Shawna Ervin-Gore: Can you give me a history of how you got started working with manga?
Toren Smith: It's always difficult to know where to begin, that's for sure. I got interested in manga actually through the animation. I had been writing comics on and off for Eclipse, and one of the people I knew through Eclipse, Jim Hudnall (who's written lots for Malibu and Viz among other companies) -- he was the first one to show me Japanese animation - good Japanese animation -- and it totally blew my mind. So I got into it pretty heavily, trading tapes and doing all the stuff we did back then, and through the animation, I discovered there were comics. A lot of this animation, in fact, was based on comics, so I began looking up the comics and found that I actually preferred them to the animation for the most part, which remains my position today. So at that time, because I worked with Eclipse quite often, and because there was a fairly solid market for black and white comics, I figure, "what the heck, we could bring some of these things over and sell them in the U.S." I originally worked together with Viz Communications, but they could only publish comics that were from their parent corporation, Shogakukan. And because there were a lot of comics I wanted to publish because I thought they were really good, and Viz couldn't publish them, I started doing those on my own.
Ervin-Gore: And how did you go about starting -- what was involved?
Smith: I was completely unaware of the impossibility of what I was attempting to do, being young and foolish. And so basically I just sort of packed myself up and shipped myself off to Japan, and I figured, I'll just sort of knock on doors and walk into places and talk people into it, which of course is impossible. I just didn't know it. I was very fortunate in that when I announced I was going to Japan, my friend James P. Hogan, the science fiction writer said "hey I'm going to a convention in Japan in August, why don't you come over with me, and we'll go to this science fiction convention, and then you can go on to Tokyo and do whatever it is you want to do." The convention was down in Osaka, so I went along with him and it turned out to be probably the key to me actually accomplishing anything in Japan. Because at the science fiction convention, as the guest of a guest, I was put into contact with people like the person who is now the Studio Proteus agent in Japan, and a lot of other people who would prove very useful to the industry, and because I was with Jim Hogan, I was treated a lot more seriously than I otherwise might have been.
Ervin-Gore: So your original plan of knocking on doors probably wouldn't have worked after all?
Smith: No. I was very fortunate, and as a result of the convention, when I got back to Tokyo it was possible for me to contact a few people and say, "Hey, do you know anybody here and can you get me in the door?" That's very important in Japan. If you just walk into a company, they're going to hand you over to the lowest ranking moron that they can possibly find. Then if you try to get anything done at that company, you are in for a long, ugly haul, because everything you do has to make it to that guy's boss, then his boss, then his boss, until finally it makes it to the president's office upstairs, if it gets there at all. It could be months later -- it could be never if somebody along the way decides it's all a waste of time. Being in the position I am now, having worked with Dark Horse and other large publishers, we have a very strong track record. So generally now all it takes is a phone call and I can get in to see the President, or at least somebody extremely high up in the company.
Ervin-Gore: How many companies like Studio Proteus are there?
Smith: It depends, I guess, on how you mean that. Most of the other people who are doing this or who have done it in the past tend to be integral with the publishing enterprises, so it's done by the people who are publishing the book, whereas Studio Proteus is a packager. We find the material and make the arrangements for it in Japan, produce it, and basically hand over publishable, camera-ready pages to Dark Horse, who acts as the publisher. So we're a little unusual.
Ervin-Gore: And who do the translations?
Smith: We've got a large number of people working on our translations -- probably our key translator is Dana Lewis, who is very good. Dana is not only extremely knowledgeable and fluent in Japanese, having worked professionally as a translator for Newsweek and Simul, which is the biggest, most prestigious translation company in Japan. Over the course of 20 years of speaking Japanese, Dana has done such things as translated the book on economics by one of the Japanese foreign ministers, that kind of thing. She really knows what she's doing. On top of that, and just as importantly -- this is something I rely on with my translators -- she's very talented in writing in English as well. In fact, she's written and published many science fiction stories and of course has many articles in Newsweek. Therefore, it's not merely a matter of having a knowledge of the Japanese language, but being able to translate it not just into what you can do, but into the best possible thing. Dana is number one. She's done the most and has been with us the longest, and we're also very fortunate to have people like Fredrik Schodt working for us. He has, of course, written several books; his latest is Dreamland Japan, which is a book on the Japanese comic book industry. It's absolutely a must-read for anyone who's interested in manga at all.
Ervin-Gore: What kind of presence do American comics enjoy in Japan?
Smith: I would say that American comics make up about one one-hundredth of a percent of the Japanese comic industry.
Ervin-Gore: Is there a belief that Japanese comics are superior to American comics? The visuals are often much stronger.
Smith: It's not so much that it's so superior. The best English comics, either American or Britain, are equal to the very best Japanese comics. Part of the reason they don't read as much American comics is because what we see of Japanese comics is the cream skimmed off of a larger industry. A lot of people in America who might otherwise be doing comic work are working on, say, the Simpsons. The same people might be writing and drawing their own comic in Japan, and their talent would go right into their own ideas. In America, a lot of people who are talented in that area tend to be working in other industries -- particularly the film industry. The film industry in Japan is so small that I think a lot of people with developed visual imagery end up doing comics.
Ervin-Gore: Because there aren't any other real outlets?
