental stuff in Morning.
But the thing I wound up working on for them--it was really, the equivalent of a television show. It was about a young guy living in New York, basically, me--that's what they wanted. They said, "We want a story about this young man, these slice-of-life stories--they can be a little bit fantastic, but basically, just funny and thought-provoking." They said that, having looked at my work. We tried a few different projects. They liked THB but they didn't quite get it--they liked the cute girls, but they didn't get all the science-fiction stuff. They said, "Give us cute girls--don't give us science-fiction, don't give us all this extra stuff, just give us the character."
PULP: When they explained what attracted them to your work in the first place, how did they put it?
POPE: Well, they liked that I was young, for one thing. They liked that I was open to experimenting--because they did say often that in working with established foreign artists such as Milo Manara or Moebius, that they were too set in their ways. They're too used to making X amount of money, they're too used to having a hands-off approach. And so I told them from the beginning, "I'm interested in manga, I want to work as part of a team. Yes, I can do 80 pages a month." There are months when I've done that--not very many, because it's a lot of work, but I have done it. And also, they liked certain characteristics of the way my art looked; it didn't look like American comics, but it certainly didn't look like manga. And they liked my sense of storytelling, because it was very visual. Without really reading any of my comics, they could look at it and laugh at the funny things, and they could look at the drawings of certain characters and say, "Well, I understand this guy's upset here"--all these different storytelling techniques that you could see visually.
PULP: I'm trying to recall; did you approach Kodansha originally in San Diego…?
POPE: Yeah! Well, it was funny. I had been living in the San Francisco area, looking at manga a lot--I mean, I was really intrigued by it. So a year later, in 1994, I went to Kodansha's booth in San Diego. As an artist talking to an editor, I have lots of questions. I talked to this guy for about two hours, and he said, "Are you an artist?" And I said, "Yeah." And he said, "Why don't you bring your work to show us?" and I thought, "This might actually turn into a paying job, you know?" Sure enough, the next day I sat down, and they were ready for me. I brought in a portfolio of work, and a few published things. And, you know, they liked what I did, and they said, "Create a proposal." Four or five months later I had a contract signed.
PULP: How long did your relationship with Kodansha last?
POPE: Five years. It's actually only been about a year since they severed the contract. The really strange thing is, is that they actually severed the contract--they paid me a severance fee; they didn't make any money off of me. It was really strange; it was a decision that the senior editor made. I don't really blame him. When I was in Japan, in '98, he showed me the guy who actually replaced me. And I don't blame them, because his style was close enough to mine, he was about the same age, his output was about the same, he was willing to work with editors, etc., etc., but his work was a little more Japanese.
PULP: He was in fact Japanese?
POPE: Yeah. Actually, I forget off hand the name of his work, but I've got it. And I forget his name, because of my sense of professional rivalry, I've blocked it out of my mind. "Ah! I can't believe it!" [LAUGHS]
PULP: Are you saying that you ended up providing a lesson to a Japanese artist?!
POPE: No, no, no. He was another a young guy who was being groomed. You've got, say, 20 slots for serialized stories in a weekly manga like Morning. You've got maybe 10-20 more slots for short gag strips and so forth. Of those 20 stories, they'd say, "Let's have an entire week's lineup. We've got to have comedies, we've got to have dramas, we've got to have sexy things, some cute things with dogs in them, sports, we have to have one for the old guys…" So the slot I was in was the "urban, crime, hip young person" manga, one with a cool-looking character. That's how they thought of it. And they thought, "Well, here's the line-up we've got for that…we've got Paul Pope-san, this guy, and that guy…" and they picked the one that they thought was going to be most successful. And I think they made the right choice as far as they're concerned.
PULP: Of course; but the perception I'm getting is that you seem to feel that Kodansha decided in the end that using foreigners was not the way to go for the Japanese market…?
