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The Space Shuttle Columbia disaster earlier this month hit manga artist Rui Hashimoto a little harder than most. At the time, she had just finished her latest feature about the life of Japan's first female astronaut, Chiaki Mukai. Included were depictions of the Challenger accident in 1986 - a time when Mukai was still in training as a payload specialist. A "complete shock" is how Hashimoto described the irony.

The book is one in a recent biography series of comics she has completed for publisher Kodansha. But getting these assignments - and any manga work at all, for that matter - is tough these days. Even though manga is growing in popularity overseas, domestic publishers are cutting back as a result of reduced consumer spending - at least on comics. Further, they are increasingly less interested in listening to writers' ideas for new works. One of Hashimoto's former mainstays, the magazine If, recently discontinued operations altogether.

Upon entering her home, one can see Hashimoto is an artist first, with manga being mainly a way to pay the bills. (A cat-sized grasshopper of twisted metal sits next to the foyer; shelves of books featuring the works of Paul Gauguin and Claude Monet fill shelves outside her workroom; and a large painting of hers featuring a rendition of a multi-colored piece of seaweed hangs in the stairwell.)

Her manga career is a relatively recent venture, beginning six years ago after a friend suggested she put her skills gained from studying toward drawing manga. She is now working on a feature for the magazine Dejiru that will profile the complications a mother faces in dealing with a soon-to-be-married daughter.

Given that as a whole the industry tends to lean towards content that is rather misogynistic, being a female is not unique in this field; in fact, Hashimoto often finds herself sharing ideas with a large group of female artists.

This week the Captain touches upon the gender issue and much more as he continues his Manga Artist Interview Series by sharing excerpts of his conversation at the home of Hashimoto - his first manga queen in the series.

Profile

Name: Rui Hashimoto
Age: 35
Hometown: Senkawa, Tokyo
Hobbies: Taking care of three cats and one dog
Recent manga reading material: Makoto Isshiki's Piano no Mori
Former jobs: Italian-to-Japanese translation and waitressing

Interview

Captain Japan: What type of people read your work?

Rui Hashimoto: Well, women my age - women in their 30s, read Dejiru and If. My Chiaki Mukai and Florence Nightingale (Nightingale) books are for children.

You know, for the one I am working on now for Dejiru, about the mother and daughter, I am reading the teen magazine Egg. It is the best way to get a feel for the kids of today, but it is really embarrassing! (She grabs her copy of Egg off the table so that I cannot see the tanned and trendy teenage girls filling its pages - Captain.)

CJ: Do you come up with the ideas for the comics on your own?

RH: They are my ideas. I must sell them one by one - it is basically freelance. Sometimes I'll hear that a publisher is looking for someone who can draw a certain type of manga, and I'll bring in my samples. That is how I was able to get the Nightingale job.

I'd like to work on as many different kinds [of manga] as possible. It is impossible to have all my works in one magazine because these days magazines are so classified - some for boys, some for girls, some for women... some for salarymen interested in hentai. (I mentioned earlier that I had previously interviewed a few artists whose specialty is perversion - Captain.)

If I bring something into a publisher there is no guarantee [as far as publication]. There are never any details about when it might be published; it is up to them, and I have to wait.

CJ: Female artists, like Rumiko Takahasi and Naoko Takeuchi, who draws Sailor Moon, have become famous in Japan. Did they provide you with any sort of inspiration?

RH: Definitely not Sailor Moon! (This comic is a current children's manga - Captain.) But Yumiko Igarashi's Candy Candy was a big influence. It was very famous with little girls. It was similar to Sailor Moon but for my generation. It was a television cartoon and manga where a little orphaned girl is adopted into a rich family; it was sort of like Annie.

CJ: Why did you like it?

For the first time I could see that manga is made by regular people, just like everyday goods like this plate. (She picks a ceramic plate off the table - Captain.) It was a first for me. Daily things are of course made by people; I understood this, but not when it comes to manga. This is when I started to learn about art and drawing.

But for drawing style, the woodblock print work of Hokusai Katsushika was an incredible influence. I really like this type of erotic art (She holds up a book containing ukiyo-e prints from Katsushika - Captain.) It is really terrific.

CJ: Do you feel discrimination in this business because you are a woman? Or can this work give women a sense of freedom?

RH: I don't think about that. It is about your work, not whether you are a male or not. There is a lot of energy expended. But there is a limit as to what a person, male or female, can do. I was working on Nightingale 12 hours a day for 2 months so that I could finish it.

