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Manga! Manga! Manga! A Jason Thompson Interview.

By AnimeEv 1 year, 10 months ago

« Back to the Anime Expo 2010 Feature Center

Manga: The Complete Guide. I knew that bear trap we set up in front of his house would come in handy one day! Strap yourself in and get ready for what the kids call “teh dirt.”

Hey Jason, what’re you up to today?

Drinking a mocha at Herkimer Coffee in Seattle, looking at old Antarctic Press manga and King of RPGs thumbnails and answering these questions, of course! ;) A pleasure to meet you.

So describe your background for us. Where are you from? What’s the gig like these days?

I was born in San Francisco, the son of a psychiatrist and an art major. I went to college in San Diego, where I majored in Writing — I always wanted to become a comic artist or a writer. Not long after that I went back to San Francisco to work for Viz, I worked as a manga editor for many years on various titles, and now I’m living in Seattle, doing freelance work, writing and art.

OK so, let’s get into your fandom. When did you hit upon manga? What happened to make you go “wow, man, this is it!”?

I had heard a little about Robotech and other anime when I was in high school, but I didn’t really become a fan till I was in college. Not long into my freshman year I went to a meeting of the anime club, where I saw Ranma _ and Akira on the big screen and was blown away. From that point on I watched anime every Tuesday night with the occasional marathon of Kimagure Orange Road or something. I discovered manga through anime — San Diego has pretty good Japanese bookstores — but I quickly ended up enjoying manga more than anime. For one thing, I’ve always liked comics. For another thing, anime watching has always been a group activity for me, but manga is something I can read alone. And honestly, I can read the same story faster in manga form than I can watch it in anime form, without filler, as in the case of something like DBZ.

Tell us about being a manga fan in 1991 and how things have changed for you as a fan and connoisseur.

It was all fandom then. At the time when I first became an anime and manga fan, I watched everything in fansubs, read tankobon and early scanlations printed in photocopies in the UCSD anime club newsletter, and basically had no idea that there were commercial English editions of anime and manga (a few of them were there, but I hadn’t noticed them in comic shops). I was really excited when I got to work in the industry and when I had the opportunity to help promote manga to the English-speaking world. From 2002 to 2007, I sort of got to watch my wildest dreams of manga come true, with manga reaching incredible heights of success in America. From 2008 on, the industry has had some problems, but it’s still a completely different world from what it was when I was in school.

So let’s fast forward to your professional editing work. How did you land your first gig?

After graduation, I worked as a temp in Northern California in 1996, when one of my friends saw an advertisement for a Viz job in the old Animerica magazine. I applied for the job, which turned out to be for the position of editor of Viz’s short-lived video game magazine, Game On! USA. And, to my incredible surprise, I got hired! Thus ended my brief period of doing medical data entry and proofreading books for a vanity press (a very strange job), and thus began my life as a Viz editor.

So then you found yourself in a position to edit Shonen Jump. Paydirt? Did you have a total fan-gasm?

Yes. It was weirdly serendipitious that it happened, because not too long before, I had been talking to Hyoe Narita, one of the Japanese Viz higher-ups, about how Viz ought to get a better working relationship with Shueisha because they had all the good manga. I had become a manga fan due to Shonen Jump manga from the ’80s and ’90s — Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure, Bastard!!, Video Girl Ai, etc. — so I was really frustrated when I found out that Viz couldn’t get most of those licenses because of the rivalry between Shueisha and Viz’s founding company, Shogakukan.

Could you describe your day-to-day duties while editing Jump? It was beyond needling manga-ka, I assume…

(1) Editing the manga. I had the final pass on all the translation and lettering on all the manga in the magazine.

(2) Figuring out what to do with the extra pages that weren’t manga, and either writing or assigning it. There was some pretty goofy stuff in those pages in the first 8 or so issues.

(3) Going to a lot of meetings with Japanese Shonen Jump staff, and occasionally American companies that had some advertising/copromotional stake in the magazine, like Konami and Upper Deck for Yu-Gi-Oh!.

(4) Proofreading everything a million times.

(5) To a certain extent, picking what manga would go in the magazine, although there were other people who had the final decision. Also, I had to make some censorship decisions, which was my least favorite part of the job.

Did it hurt to step away from that position? Between editing DBZ and Jump, that’s sort of the US Manga industry’s Holy Grail!