POPE: No, it wasn't--because they told me at a certain point when I was in Japan. I'd been working on this thing, Super Trouble, which was basically THB boiled down to the point where it was sort of silly. Nobody was happy with it, and they were beginning to get more interested in me developing a story in an urban setting with a male lead character, rather than with a female lead character and a sci-fi thing. And they basically told me: "You have two choices, and we're going to leave it up to you. You can do what you want, and we won't get in your way--we'll let you tell the story you want to tell, and you will have a book completed--and it will only sell 2 or 3,000 copies when it's collected. Or
--you can work with us, you can appear in our weekly lineup, you can create manga as an American just as if you were Japanese, and you will have a success. You might sell a million manga when it's collected." So of course, I said "Absolutely!" This was a once-in-a-lifetime chance to really make mainstream Japanese comics. And I think that what happened is that it was just taking too long. The new senior editor came in, and he said, "We need to trim the fat--let's get rid of anyone who's not Korean or Japanese." Boom.
PULP: Taking too long to come up with something they felt was just right for the market?
POPE: Yeah. It was so frustrating, you know. It's like my agent would say--you almost have to smile with your teeth grit. Because they would say, "Develop an 18-page story." I was developing 18-page stories through most of 1999 and 2000. And I'd do one, and I'd propose maybe four ideas for a story, and they'd like one initially, and we'd develop maybe two or three as we went along. I would deliver the one--the turnaround was crazy, 18 pages in a week, but I'd do it--and the senior editor would say, "Well, this is close to what I want, but I want a little more…humor…or, I want a little less…unrealistic humor." And it was all very interesting, too: the criticisms were really--I mean, if it was just tedium, it wouldn't have been worth it. But, I mean it was fascinating, the nuances of storytelling that were coming across in the criticism; I really felt like I was getting educated.
PULP: Were the critiques of your visual storytelling, of your actual dialogue, or--
POPE: I think he never liked foreigners. I think he dismissed me because I was a foreigner, because he'd say, "This is the one of the 20 regulars that I just don't like." So he'd say, "Let me just focus on the mechanics of the storytelling…" And he would always emphasize at the meetings--and this would usually come through my editor or through my translator--but these decisions would be coming from my senior editor, who was very hands-on. And he'd say, "You know, I like this, but I think that there's not enough--" It would be something with the mechanics of the story, something in the storytelling itself, that came through the visuals and the plot. Not necessarily in the dialogue; they didn't want a lot of dialogue, so I already, y'know, pared it down to the point of Hemmingway; two sentences on the page instead of seven.
PULP: That's right, you did recommend Hemmingway to aspiring comics creators. Did the editors ever try and drawing themselves to illustrate their critiques, do thumbnails of layouts, things like that?
POPE: Well, the one thing I really respected about them is--you know the old saying, "the master appears when the student is ready?" They were very individual in the way that they would approach any particular artist. So in my case, before we would ever did any work, we spent months where we would just go out to dinner and get drunk. And we would talk. We would talk, we would talk about baseball, we would talk about Japanese comics, and I'd ask them tons of questions and make them laugh, and they'd make me laugh, and we just got to know each other. And I think that they must have decided after a certain point, "Okay, we know how to approach working with him." And the approach would have been different working with anyone else.
They knew that I was a proficient storyteller, so the kind of directions I got were very abstract. Things like, "In manga, people appreciate humor, but if the story is basically realistic, you can have maybe one coincedence, but you can't have something happen that doesn't make sense in reality, because people intuitevly understand that if you have something absurd happen, then it is no longer a realistic story." It'd be things like this, you know. And I'd take that, and I'd say, "Okay, they want something funny, and they want me to keep this provision in mind--let me go back and re-tool the story."
Basically, it was almost as if they wanted a virtuoso debut from me right of the gate. I went from 24 to 29 during the period I was working for Kodansha, but they always said, "Don't worry about how long this takes. When your debut comes out, it needs to be perfect, it needs to be great--because you have the cultural problem of not being Japanese. So the storytelling has to be manga. It can look like American comics, but it has to be manga." So that was the way they approached me. It was like a pinball game. They would sort of let the gravity take the pinball, and then every once in a while they would bump me against a flipper and send me in a different direction.
PULP: It's very interesting, the idea of not having you develop in publication, but developing you until you're ready for publication.
