Vertical Editor Mentzas Talks Tezuka, Japanese Comics & The Industry

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Interviews

Published on Wednesday, 19 September 2012 05:00

Written by Renzo Adler

Over the years there have been many publishers of Japanese comics (manga) and Japanese literature in the US, but few are as remarkable as Vertical Inc.

Established in 2001, Vertical has garnered a reputation for publishing classical and daring manga and other Japanese publications. Their titles are a unique cornucopia of genres and even the covers Vertical designs have an aesthetic charm not unlike the DVD covers by the Criterion Collection.

Their most recent publication, Message to Adolf by Osamu Tezuka, was originally published from 1983 to 1985 and is about two boys: Adolf Kamil, a Jewish-German, and Adolf Kaufman, a half-German/half-Japanese son of a government official living in pre-war Kobe, Japan. Though starting out as childhood chums, their relationship becomes strained at the onset of WWII and as they become entwined in a plot to overthrow Hitler.

What follows is a winding path of conspiracy and madness as Tezuka uses a noir aesthetic combined with deeply personal feelings of horror in facing an insurmountable socio-political force.

Tezuka (1928 – 1989) is best known for his children’s science-fiction comic, Astro Boy/Mighty Atom, and while he is only now just emerging from obscurity in the West, he is considered “The God of Manga” in Japan. Combining a flare for the cinematic with a worldly and Machiavellian taste in literature and art, Tezuka laid the groundwork for the visual language used by comic authors all over the world to this day.

Not one to be confined to a single style, Tezuka’s works are whimsical, dark, comic, contemplative, erotic, speculative, grounded in tradition, and thoroughly modern.

Until Vertical came along, Tezuka’s comics were rarely published in English and often times quickly went out of print, or only small portions of larger runs were published. Vertical has since published a number of Tezuka’s works, both long and short, including Black Jack (a grim ace surgeon with a scared face), Princess Knight (the adventures of a princess masquerading as a prince), and MW (a bizarre homosexual romance between a priest and a sociopathic banker).

Vertical Editorial Director and Executive Vice President Ioanis Mentzas discussed Vertical’s and his personal relationship with Tezuka, Vertical’s future, and the state of the American manga industry.

Q: I'd like to know a little about your background.

IM: I was born in Japan and raised there. I was born between a Greek father and a Japanese mother and I came to the US for college and I’ve been living here since.

Q: How did you get involved with Vertical?

IM: I am its co-founder. After graduate school, me and this Japanese gentlemen [Hiroki Sakai, ed.] who used to be an editor at Nikkei, which is the Japanese Wall Street Journal, this man [who] was an editor in the book department and I co-founded Vertical.

Q: Is it difficult marketing Japanese novels to the West?

IM: There are definitely challenges. The market for translated fiction is not large to begin with in the US. I’m not saying that American are closed minded, in other countries too, the percentage of translated fiction would be very small once you disregard American imports.

In Europe and Japan they say we have so many translated works published every year, but if you cut out all the American authors, it’s a much smaller number there. That’s why the percentage is pretty small in the US, you already have those big name American authors.

Other countries are trying to imbibe American culture as opposed to American literature specifically.Everyone has their eyes on the US.

So there’s that difficulty that applies to any translated fiction, but in the case of Japanese works you have the issue of there not being enough translators that can really get it done. The two languages [Japanese and English] are very different, so it’s very difficult to do a bang-up job.

Q:Tell us about Tezuka’s Message to Adolf.

IM: The interesting thing about that book is that I said I was born and raised in Japan, in Kobe the port city, from age five to 18, so I was in the exact same situation as [the character] Adolf Kaufman, except there was no World War brewing. I had a Japanese mother and a European father and I was growing up in that same city.

One thing in terms of the difficulty translating is that they are speaking in the Kansai dialect [the south-central region of Japan's main island, Kansai dialect is used in Kobe and Osaka and attributed to a rougher tone].

In the original, when Kaufman and Kamil speak, they speak with a Kansai dialect, but that’s something we didn’t try to replicate [in English].

I spoke with a Kansai dialect growing up, and let me tell you, forget manga, fiction, movies, no work has addressed my specific predicament like this one [Message to Adolf]. Tezuka was already a god to me, I loved Black Jack and his other manga. I only read Adolf when I was in high school because it was a late work of Tezuka’s from the 80’s, so Tezuka already was a genius standing apart and this guy had produced the one work that was addressing my specific situation growing up.

That’s how impressive Tezuka is.

Q: Did the book accurately portray what it’s like for people of half foreign born parents living in Kobe?