But for freedom, after getting married, many women work part-time as artists. But, at the same time, if you are a mother, and drawing while raising a child, sometimes it is hard to keep your focus.

CJ: If you look at the work of Toshio Maeda and Takeshi Oshima, you can see that it is based on perversion and female exploitation. Of course, it is not just these two artists; perverted comics compose a large percentage of the manga that is produced. Do you feel strange working in an industry that exploits women in such a way?

RH: When I started working as a manga artist my mother was really concerned about it because she held a bad image about the business. But now, there is no problem because my manga is as harmless as Candy Candy - it is at the same level of appeal or interest. You know, there are so many various sub-genres of manga that artists can do what they want...and I can do my own as well.

CJ: What do you think about Shonen Jump's popularity overseas?

RH: For my work, it doesn't mean much. But I'd feel really happy if young kids who read Shonen Jump now will grow up and start reading manga for adults...but not hentai! (laughs) It's a great way to transfer Japanese culture [outside of Japan].

CJ: What is your biggest problem in this business?

RH: There are no jobs! (laughs) And...there are too many artists [now]. The competition is fierce; there is no balance with readership and production. Some people have even quit as artists. For me, I am hoping that people with real drawing skills, or talent, will continue on, producing great works and making the business stronger.

CJ: So it is the economy's weakened condition then that is causing the trouble, right?

RH: Yes, it is very difficult. The publishing companies are hurting. Spirited Away and Musashi Miyamoto's Vagabond are really the only two popular comics. A lot of people buy them so their sales are strong.

For me, I am not that famous, and the competition makes it really tough. I can only look at it one story at a time. But now I am wondering, though, if I can keep working as a manga artist or whether I should change to web illustration. There is so much demand for drawing characters, images, and mascots for companies' web pages.

CJ: Do you have fans writing to you?

RH: Well, my editors receive letters sometimes and they'll send me a copy. Mostly they are from young children.

One time, a mother wrote to say that she and her daughter read my manga together. The mother was a nurse, and she taught her daughter about her job through Nightingale. This made me very happy.

CJ: What are you interested in doing in the future?

RH: In Japan these days, many young kids are becoming less and less interested in getting married after observing the lives of their parents. They see the future as being bleak; they see their their parents' lives as company workers as being worthless. I would like to draw manga about people who still have a little hope in spite of seeing the reality of life - and I want to give them more hope.

Note: Fumiko Kojima contributed to this report from the Saitama Bureau. A special thanks goes to Freedom Lohr of TokyoDV for assisting in this interview. Images 2 and 5 are courtesy of Kodansha.

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EX: How did you get started in the manga-drawing industry?

Hagiwara Kazushi: I always wanted to become a manga artist, but instead of applying for awards, I became an assistant for manga artists. Initially, I was an assistant for Dirty Matsumoto (an H manga artist), but I realized that if I kept going there, I probably wouldn't be able to draw shounen manga in the future. That was when I saw the advertisement for assistants in WEEKLY JUMP, and applied to be an assistant for Matsumoto Izumi-sensei (most famous for the original manga series for KIMAGURE ORANGE ROAD) because I liked his art style. Towards the end of my apprenticeship, I was inking on behalf of Matsumoto-sensei while drawing my own manga in my spare time. When I was done with my own work, I showed it to Matsumoto-sensei's editor at WEEKLY JUMP; the reply was positive, and I was able to debut in JUMP.
EX: So you never went through those manga school/award programs in magazines?

HK: I've never gone through applications, and never have received any awards. Although, I have to add to the last question?I remember doing one small piece for some anthology during my apprenticeship, and it made me swear that I would never work for a small publisher ever again.

EX: Oh? How so?

HK: They rejected some of my ideas as worthless, and it left such a bad taste in my mouth that I swore I would only work with larger publishers.

EX: How long were you in Matsumoto Izumi's studio?

HK: I spent approximately three years there. Many of the people there grumbled when there was lots of work to do. Since I loved to draw, I was very happy to be there and learning techniques.

EX: Did you make many friends during your apprenticeship that we would recognize?

HK: Actually, most of my friends in the industry I befriended after I debuted. The only one I can really remember off the top of my head is Okazaki Takeshi (of ELEMENTALORS), who ate from the same pot I did at Matsumoto-sensei's studio.

EX: Speaking of which, whatever happened to Okazaki-sensei?

HK: He quit drawing manga, and is now studying to become an accountant.