Well, one of the reasons I left, apart from the desire to work on my own artwork and comics, was because I was being increasingly required to do managerial stuff which took me away from actually working on the manga. When I stepped down as the primary editor of the magazine I managed to keep the job of editing all the manga themselves, while only working part-time, which gave me the time to work on my personal stuff. I love manga, but I was tired of only working on other people’s comics; I wanted to work on my own too. I was also frustrated by the increasingly corporate nature of Viz at the time, which ironically, was partially caused by Shueisha’s partnership with Viz which forced Viz to do things the Shueisha way or the highway. There is one thing I regret not doing; I was offered the chance to work in Japan for a month as an editor under the Japanese Shonen Jump staff, but by this time I was already set on going part-time so I turned it down. In retrospect, it would have been pretty fun.

While at Viz, you worked on the under-rated and much-missed (at least in my house) Pulp magazine. Considering the magazine’s classic noir-and-grit bent have since become lauded concepts in small press comics but were about as marketable as a typhoid sandwich in the early ‘00s, do you think Pulp was just ahead of its time?

PULP was a weird magazine. It started out as Viz’s attempt to publish “pulpy,” semi-explicit seinen manga by artists like Ryoichi Ikegami and Hideo Yamamoto. Later, when Alvin Lu became editor, it became more of an alt-comics, underground magazine, with stuff by artists like Junko Mizuno and Usamaru Furuya. Maybe it was sort of caught between both worlds and never went far enough in either direction. On the other hand, though, magazine publishing is just not a healthy business, and wasn’t healthy even back then. PULP died ultimately for the same reason that Manga Vizion, MixxZine, Animerica Extra and Yen Plus died; people in America don’t generally want to read manga in magazine format. (As for the American Shonen Jump, which is still around, I wish 'em good luck…)

Give me a one-word response to describe your experiences on each of the following:

About the one-word responses… that’s too hard! I can do a few words and short phrases, though.

Fullmetal Alchemist: Gets much better as it goes on
Uzumaki: The movie is also awesome.
Gyo: The best part is the “Amigara Fault” short story.
Dragon Ball: Old-school.
Dragon Ball Z: Fun.
Yu-Gi-Oh!: $$$$.
Bastard!! : Too old, sadly.
Hana-Kimi: Least convincing FTM cross-dresser ever.
Naruto: Rabid fans.
Gankutsuou: Introduced me to “The Count of Monte Cristo”.
Sayonara Zetsubou-sensei: Hardest thing I’ve ever edited.
The Drifting Classroom: Too bad Viz won’t ever publish Umezu’s “14”.
Shaman King: Awesome.
One Piece: DON!

Why exactly did you leave Viz? Publishing wasn’t exactly the most stable industry even in 2006, no?

Actually, Viz was doing great in 2006, but while I was working there I got the offer from Del Rey to write a manga guidebook, which ended up becomingManga: The Complete Guide. I talked to my boss at Viz, Alvin Lu (yes, the PULP guy), and he said that I would have to leave Viz to write it because of conflict-of-interest… I couldn’t work for both Viz and Del Rey. But it was a friendly parting. I left pretty much exactly on the ten-year anniversary of when I was hired.

Moving onto your book Manga: The Complete Guide, what can you tell us about the gestation of the book? How did it all come to pass?

Around 2000, I had proposed that Viz do a coffee-table book about different manga artists and why they are awesome… kind of a book to show manga newbies and skeptics how awesome manga is. Viz didn’t go for it, but Dallas Middaugh heard my pitch, and he later went to Del Rey. Del Rey had the idea of publishing some kind of manga guide, so Dallas remembered my book and called me up asking if I’d like to do it. Once I was hired, I had pretty much free reign to create the book the way I wanted it.

How did you define the book’s taxonomy? Was it a case of “this is cool, this is going in” or “well, nobody will remember this Alien X-Peke manga Toriyama did as a goof…”?

Manga: The Complete Guide focuses on manga that has been officially licensed and translated from Japanese into English (about 1100 titles at the time when I wrote it). Within that, it lists everything that I could find, including bilingual titles and p*rn. One of the reasons for organizing the book this way was that it gave me a limiter, since Del Rey wouldn’t have agreed to publish the infinitely long book that it would have had to be if I tried the insane task of reviewing everything available in Japan. (Frankly, I would have had to live to be 100 to read all that manga anyway.) Another reason was that I wanted there to be a firm definition of what “manga” is and isn’t. In the case of MtCG, it’s comics which were created for a Japanese audience (or in some cases, by a Japanese mangaka for an American audience). I didn’t want to have to play style cop for Western and Korean artists and create some false definition of “things I like=manga” and “things I don’t like which may be manga-influenced=not manga”. So I just found every translated manga that I could. I also figured that these would be the manga which English speakers would be most likely to run into. For the really important manga that hasn’t been translated in any form, I tried to mention a lot of them in the articles on various topics (shonen, shojo, seinen, fantasy manga, science fiction manga, etc.)

