One of those comics is the highly anticipated and eagerly awaited follow-up to Masamune Shirow's 1995 Manga classic, Ghost in the Shell. The sequel, titled Man-Machine Interface, is a tour de force of philosophical ideas, explosive action, and stunning 3-D art. More than ten years after the original Japenese version first saw print, American fans will finally be able to read the English translation.
I was able to sit with Warner for a few minutes and discuss with him Dark Horse's efforts to translate this Manga.
Adam Gallardo: Could you explain the process of bringing a Manga series to America?
Chris Warner: Basically we - which can be our publisher, our licensing department, or in this case, our publishing partner Studio Proteus - keep an eye out for titles that look interesting. When we find something, we look into acquiring the rights, which can be a complicated process because of the language barriers, the distance involved, that sort of thing. Next, we have to get materials, translators, and the work has to be Westernized, which generally requires reversing the pages (although Hiroaki Samura's Blade of the Immortal is Westernized in cut-and-paste fashion, moving the panels into left-to-right reading order because Mr. Samura prefers the artwork to not be mirror-imaged). The Westernizing process can be very time consuming and can take as much time as it does to do produce a comic from scratch.
AG:Lets talk about one title in particular. With the publication of the much-anticipated sequel to Ghost in the Shell on its way, how has it been working with Shirow? Has it been a fairly smooth process working with him and his publisher?
CW:We have a very good relationship with Kodansha (the original publisher of Ghost in the Shell) and, indirectly, with Shirow, who is very involved in the Westernizing of his work. To provide some background here, the Ghost in the Shell sequel, Man-Machine Interface, first began serialization in Japan in 1991, with new chapters published on an irregular schedule as Shirow became involved in a variety of projects, including developing his skills with cutting-edge digital tools. Man-Machine Interface evolved, and when the time finally came to collect the series, Shirow wanted to make changes and add material, not an unusual approach with collected series in Japan.
Shirow, though, went well beyond a cosmetic makeover and completely overhauled the series. While the original serialized stories were primarily black-and-white with some short color sections (as you'll find in most serialized manga) for the collection in Japan, Shirow produced well over 100 pages of entirely new material, almost all with fully-rendered digital color and 3-D modeling and looking very much unlike anything previously created for comics. The trade-off for this radical refitting, however, was time, and several years passed (including the publication of an earlier collected version for the Solid Box limited edition set, which was then further revised and expanded) before Shirow had the Man-Machine Interface he wanted.
So, it's been a ten-year journey to get to the Man-Machine Interface of record, but the results are well worth the wait, believe me.
AG:Is it completed? Because I was reading on the Web that it still is not quite finished?
CW:Shirow has not completely finished Westernizing the artwork. Unlike a lot of black-and-white manga, this is not something that we at Dark Horse could easily, it at all, Westernize ourselves. The color pages in particular are unbelievably complex files with vast amounts of imbedded graphics - including embeddeed English graphics that can't just be reversed - and digital effects. The pages are just absolutely insane and totally incredible and even under the best circumstances, Westernizing them would have been a monstrous technical challenge. Understandably, Shirow is not comfortable with having that process outside his control, so he is overseeing that process personally. Again that's fairly unusual for someone of his profile to take this degree of involvement for something being produced for foreign markets.
The irony in this sort of unprecedented involvement is that while we'll be getting perhaps the most direct, unfiltered Westernized manga ever, Shirow's efforts saves us a huge amount of time and labor.
AG:Are you feeling any pressure, personally, working on this project that has been so anticipated for so long?
CW:Oh yeah. Ghost in the Shell is one of the best-known anime and manga, and one of the most acclaimed animated films and comics of any kind. Hugely influential. It's one of the jewels in the crown.
That said, Westernizing Shirow's work has always been a tremendous technical challenge just because of the quality and complexity of the art. Not to mention the unbelievable challenge of translating his work, which is not just a matter of translating Japanese, but of translating Shirow. Shirow creates his own cyber/philosophical/ religious landscape and even his Japanese editors are not always sure where he's coming from! His work is really very deep. If you've ever read any of his own descriptions of what he is going through and what he is thinking about when he is producing works like Ghost in the Shell or Orion, the influences of art, science, religion, and philosophy are melded in a fashion unique to Shirow, and there is absolutely no blueprint for this kind of material. Translation takes far longer than on anything else that we've published.
AG:You mentioned how difficult it is to translate Shirow, so who do you have working on the translation?
CW:Frederik Schodt, who translated the first Ghost in the Shell and Shirow's Orion, and he's one of the best. From his past experiences with translating Shirow and working with his editors in Japan, Fred knows more of what to expect - at least as much as anyone can! When those inevitable questions crop up, he knows where to track down the answers. You simply can't translate Shirow in the traditional sense. You have to have a team of people who know Shirow's work and have a direct pipeline to what he's doing. Toren Smith at Studio Proteus is a major player in this area, communicating directly with Shirow and Kodansha and coordinating and supervising the project. That, and Toren's encyclopedic knowledge of science and Shirow's work give us a perspective on the work we'd never have otherwise. Shirow's writing is amazingly deep and incredibly challenging, and you really have to go farther beyond just knowing the language and knowing Japanese idioms and ideas and their closest Western equivalents. Shirow creates his own idiom, and have to try to create understandable equivalents for things that don't exist outside Shirow's universe. That's not an easy to pull off, but when you do - wow!
Fans of the original Ghost in the Shell and of Manga in general will want to check out Man-Machine Interface. This full-color, 48-page comic will be available in stores October 30.