EX: Getting back to you and your roots, was there any artist that particularly influenced you into drawing?

HK: The first work that comes to mind is Nagai Go-sensei's DEVILMAN. As a child, I grew up reading and knowing only DORAEMON; in that aspect, my finding and reading DEVILMAN in junior high school probably influenced me much into entering this field.

EX: Do you have any other authors and/or works that are particularly memorable?

HK: Junior high school was about when I started reading KING on a regular basis; that was the first magazine that I bought on a regular basis, unlike MAGAZINE that most people back then started with. In that aspect, Moriya Tetsumi-sensei influenced me a lot. I know that Moriya-sensei is drawing ladies' comics under another pen-name; I've been looking for tankoubon of her earlier works but I can't find any. Let's see... I've always loved Matsumoto Leiji as well. I loved GALAXY EXPRESS 999.
I remember reading shoujo manga back then as well. I read every issue of SHOUJO COMIC and BESSATSU MARGARET; my little sister and I split the costs for those two magazines, and read them together. (laughs)
Although I spent a very poor childhood, I also started reading shounen manga around then. My favorite series in KING was WILD 7, and when I started reading JUMP, my favorite author was Eguchi Hisashi.

EX: Now going to the present... BASTARD!! has been made into an anime. What are your honest opinions about that?

HK: The anime is a completely different thing compared to the manga, so I went in with no expectations. I was happy it was made, and that I thought Gara's story in Episode 4 was done well, but I will leave it at that.

EX: So we won't see any more of your works made into anime?

HK: Back when I was in school, I was in the animation division. So I would like to make my own anime someday.

EX: What kind of anime would you be making?

HK: That depends on the staff that I can gather. A new work utilizing a great staff would be interesting, but it would depend on how people react with one another. Creating anime works is like a chemical reaction, but instead between people?it really doesn't matter what is made, as long as there is that reaction going on between the creators.

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Rumiko Takahashi was born in 1957 in Niigata, Japan. She attended Niigata Chuo High School and founded a manga appreciation society. By the time she was a junior she knew that she wanted to create manga for her life's work. Her first work was Katte Na Yatsura published in the popular magazine, Shonen Sunday. She went on to study manga at college and then onto a successful career, drawing such titles as Urusei Yatsura, Maison Ikkoku, Ranma 1/2 and Inu-Yasha Sengoku Otogi Zoushi, as well as several shorter stories.

Rumiko is known for her humor and long complicated storylines. She also is known to liberal dose her works with clever puns, many of which are lost when her wroks are translated into English. Her career has lasted over 20 years and managed to earn her the title 'princess of manga.'

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Masamune Shirow on Ghost in the Shell



Fans of manga need no introduction to Masamune Shirow. His works are legend. It is our hope that during Manga Month at Dark Horse, we will bring some new readers into the fold... and no introduction to manga is complete without an introduction to Shirow. His published works include Black Magic, Appleseed, Dominion, Ghost in the Shell, Orion, Neurohard, and the deluxe illustration collection, Intron Depot.
The animated version of Ghost in the Shell is scheduled for theatrical release in Japan, the United States, and the United Kingdom in late 1995. It is expected to be a very high quality work, employing a great deal of computer graphics, and the best animation staff in Japan. Mr. Shirow is currently working on Ghost in the Shell Part 2, and he plans to serialize it in Kodansha's Young Magazine in the fall of 1995.

Almost all of his works have been translated into English by Studio Proteus, and are currently available through Dark Horse Comics. Ghost in the Shell will be released in March 1995.

Dark Horse: How would you describe your background?

Masamune Shirow: One way you can look at it is that since I was born in 1961 in Japan, I am a member of the color TV generation; it first appeared and became popular while I was growing up. As for Kobe, it is a long, narrow city hemmed in by mountains and the ocean, at the corner of an industrial region that stretches out from Osaka, Japan's second largest metropolis. Kobe is the second largest port city next to Yokohama, and historically it was an early port of entry for Western culture. In Japan today Kobe has a reputation of being a tourist city. When I made my debut with Appleseed, I lived only a few meters from the breakwater, but I drew Ghost in the Shell while living in a town in the mountains about nine kilometers from the sea, and I continue to live there today.

Dark Horse: What did you do prior to your professional debut as an artist?

