Carl Horn and Kazuo KoikeKazuo Koike - co-creator of Lone Wolf and Cub, Samurai Executioner, Lady Snowblood, Path of the Assassin, and Crying Freeman, all published through Dark Horse Comics-is more than just a famous manga author. Within the Japanese comics industry, Mr. Koike is unusual in having achieved the pinnacle of fame and admiration as an author alone.
Unlike Western comics, where the a split in creative roles is standard enough that Wizard lists the hottest writers against the hottest artists, in manga editorial philosophy is normally that the artist should also write. For example, of the 37 manga that ran in the January 2006 issue of Kodansha's Afternoon magazine-home to many Dark Horse titles including Blade of the Immortal, Gunsmith Cats, and Oh My Goddess!-only four had a separate writer (this "extra" script writing responsibility placed on the manga artist helps to explain why art assistants are more common in manga than Western comics).
Even in Japan, people tend to think in terms of "how to draw manga" rather than of the larger and more important question of "how to create manga." Kazuo Koike's confidence in the power of the writer as a force led him in 1977 to establish the Gekiga Sonjuku program to educate new creators: many of whom draw as well as write, but who have benefited from Koike's dramatic, confrontational theories on character creation. The course is named for gekiga-the 1950s and 60s movement towards contemporary realism and relevance in manga that introduced the adult presentation of themes into a medium previously regarded as for children only. Two of the most famous graduates of the Gekiga Sonjuku are Rumiko Takahashi (creator of Inu-Yasha, Ranma 1/2, and Urusei Yatsura) and Tetsuo Hara (artist of Fist of the North Star).
Mr. Koike's command of his medium goes further still-beyond writing and education into publishing. Specifically, Kazuo Koike is one of manga's greatest self-publishers. Many people know that it has always been more common in Japan than America for comics creators to own the copyright in their work. Mr. Koike has taken advantage of this to establish Koike Shoin, his own label, which publishes thick, omnibus (400-500 pages) editions of works he originally wrote for other publishers years ago. For example, Lone Wolf and Cub was originally published through Futabasha, and Crying Freeman through Shogakukan, but today both Koike titles-together with more than twenty others-are published directly by Koike Shoin. Koike has been very successful in distributing these omnibus manga editions through nationwide convenience store chains in Japan, connecting brand new readers to vintage tales twenty or thirty years old. You pop in for a little Pocky, and pop out with lurid vengeance.
In America, those who try to speak for comics and get "recognition" for it as a "legitimate medium" all too often make an appeal on the basis of comics being "art," by which is usually meant certain mannered works of sensitivity and restraint. The first problem is that this is ultimately just as limited a view of comics as obsessing upon superheroes. The second problem is that it puts a burden on comics that isn't asked of other media-no one insists books, TV, video games and movies have to prove themselves worthy of your time by being "art." The third problem is that it's wearisome, because comics have nothing to prove to anybody about anything, and haven't for decades. So in Japan comics got respect the same way as other media-through building a mass-market, wide-demographic business model whose success then spoke for itself, loudly, through sales figures.
Sounds unspeakably vulgar? It isn't an anti-art approach; on the contrary, when the genuine work of comics art comes around (as rare as in Japan as in the West) the advantage of the Japanese model is that now it can be read in a magazine that already reaches a million people a week, as opposed to progressive American comics which are lucky if they sell a few thousand. And so Kazuo Koike, as a spokesman for manga, is a spokesman for something truly vital-fast-moving stories of sex, passion, violence, honor; at times lyrical, and always (a Koike touch) as full of detail as any historical novel or technothriller. Manga in the late 1960s and early 1970s were in an odd resonance with what was happening in the U.S. inside "underground" comics-as Koike alludes to below, taboo-breaking itself was a political act.
Yet Koike wanted to bring his sensibilities into the mainstream-entertain a mass readership in a way he believed they were ready for. Perhaps the closest American equivalent in spirit was 1968's His Name is...Savage!, whose collaborators Gil Kane and Archie Goodwin were both people who could excel in "mainstream" comics, but who put out the hard-boiled adventure Savage! as a black-and-white magazine, trying to reach out to adult audiences on the newsstands (Goodwin was in fact born only a year after Koike; his work as an editor and writer on the Warren line of b/w magazines in the late '60s and '70s-free of the Comics Code and with an alternate publication model-can be seen as the American "gekiga" to superhero comics' "manga."). Another comparison I could offer is Richard Condon, known best for The Manchurian Candidate and Prizzi's Honor, but whose more obscure 1970s novels such as Winter Kills and The Whisper of the Axe offer a Koike-like whirlwind of bloody gourmet madness.
Needless to say, Dark Horse is proud to have published more of Kazuo Koike's work in English than any other publisher, a record we intend to maintain. Mr. Koike was kind enough to take a little time out of his busy schedule for a short interview on his recent visit to the Milwaukie office.