Did you have to leave things out? Argue for things?

Originally I wanted the book to be arranged by artist, not title. But it’s hard to find interesting, substantial information about most mangaka. I did have a longer artist’s bio section in the original draft, but it had to be cut for space reasons. Another minor change I argued about: one of the original Del Rey people who worked on the book wanted the cover to just be a big image from Akira, but I told them that Akira was too old and that it should show a variety of manga, including some shojo, some shonen, and some yaoi. I also wanted the cover to show a bunch of different characters from different manga all mixed together, but that was impossible for licensing reasons — different creators and publishers would demand that their character be bigger or not touch the other characters, etc.

What do you think your book offers as opposed to older and slightly more “general” texts, such as Fred Schodt’s seminal “Manga! Manga!”

Manga: The Complete Guide is a snapshot of the translated manga industry (circa 2007), a general book about different genres and types of manga, and lastly, of course, my blaringly subjective opinion of every manga that’s been translated. In that way, it’s a pretty personal book, since I spent a year preparing for the book doing nothing but reading manga 12 hours a day, and I was given free reign to talk trash about InuYasha or Bleach or even Del Rey manga like Negima. I basically wanted to write a review book in the style of film critics like Roger Ebert, an expansion of my years of reviewing manga forPulp and Animerica. Of course, Wikipedia and ANN and Amazon have reviews too, but popular things get the highest ratings, and in the case of Manga: The Complete Guide, I wanted a more personal approach. It’s like I took all the manga that existed in English and filtered it through my brain. I thought that was a noble, suitably megalomaniacal pursuit for an otaku.

Did you have a mission statement for the book?

To explain manga to newbies, and to introduce people to good manga, among all the shelves-crowding junk out there.

Who do you see as the book’s target audience?

Manga fans, and to some extent people who don’t know anything about manga, like my parents.

Old-school indulgent question alert: As you yourself have pointed out in some interviews, the shift from US manga publisher’s tendency to put their weight behind edgy and dark titles in the 80’s and early 90’s (Epic’s Akira, Dark Horse’s Appleseed, Viz with Area 88 and Xenon) to a more pop-oriented mainstream type of material (shonen/shoujo titles) represented quite the sea-change for the American manga scene. Do you have a qualitative take on these developments?

The change happened with Pokémon. Before that, the stereotype of anime and manga had been that it was seedy, unhealthy tentacle/lolita porn and wonky science fiction, stuff for creepy nerds. (You can still see these stereotypes now and then, like in the movie Juno where one of the characters turns out to be a pervert who reads manga with titles like “Magical Pregnant Schoolgirl Nami.”) After Pokémon, kid-oriented, tween-oriented manga and anime made so much money that every manga publisher tried to publish it (with a few exceptions like Dark Horse) and the new stereotype was the manga is kid’s stuff. It seemed like it literally happened overnight; all of a sudden, Viz was doing test screenings of anime for non-otaku teenagers and they were saying “The plot is OK once you get into it, but it looks like the stuff my little brother watches.” Naruto is more adult than Pokémon, but this idea that manga is for children continues more or less to this day. It’s good for the overall sales and visibility of manga, but for publishers trying to sell more adult, isky manga, the stereotype is hard to overcome.

And finally, what are you reading these days?

Highschool of the Dead, Otoyomegatari, Moyashimon, One Piece,and pretty much everything that comes out in English.

How may we find out more about you?

I’m on Twitter as “khyungbird,” and I review manga in every issue of Otaku USA, as well as various websites. Right now I’m mostly working on comics and fiction writing, including volume 2 of King of RPGs, the graphic novel series I write with art by Victor Hao (www.kingofrpgs.com). I’m also doing a contest on suvudu.com, “365 Days of Manga,” where I print manga reviews online—sort of a continuation of Manga: The Complete Guide—and give away five manga every day to a random person who signs up on the site. And I draw my own comics at www.mockman.com. So I’m a creator, localizer and reviewer. Basically I love comics and manga, and I’m lucky to be able to make a living at it from various different perspectives.