Shirow: When I was in elementary school I used to do water colors without thinking about it much, and for fun I often went out to draw in the local mountains or at the seashore -- taking complicated illustrated reference books with me that I didn't really understand at all. When I was in junior high and high school I didn't draw much, and I instead devoted myself to sports (judo). Since I was fond of art, though, I later chose to enter the Osaka University of Arts, and I studied oil painting there. In college I met a friend who was a manga fan and was also doing self-publishing. And that's how someone like me -- who had never even bought a manga magazine before -- wound up drawing them.

Perhaps because of this, there's very little of the usual manga "know-how" in my work. Some people kindly refer to my style as "unique," but others say it's immature and lacking in understanding of some important and basic points that would make it more commercial. At any rate, after drawing manga for around two years, I was able to issue Black Magic -- my first manga paperback -- through the self-publishing group to which I belonged. Black Magic was noticed by a man named Harumichi Aoki, who is the president of a small publishing firm in Osaka called Seishinsha, and he invited me to make my official debut from his company. Thus began my first contact with the real manga world.

Since I wanted to concentrate on painting until I graduated from college, I had Mr. Aoki wait for a while. Then, upon graduation, in 1985, I drew Appleseed specifically for his company, Seishinsha, and made my commercial debut. Unlike others, I thus began my career never having working as an "assistant" for an established artist, and never having gone through the arduous process of submitting work to publishers as an unknown. I loved to draw and create stories and do research, and I knew that I wanted to enter a profession where I could do all those things, but it took a while after my debut for me to realize that this is, after all, what a comic artist is really all about.

In parallel with my manga debut with Appleseed, I also became a high school teacher. I taught for five years, but I eventually realized that school education merely demands that teachers transmit information, and that I could have a much more direct and deeper dialog with people as a manga artist, so I'm now taking a break from teaching. Around the time I stopped teaching I began drawing Ghost in the Shell and Orion (Seishinsha), and that brings us up to the present. Since my debut, I've been supported by many people and by fortunate circumstances around me, and I feel that I've been incredibly lucky. I'm enormously grateful, for example, for all those at Studio Proteus and Dark Horse who have helped make it possible for my works to be read by my fans in America.

Dark Horse: What are your primary influences?

Shirow: Rather than manga, I think I've been more influenced by animation and TV dramas (especially those from the U.S. and the U.K.). Gundam is an example that comes to mind of one influential animation work. Of course I do believe that my work is original in its own way, but there's always some past experience or memory that triggers the ideas I come up with. I may be able to build on ideas, to adapt them, and thus come up with something new, but I have doubts about whether it's truly possible for anyone to create something completely new and original. Emphasizing a combination of females and mecha, as I do, is something that's been around for a long time, and neither the idea of computer brains nor Special Forces units are themselves new, either. But as with cooking, even if the ingredients are the same, the way they are mixed together and the goal of the person doing the mixing creates a different flavor. In that sense, if the result of cooking can be called original, so, too, can my work. I always try to draw manga that are true to myself.

Dark Horse: Are there any foreign artists whose work you particularly enjoy?

Shirow: Unfortunately, there are very few non-Japanese comics sold in Japan, so we have very little opportunity to get to know foreign artists. I'm really happy that I've recently, finally, been able to obtain DC Comics' Arkham Asylum and Moebius' Made in L.A., but I've only been able to catch three episodes of Max Cabanes' Colin-Maillard, which was serialized in one of Kodansha's magazines. Someday when I can find the time I want to take a vacation and tour bookstores throughout Europe scouting for comics.

Dark Horse: Would you ever consider working off another writer's script?

Shirow: I personally like working alone. I like thinking up my stories (even if I'm not very good at it...). Whether using scripts is good or bad is a case-by-case situation, and it would depend on each writer's circumstances and involve some judgment. (From my experience, though, script writers all too easily specify "a young girl so beautiful one falls in love at first sight" or "a heroic clash of mounted armies," and frankly as the person who has to draw the pictures, I'm not very interested in working with them then. Of course, it does depend on the writer, though).

Dark Horse: How do you view the relationship between manga and animation?

Shirow: I do believe that commercial success with manga makes it much easier to get animation projects off the ground. But there are too many people who think that they only have to do a half-way decent job of animating the drawings of a best-selling manga, and I don't agree. I think there are ways to demonstrate and produce animation that are unique to animation. Also, in order to establish animation as a truly unique medium of expression, I think it's better to work from an original concept than to base the work on a manga, or, if producing animation based on a manga work, I think it's better to at least rewrite the story for the animation. It's also true that there are some manga that are truly superb when read, but that are not necessarily suited for animation because of their pacing, style, or length of story. Rather than stressing the "animation of manga," I think it's better to evaluate each work on its own merits (as either manga or animation), and see whether it is good, or whether there is room for improvement.