-Carl Horn
HORN:
What's happened in the last couple of years has been a tremendous expansion of manga readership in this country, beyond the comic book shops, into the major book chains and malls...
KOIKE:
The key factors for the recent "Manga Boom" are shojo, and the strong characters and storylines you can find in manga in general. Japanese characters are strong in a different way from traditional American comics heroes; they have the strength to fight, but at their core you find tenderness rather than righteousness. A manga hero is a person, and good or evil, their fight is with other people. Their weakness isn't some trick, some element or color, it's that they're people. You know the legend of Siegfried-he battles with a dragon, and then bathes in his blood. It grants him skin of stone, makes him impervious to being cut. Except a single leaf fell onto his neck when he was wet with dragon's blood, and so the blood never touched him there. It's a symbol of how light and subtle, how soft our weaknesses are, even in the midst of might and victory. This kind of possibility of being hurt shows the person behind the character, and is why manga readers-persons themselves-feel tenderness towards these characters.
HORN:
I'd agree with that statement. I also think that in manga, there is an awareness of society that is often more powerful than any single individual, including a hero. This doesn't cancel out your heroism, but you have to be prepared to be hurt at heart to do good.
KOIKE:
Absolutely. And some of the most famous Japanese characters are at war with their society, or some sort of public institution. It's rare to see American characters fight their own country.
HORN:
It goes back and forth. Right after 9/11, there was the notorious example of The Authority being censored-a move that was itself disturbing and childish, changing a comic book because you couldn't order someone to redraw and rewrite the horrible things that were really happening on TV. The Western comics artist you influenced most famously was also the most important American creator of the 1980s, Frank Miller, and if you look at the way he wrote Batman and Captain America in the 1980s-these icons of justice and patriotism, like Itto Ogami in Lone Wolf and Cub, became sharply aware of the tremendous gap between their own heroism and their society's corruption and cowardice. It's funny, because when I was a student in the '80s, I was already into manga and about the only American comics I'd still read would be Frank Miller's. Yet back then the mainstream U.S. media had little to say about the manga that was influencing him; all the Japan-related stories were about Japan as an economic and geopolitical threat, not a cultural force. Nowadays all that "serious" coverage has been transferred to China, and all anyone hears about Japan is manga, anime, pop culture. We stopped caring about the fact Japanese cars are still better, or that we still have a gigantic trade deficit with Japan, stuff that was supposedly so important in the 1980s. Back then, people would always ask me why I wasted my time with Japanese comic books, and told me to study Mitsubishi's organizational methods or something. (Koike laughs)
KOIKE:
And now, the big economic story is manga, too. The Japanese government is trying to protect the manga business, give it active support as an industry. This represents a clear and significant change in Japan's own social perception of the medium. Even politicians are going around encouraging Japanese citizens to read more manga. This might mean that manga is the only new-and perhaps, the last new-commodity that Japan can proudly present to the world. Gross yearly sales in the Japanese automobile industry are ¥20 trillion ($170 billion). Gross sales related to intellectual property, of which manga is a major subset, are ¥14.7 trillion ($125 billion).
HORN:
I think an important difference is that all those years, when the Japanese government was promoting "real" industries like chemicals, steel, shipbuilding, electronics, and autos, it never did a thing to help manga-so the success of the industry is all that more impressive.
KOIKE:
Here in 2002, we have Prime Minister Koizumi recommending the promotion and government funding of creative content...Koizumi declared Japan "a nation based on intellectual property."
HORN:
That's true, but in my opinion, he was just jumping on the bandwagon, the way in England in late '90s Tony Blair claimed he listened to Oasis and promoted an image of "Cool Britannia." Even though people around the world thought Japanese pop culture was cool for years, it took a long time for the Japanese government to realize they had more to sell the world than just cars and electronics. (Looking back on the interview, I would be very interested to pursue the follow-up question of whether, if the Japanese government never supported manga directly, it might not have given it important indirect support through the paper and printing industries. The famously low cost of manga magazines in Japan-15 to 20 times cheaper per page than American comics-have in my opinion been just as important as creative content in making manga a mass medium in Japan. The bargain for the consumer is still more remarkable considering other forms of entertainment, such as movie tickets and CDs, are often more expensive in Japan than they are in the United States-CGH)
KOIKE:
Yes. By contrast, people have known about the salability of ideas in America for some time. Nearly 150 years ago (in 1858, just before the Senate campaign against Stephen Douglas that would make Lincoln a national figure and lead to his presidential nomination-CGH) Abraham Lincoln stated that "The patent system added the fuel of interest to the fire of genius." In other words, America has been promoting intellectual property for more that a century-and-a-half. For Japan, this push only started in 2002. And it wasn't the government that made the push for this, or the government that had to persuade the people to like this culture. It was those in the creative industry, and intellectuals, who finally stood up and started to persuade the government. It's just now starting, and it's really late...