Smith: Well, because there are limited outlets. I can very well imagine someone like Tim Burton being a comic book artist had he grown up in Japan. There are fewer outlets, and certainly he would have seen working on comic books as being a more reasonable thing to do. In America, it's certainly not something that springs to people's minds unless they happen to be into comic books to begin with. In Japan you can't escape it. They're around you all the time, and it's certainly something you would think of.
Ervin-Gore: Why are comics so prevalent in Japan?
Smith: That's a question that, boy, there have been a lot of arguments about. I can certainly give you my take on it, though. I think they came to be such a large part of the society originally because they represented cheap entertainment in a society that had no money. After World War II it was very much like the depression in the United States. The people had no money, and they were looking for cheap entertainment, and comics generally filled the bill there. They also continued to grow because they were never subject to a period of censorship and repression the way they were in the US. There were no real limitations. In the US. the comic book industry right now is a fraction of what it was in the fifties. It was largely destroyed because of events that we're all well aware of. But if you look back at the time before that, it resembles almost uncannily the embryonic comic industry -- the same breadth of subjects, for older readers, younger readers, mystery, romance, sports comics -- you name it. And that of course is the key to the Japanese comic book industry; there it's a true media, and there's something for everyone. It's simply a different method of expression than prose or movies or television.
Ervin-Gore: It makes you wonder what the American industry would be like right now had we never seen McCarthyism in the `50s.
Smith: It does make you wonder. Another reason they seem to work so well in Japan -- this is something people have mentioned, and technically it doesn't work, but they've got a point -- comics work very well in the Japanese language because their writing system is idiographic, and that means they're looking at little pictures, and looking at pictures on a page with other little pictures works really well. When they've done studies, positron emission tomograph studies that show areas of activity within the brain, the studies show that the Japanese, when reading their language, process that information in the same area that activity shows when they're looking at pictures. When a person is reading in English, the two activities of reading and looking at pictures takes place in two different areas of the brain. So for a Japanese person to look at a comic book, there's no cognitive dissonance there. The whole thing makes sense to them, and they read with tremendous speed -- far faster than we do, because certainly Japanese is absorbed differently than English. In some cases, I've found Japanese is easier to read than English, which I never would have dreamed when I first started looking at it. I have noticed that, for example, when I'm on a train, I can often read the Japanese name of the station before I can read it in English, because there's something very powerful about the language's ability to communicate.
And speaking of trains, there's another reason I think comics are so popular [in Japan]: there's a tremendous number of trains, and train stations, and riding on trains that goes on in Japan, and it's nice to have something to pick up. Comics are everywhere: in subway kiosks, at 7-11s -- everywhere. It's just very easy to grab them and read them, and it's much smaller than a newspaper and therefore easier to read on a crowded train.
Ervin-Gore: I wanted to ask a question from a manga reader who wrote in to the website: Is the current trend of American artists drawing in the manga style a good thing or a bad thing, and how does it affect the popularity of manga?
Smith: I think it's an outgrowth of the popularity. I don't think more people are going to become interested in manga because of it, because you'd have to be interested in manga to know there's an influence there, so I don't think it works that way. As to whether it's a good thing, well, more styles for life. I think that most artists absorb a large number of influences and come up with their own styles based on those. As long as they're not just copying someone, and I get infuriated when I see people do this. I've seen [other companies'] artists doing it; I've seen them photocopy that stuff, especially from Shirow [Ghost in the Shell]. In fact, Robert de Jesus, who is one of the best manga-style artists in America today -- he's got his own style, yet he's very much manga influenced -- Robert has a section on his website where he actually busts people who do this. He'll put the original and then the other version right next to each other, and in some cases it's just flagrant! You wouldn't believe it, and actually, it's pretty amusing. But I think it's a good idea for people to absorb different influences and try different things, and I think there are things that people can learn from manga that are of value to American comics.
Ervin-Gore: Is there any sort of increasing awareness of manga?
Smith: I find it astounding that I can talk to people at the San Diego Comic-Con -- it is not uncommon at all to run into a comic book fan who is not a manga fan -- and of ten their comment will be, "well, I don't like manga; it all looks the same." How they get these ideas, I don't know. I would say there's more similarity among Image comics than there are manga comics.
Ervin-Gore: There are lots of people who seem to think all manga is Speed Racer.
Smith: I guess so.
Ervin-Gore: Given all of this, where would you say manga is going in America?
Smith: Sometimes it seems like just when I think I know where manga is going in America, I've always been fooled. I would say that if the comic book industry in America survives -- which frankly I don't believe is a done deal -- but if it does, manga is always going to be a part of it. We've really lived through the worst they can throw at us, and not only lived through it, but we've prospered. If you look back to `93-'94 and look at where manga was sitting in the overall sales charts, it was down in the high 300s, even the 400s. Now, after the enormous decimation that has gone on and the loss of sales many comics have seen, we find ourselves sitting in the high 200s or low 300s, which means that while our sales have not necessarily increased, our position in the market has improved enormously. And this means while other people were taking savage cuts in their book sales, ours were just percolating along. Manga fans are a really dedicated bunch. They're gonna go to the stores and they're gonna buy their damn manga.