Dark Horse: What do you consider your best work?

Shirow: I think of my works as my own children, so they're all equally precious to me, and I can't say which is best. But in an overall sense I suppose that Appleseed stands out the most.

Dark Horse: What do you do in your spare time?

Shirow: I take photographs of spiders and make paper-mache figures (unfortunately, I haven't been doing much of this recently). Since I have always loved to draw, it's hard for me to differentiate between work and play.

Dark Horse: Some of your color work includes very unusual textures. How do you achieve these effects?

Shirow: I use a color copy machine and copy rock or metallic images onto a "transparent film with an adhesive on one side," (reversing or flipping positive and negative images, altering colors, and changing sizes), and then cut and paste them into the drawing. I usually use acrylic paint and apply several thin layers... I avoid a high contrast look with sketches, because when I draw very realistically "the flat, deformed, and unrealistic-looking" faces of my characters tend to dissolve into the surroundings there, and appear odd.

Dark Horse: Do you work together with anyone?

Shirow: I have no drawing assistants or special manga production staff. Even if I wanted to, in the Kobe City area, unlike Tokyo, there are almost no such people anyway. For business matters such as accounting, handling rights, and general negotiations, I have formed a company, however. This allows me to leave business matters up to the company and to concentrate on my creative work. As far as my comics are concerned, it's easier for me to work on my own.

Dark Horse: How much money do manga artists in Japan make?

Shirow: Manga are quite established as a creative medium in Japan -- although they are not given a great deal of public recognition -- and there are many different genres. There is also a vast gap between the lowest and the highest incomes of manga artists. (For your information, although Japan is said to be an economic superpower, it is really the corporations that have all the money, and not the individual citizens. Japan is a peaceful and fortunate place, all right, but to buy a house typically takes between 20 to 30 times the average white-collar worker's annual pay). According to a rumor I have heard (and I can't guarantee its veracity), the annual income of a certain top manga artist is $3 million (perhaps half of this is taken by taxes, but it's still more than 70 times the average white collar worker's annual pay!) and the lowest annual income is around $500 (which would obviously require depending on one's family). But with a page rate of $100, a thirty-page work serialized in a monthly magazine for a year comes to around $36,000, or almost the same as the average salaried employee's annual wage of $40,000. And if the artist draws 200 to 300 pages, he or she can issue a paperback volume and enjoy royalties as well, with almost no limit as long as the work sells well. Major publishers usually demand that artists produce between 20 to 30 pages a week, and they pay more than $100 per page. Artists are also generally paid between $500 and $5000 for the rights to use a single illustration for a video game package, etc., so with talent and luck (depending on whether the masses love you or not), you can see that it can be considerably more profitable to work as a manga artist than as the salaried employee of a company. Nonetheless, things don't always go the way you expect in this business, so a manga artist is definitely an occupation with a considerable element of gambling to it.

Finally, it takes considerable expense to hire the multiple assistants necessary to meet the volume-production demanded by publishers, and to set up and maintain a production space. You have to do good work in order to succeed commercially, but whether you'll succeed commercially just by doing good work involves a gamble.

For Ghost in the Shell I drew an average of forty pages per episode and it took me around forty days to do one episode. But the number of hours I can work, and the efficiency of my work fluctuates, so it's not always possible to do a page a day. It's a real struggle simply to adjust my schedule to "meet the deadlines...!

"As with cooking, even if the ingredients are the same, the way they are mixed together and the goal of the person doing the mixing creates a different flavor. In that sense, if the result of cooking can be called original, so, too, can my work. I always try to draw manga that are true to myself."

Dark Horse publishes the galaxy's greatest comics.

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Creatorof Sailor Moon!

Naoko Takeuchi was born March 15, 1967 with blood type A. She lives in the Azabu Juuban area of Tokyo with her husband who is also a manga artist. Before she became a manga artist she went to school and recieved her license to be a pharmacist and medical examinar. Mrs. Takeuchi has done several other notable manga series such as; Codename Sailor V, The Cherry Project, and PQ Angels. As you can read in the letters featured in the Mixx Manga comics she loves to hear from fans and recieve fanarts, etc from them.

"If we girls aren't strong, we can't protect the boys we love."


Links to more indepth Naoko sites:
The Manga of Naoko Takeuchi
Takeuchi Naoko: The Unoffical Homepage