HORN:
How does that balance with artistic struggle, creative struggle? If you look at your 1973 work The Starving Man, it suggests an outrageous, rebellious vibe, not a manga that cares about respectability or what society has to say. It's simply telling a great story. I can't picture the government wanting to promote something like this. (The Starving Man deals with Koike's perennial theme, revenge-but 3/4 of the 1300-page epic is set in contemporary-i.e., 1970s-America: locales include New York, Hollywood, Marin County, and Las Vegas. It was Koike's first collaboration in with Ryoichi Ikegami, artist of Dark Horse's Crying Freeman. Patrick Macias, author of Tokyoscope: The Japanese Cult Film Companion, speaks of The Starving Man 's "amazing rawness...that makes it even more thrilling and maddening."- CGH).
KOIKE:
The basic situation nowadays, however, is that there's no longer any social stigma or taboo about reading manga per se, as there was in the 1970s...there's just the promotion of manga, and of people reading manga in general. As I mentioned earlier, Japanese IP had a gross sales last year of ¥14.7 trillion, against Japanese auto sales of ¥20 trillion. Auto sales are pretty much guaranteed not to change that much (the Japanese government imposes expensive re-registration and periodic inspection fees on cars as they age, a policy designed in part to encourage people to sell them and buy new ones-CGH). But there's a possibility the sales of manga next year could drop dramatically-if no new popular characters are developed. We can use this fact to coerce the government to get what we'd like, such as reduced taxes on our businesses. The voice of creators in society gained strength once we could show the gross sales figures for our content-from mascot characters to The Starving Man (Mr. Koike grins).
HORN:
This manga reminds me of paranoid, violent 1970s movies like The Parallax View, or Taxi Driver...what were your own thoughts when you created The Starving Man? Where did the idea come from?
KOIKE:
The '70s in Japan was an era rife with student protests. There was a lot of anguish in the air towards public policy. The state was threatened by these movements, and attempted to limit freedom of expression. There was a lot of resistance and overall, people were very angry. The mood in the air affected manga creators as well in the subject and content of their work. And I was not an exception. That's why I created this character and book.
HORN:
That's what I'm getting at, with this idea of government support for manga. It's a double-edged sword. Good creative work will often come from tension and resistance to authority-but if you take too much support from the powers that be, isn't that going to work against a good story? The manga then just becomes part of the system.
KOIKE:
Yeah, but the kind of manga readers I wrote The Starving Man for aren't around any more. The current young generation isn't really protesting or resisting anything the way they did in the 1970s. Nowadays, I'm not trying to adjust myself to the personal mood of the readers. Nevertheless, I still feel the desire to write about resistance. I think that my period pieces are exceptions, as these are frozen in time three or four hundred years ago, and their themes of resistance come off now not so much as contemporary and relevant, but more as "timeless tales."
HORN:
Lots of Americans now who grow up reading manga dream about becoming manga artists themselves. They identify with the manga itself, and think “I don't have to be Japanese...I just want to draw manga."But all the education in the U.S. seems to emphasize how to draw manga. You don't hear much about writing manga? What do you teach your students?
KOIKE:
Well, I've only been teaching how to develop characters-never how to construct a storyline. What I always try to do is persuade my students to create a strong character first. If you have a strong character, the storyline will develop naturally, on its own. The storyline then follows in the character's wake, and swirls around the character, influencing the character further...Strong manga can only be made when you create a strong character. I've never changed my ground on this philosophy. If you're wondering how I teach my students to create good characters-to give them that starting point-I try to encourage them to make two characters that are polar opposites: God and Satan, night and day, North Pole and South. The struggle between these two characters develops the story. Having just one strong character doesn't work. Having two characters as foils of each other is what sets things in motion.
HORN:
It's like the saying, character is destiny-the story turns out the way it does, because of the kind of people its characters are.
KOIKE:
Right. That's why I created Ogami and Daigoro. When I came up with these characters-the Samurai with his kid-the storyline developed on its own. He is a samurai, so encountering fights is inevitable, but he's always with his child, who is exposed to the danger throughout all these ensuing fights. The essential tension between his imperative to meet these challenges while keeping his son with him on the journey, makes the story literally move on its own.
HORN:
So, when it comes down to it, Japanese manga is "character-centric" and in America, the storyline is key?
KOIKE:
Yes. For Japanese manga, that's the first stage. A good character. Who do you think are the greatest characters in history? I teach that the greatest character of all time is Jesus Christ, and the second is the Devil. The third? Buddha.
There's little more which I can add to that. Once more, thanks to Mr. Koike, as well as to Michael Gombos and Riko Frohnmayer.