IM: Of course there’s a 50 year difference there, but there’s a lot there that I identified with as a high school student reading the work for the first time and reading it now more than 20 years later I’m still pretty impressed by all the little touches there.

Q: So translating this comic was a very personal project for you?

IM: If you read any book on Tezuka in Japanese, the Tezuka canon is pretty set at this point. The best works are this, this, and this. Adolf is in that.

Among the late works are Buddha, Phoenix, and Message to Adolf. For earlier works there’s Astro Boy, Kimba the Lion, and Princess Knight. It does mean a lot for me, but it is considered in general one of his masterpieces. Adolf is considered his biggest masterpiece from the last decade of his career.

Q: Does Tezuka’s being Japanese give him a unique perspective on Germany and the Nazis?

IM: Yes. Tezuka lived through World War II, I think he was in middle school. He was born in 1928, so I guess he was in high school during the war. He grew up in Osaka in the Kansai region. He lived away from the city because the cities were being bombed, but he still experienced it firsthand.

The core of that experience is that he really came to distrust the state use of violence. You can tell from Adolf that he’s completely critical of fascist regimes, but at the same time he picked up a deep mistrust of any government resorting to violence to solve problems.

Q: Are there any other manga authors that address the Holocaust like Tezuka does in Adolf?

IM: Not really. That’s a subject that you don’t find addressed much in manga.

Q: Is there a reason Tezuka was attracted to this subject?

IM: The venue the story was serialized in comes into play in this. The story got serialized in Weekly Bunshun which is a news magazine covering politics and the economy read by grownups and there would be just one manga serialized at a time, like about 20 pages each. Weekly Bunshun still carries manga. So he was writing for a very different audience than usual.

It’s well known in Japan that adults read manga too, but this was being serialized in a magazine that was basically not a comic magazine. Just one manga series out of 300 pages or something. We know that a lot of Tezuka’s later works are pretty serious and directed at people that are college age and above, but this opportunity made him bring it up because he knew the audience would be able to process that kind of story.

Q: Can you give us your thoughts on the popularity of manga and the manga "bubble"?
[The Manga Bubble is the term for the period from the early 2000's to about 2009 when manga publications and sales spiked in the US, but then took a sharp nosedive]

IM: It depends on what kind of metrics you’re looking at. There are a lot of manga and anime conventions in the US, a lot of cities have their own, and each year the number of people attending these cons has gone up, not down. That metrics indicates that manga has in fact been increasing in popularity since the boom ended.

Industry sales figures have gone down [and so have] the number of titles published. So how do you interpret that one line going up and the other going down? In my view, that’s the popularity of scanlations [pirated comics 

You got a lot of pirated stuff and that’s why the industry sales and number of titles published have gone down. However it’s not that manga and anime are not popular anymore, it’s just that it’s not translating into revenue for the localizers here or the licensers in Japan.scanned and translated by fans].

Q: What were publishers doing wrong? Were they putting out too many titles?

IM: I definitely do think there was a glut at that point. Companies were putting out way too much stuff without committing to completing series and just thinking that whatever they put out is just going to sell. That was definitely a bad idea and that didn’t help things at all.

However, that didn’t kill the popularity of manga and anime, what that did was seriously hurt the industry here. Those are two separate things.

Q: On Vertical's Facebook page there is a poll for what titles Vertical should localize next and the most popular title is Princess Jellyfish, a title aimed at college aged women. Can you give us your thoughts on manga's popularity with female readers?

IM: Well the people who respond to surveys by Vertical are definitely not representative of the manga buying audience as a whole, it’s a pretty self-selecting group. We’d get a pretty different result if another company did a poll.

It’s really hard to extrapolate from that poll, but I do think your readers would appreciate knowing that before manga came onto the scene, the vast majority of American comics readers were male and the works were indeed geered towards boys and men.

If you look at the titles, it’s all Something-man. But with manga, slightly more than half [the readers] are women.So that just filled a humongous gaping hole in terms of a demand that the American comics industry was either ignoring or struggling to respond to.

I know a lot of people who have a problem with manga and anime and see it somehow being pornographic or that it objectifies women, etc, but that fact indicates that that can’t be the whole story because girls are picking these up.

Q: Adolf does have a different sort of gender politics, but it was written in a different time.

IM: Adolf was not only written in a very different time, a lot has changed in 30 years, it was also set in a very different time.

Q: Are there any titles you would love to bring to the States but that are out of reach?

IM: I consider those trade secrets. I can’t tell you the ones I really want to do because, who knows, someone else my try to get into the game.

Q: Vertical has always had a close relationship with Tezuka titles. Are there any future Tezuka related plans?