POPE: Well, you know this guy, Silvio Cadello, this French artist. He's fabulous. He did this entire graphic novel for Kodansha, and they never published it. They paid him for it--it's beautiful, I mean, it doesn't make any sense, I must say, it makes no sense whatsoever…And in fact, he was the one they showed me when they told me about that choice they gave me--"If you want, we'll let you do whatever you want, you have a contract signed, we're obligated to pay you, you're obligated to make 200 or so pages for us. If you want, we'll leave you alone, you can do it, we'll pay you, and then you can kind of just go your own way."
Which is what this guy Cadello did. And it was like something out of a Kafka novel. It's like, hemade this graphic novel, I was looking at the art boards in Japan. And they were done right-to-left, as a manga--but they just said, "We'll never publish the thing." And they paid him for it, and he quit. Cadello is the guy who did The Jealous God with Jodorowsky; beautiful, I love that guy's work. He's done a few other things in Europe.
The only foreigner who came close to a hit for Kodansha, I think, was this guy Baru. He's a contemporary French cartoonist who's really good; he's actually been published in Drawn & Quarterly. Do you know the boxing story with the Arab boxer? For Kodansha he did this story entitled Autoroute du Soleil, ["Highway of the Sun"--a quite interesting contemporary road-trip story that encounters race, sex, and drugs on the long road south from the suburbs of Nancy to the shores of Marseilles--the Mediterranean town that is the stronghold of France's far-right National Front party. Autoroute was published in Morning in the summer of 1994--CGH]. It was a hit in France, where it sold about 30,000 copies--which is pretty good for a 400-page book. In Japan it sold maybe 10,000--they considered it a financial failure. However, it did run weekly in Morning, which had a circulation of 1.2 million at the time. So there's this kind of cross-cultural misunderstand where, if it looks too much like Western comics, it doesn't "make sense" in a weekly or monthly manga.
PULP: Visual sense?
POPE: Yeah. It's different in America, I think, because people are so starved for good material. There is, however, a kind of fetish some have for American comics in Japan, the way some people here have a fetish for manga.
PULP: I've seen manga artists draw in what they think is a very stereotypical American superhero style, basically to make fun of the whole "BIFF POW SOCK" sort of thing. On the other hand, there are some Japanese artists who try to put their ear to the ground of the American comics scene, and who try to take serious artistic influences from America.
POPE: Yeah, well I have to say, that on a regular basis I go to Kinokuniya in New York--every week. And Kodansha's been very, very good to me. They've paid me a lot of money, I've done a lot of work for them, and they still send me comp copies of manga. As a routine in working for them, I would get a humongous box of stuff. And it'd be stuff my editor distinctly picked out, knowing I would like. And when I went to Japan, I had a per diem, they bought me books--it was such a great experience. But even now, I mostly look at manga as so many interesting things happening on so many levels in Japanese comics. Going around to conventions in America, and talking to American manga fans, this shouldn't be surprising, but they're reading what's been translated into English. That's often because they don't have access to a good Japanese bookstore like a Kinokuniya or Asahiya, or a friend who can recommend some good websites.
PULP: That's actually kind of a problem, even at those stores--for example, when I went to high school, the San Francisco Kinokuniya didn't shrink-wrap their manga. I was able to discover artists by browsing. That's how I discovered Tatsuya Egawa for instance, with his Be Free!. These days, you have to literally judge a book by its cover…it doesn't seem quite fair, because by and large American comic books aren't sold bags, and of course regular books aren't. Is that the situation at the New York Kinokuniya, too?
POPE: Yeah, but--usually, you find that the way the shrink-wrap is done is like a burrito; it's open on top and you can sort of pry the pages apart [LAUGHS]. I go in when I've got, say, 50 bucks, and I'd like to buy a nice design book or an art book, and I'm going to buy a few different manga, just to keep up with what's happening. And a lot of time, the stuff us not very good, so I wind up giving it to a friend, or recycling it or something, but I give it a try. And also, interestingly, I don't have to like something in order to study it, you know what I mean? There's very few comics or manga that I read for pure pleasure. A lot of them I look at for research.
PULP: So there's something to be learned from them, even if you didn't enjoy them as entertainment.
POPE: Absolutely.
PULP: Is that "frugal" approach to reading comics something you picked you from Kodansha?
POPE: Well, you know--you read something great like Watchmen. Watchmen gets better and better the more I read it. You only read it once--
[end of side one of tape]