IM: When I co-founded Vertical with Mr. Sakai, I had a line-up in mind of Tezuka works that had to be published in the US. I’ve actually published all of them. I didn’t think we’d be able to publish Black Jack and Adolf because those had originally been done by Viz, but not finished.

My canon of Tezuka works that I believed had to exist in English are already out now. The one Tezuka work that I believe must exist in English but hasn’t yet is Jungle Emperor [known in the states as Kimba the White Lion]. For complicated reasons Tezuka Productions isn’t keen on liscensing that one.

Q: A lot of people say it’s because of the debacle with Disney [it was rumored that Disney's The Lion King plagiarized Jungle Emperor, causing a mini dispute between Tezuka Productions and Disney].

IM: I don’t want to speculate too much, because we’re talking about Tezuka Productions, not Vertical there. We’ve asked many times. I hope we can do that book one day, and in terms of Tezuka, that’s the one I want to do the most right now.

I told you that one because other people have tried to get it and can’t either, so it’s like an open trade secret.

Q: What does Vertical have coming up?  Mobile Suit Gundam: The Origin by Yoshikazu Yasuhiko was announced at Otakon and is receiving a lot of attention.

IM: Gundam is really one of the most important series to run in Japan about robots. Japan is known for its robot sci-fi, Gundam took it to a completely new level of verisimilitude by really fleshing out this near-future timeline, the politics. No robot-type work since has been able to ignore Gundam.

It’s become a huge franchise with a number of sequels, however the manga we’re publishing is a sort of re-telling of that original anime TV series by the character designer himself [Yoshikazu Yasuhiko].

He’s a manga author in addition to a character designer and worked on the original anime, but now he focuses on his own manga writing and this was something he didn’t try to do until late in his career. He’s coming back to the work he’s best known for because he had never done a manga about it. It’s one of the original creators returning to his most famous work.

Q: Gundam is a huge franchise in Japan, but in the west it’s comparitievely unknown in the West compared to a lot of other franchises.

IM: It’s not just popular in Japan, in the rest of Asia Gundam is really popular. It’s not that it doesn’t have appeal outside of Japan. There’s a chance it could become big somehow because they keep making new series and movies.

Q: What’s Vertical’s most popular title right now?

IM: In terms of numbers, Chi’s Sweet Home, the cat manga, is doing alright.

Q: What about non-manga publications?

IM: Those are tough. In addition to manga, we don’t just do novels, we do craft books as well and Aranzi is doing alright.

Q: What do you have coming up in non-manga?

IM: We have the illustrated Queens Blade coming out. This is like anime as some people picture it.

Q: I’m familiar with it. It’s very Russ Meyers.

IM: The soft-porn image of anime is completely born out of this. It’s not like we stay away from that, we know there are people that like that stuff too.

We’re publishing a book called General Will 2.0, it’s a prose book. General Will is a concept that appears in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Social Contract. The book is General Will 2.0 and is written by Japan’s foremost critic and thinker, Hiroki Azuma. A book by him has been published by University Press about otaku culture.

This one however has a broader topic. It’s about the notion of General Will and how something like that might be linked today through internet culture. Not just Rousseau, but also Freud and Pritchard.

Q: Are there any literary or comic trends in Japan you’re interested in?

IM: I’m very interested in properties that tie into video games. When people talk about Japanese culture, about pop-culture in both US and Japan, people mention manga and anime. But my reading of the history is that in the 90’s with Nintendo, Gameboy, and RPGs on Playstation, those were the works that introduced Americans to Japanese popular culture, storytelling, and sensibilities.

That’s just a bigger market than manga and anime which still are niche. Video games are hardly niche, it’s humongous. I think Japanese story RPG’s have been kind of weak in this century, but I see some signs of a comeback, so I’m keeping my eyes open for good properties which might have comic tie-ins and such.

We published a book called Nintendo Magic about that company’s very unique culture of innovation and it has gotten pretty good reviews. It’s a beautiful looking hardcover too. It’s a little outdated since it came out a few years ago, but it’s mostly about Nintendo’s culture and founding in the late 19th century, so that parts not ever going to be outdated.

Q: Any closing remarks for our readers?

IM: I hope young people can find jobs so they can actually vote with their dollars when it comes to entertainment.

Q: So the economy prevents youth from having a say in media?

IM: It can’t not have an effect. It pushes them towards free forms of media like blogs and such. They can raise a tempest in a teacup, but what means most for a company is the bottom line, the numbers. You can like something as much as you want, but that’s a means to an end.

It’s the bottom line companies need to see. If you don’t have those dollars, you can’t vote in that sense. I hope the sacred rights to vote are restored to them.