The Forbidden Planet International Blog Log

FPI: This is something of a first for me as today I am talking to someone who moves in an area of Comicdom that I must confess I don’t know a huge amount about: manga. So, Ilya, welcome to the FPI blog and please bear with my relative lack of knowledge here. I read a lot of comics and graphic novels but only a fraction of those have been manga (probably the predictable titles like Akira or Ghost in the Shell, dabbled in Ranma, Appleseed and Dirty Pair), so I’m hoping perhaps I’m going to expand my own knowledge here as well as that of our readers. Perhaps we could begin with you telling us how you got into the comics business? You haven’t always been working in the manga field, have you? I know your End of the Century Club was extremely well received several years ago and you’ve worked in comics for various countries, haven’t you?

ILYA: Hi Joe. I’d been active in fandom before college, but got started in comics proper via self-publishing after that, way back in 1987, with a photocopied A5 pamphlet, a collection of short stories called Speech Defects: it earned me a complimentary review from none other than Grant Morrison (in Speakeasy, a precursor to Comics International). That spurred me on to create BIC (seven issues, later collected as Skidmarks), while at the same time collaborating with Eddie (From Hell, Bacchus etc) Campbell on his Deadface series, which led to The Eyeball Kid, our series for Dark Horse.

Over the years I’ve worked for Marvel, DC, everyone really – but remain in relative obscurity since I prefer to work on creator-owned concepts, which the bigger companies make very little allowance for. I’ve received greater recognition for my indie comics work in translation – and it has been widely translated.

Back in 1993 I was approached by an editor at Japanese publishing giant Kodansha to try out for a showcase of western creators in their manga title, Morning. That, and an exposure to anime in the form of the movie Akira and even more so Grave of the Fireflies, began a love affair with manga and anime forms that persists today – and has eventually led me to editing this new book, the first edition of an ongoing annual anthology, The Mammoth Book of Best New Manga.

FPI: Wow, that’s quite an evolution, from the self-published through the majors and into all sorts of work – hopefully that inspires some of our chums in the UK small press and let’s them see that it can happen. Some comics fans familiar only with Western work can be almost as dismissive of manga as non-comics reader are of their normal fare (the irony) and yet, like the rest of the comics universe, it is a pretty diverse field, covering just about everything from basketball to fantasy. For the uninformed (which includes me to a certain extent!) could you give us a loose definition of what manga actually is? There are a lot of general labels applied to certain sub-types, such as shonen, shoujo, manhwa, yaoi etc; could you possibly explain these to the unfamiliar?

ILYA: Stick with me. Manga, in the simplest of terms, is just a Japanese phrase meaning comics. What we tend to import has by and large been restricted to shonen and shojo, a classification of teen titles for boys or girls, whatever the genre. When we think of manga, this stuff is what we tend to see in our heads. This has led to a widespread misconception – that these forms represent the totality of what manga is. It’s like, a tiny percentage of the medium as a whole. This publishing practice and the resulting “idea” of what constitutes manga has led to it being too easily dismissed – oh, it’s the stuff with the big eyes and the short skirts, either horrendously violent or quite girly.

You think that’s manga? In Japan EVERYONE reads manga, with everything that entails, and therefore it can and does look like ANYTHING – there is no such thing as “manga style”. Some days I feel I’ll repeat that until I die. There is no such thing as manga style. Plenty of people will very likely pick up the book and say “that’s not manga”, and I can tell you now, categorically, they are just plain wrong.

The crucial difference lies in the pacing, the storytelling – manga are longform. The book is 560 pages long to help accommodate that, but in order to fit in as many creators as I could, even at 50 pages plus most of the entries are short stories, standalone samples of bigger concepts or series you’ll hopefully want to and get to see more of. I mean I tried to make sure each story was a satisfying experience all by itself. Even so, given the opportunity (and I hope that will be one result of the book’s existence), every single one of the contributors could fill a book of that length by themselves. And that’s just one of the many strengths of manga – depth, development, complexity – bang for your buck.

What’s more, manga stories can be about any subject – whereas the comics market over here has pretty much restricted itself to a single genre, and hence falling sales, since the 1970′s. I love superheroes, me – as part of well-balanced, healthy diet, not breakfast, dinner, lunch and tea. People love the idea of superheroes – look at Hollywood nowadays – but if that was what they wanted to read, or all they wanted to read, comics would sell (duh).

FPI: I have to confess I have been one of those people who has sometimes thought that the style of most manga was the same – that this sort of bias exists even in the comics-friendly fraternity shows how widespread a misconception it is. Mind you, I’d have to say that the comics market here hasn’t so much restricted itself to only superhero comics, more that they are the dominant form (and what most non-comics readers probably think of when they hear the term ‘comics’). There are a lot of good non-superhero works out there, mostly in the Indy zone, but there’s no arguing that the spandex genre is the dominant one.

Graphic novels in general are doing well at the moment, with growth even in the mainstream bookstores, but manga is doing spectacularly well with many mainstream stores in the UK, USA, France and just about everywhere else, and book publishers are getting in on the act as well as the more specialised comics shops and publishers (indeed the Mammoth book itself is coming from a UK books rather than comics publisher). I recall the mini-manga and anime boom back in the late 80s and early 90s which fizzled out, but this seems to be for real this time – why do you think that is?

ILYA: Cynical reasons, but ones that could reap long term benefits. Since they stopped flipping the artwork or trying to colorize it, the popularity of authentic Japanese manga has exploded (crucially, this was NOT a publisher led initiative – this effect happened BY READER DEMAND). Kids got into it almost despite everything the publishers were trying because it is like having your own secret language – one that adults just don’t get. “You WANT your comics backwards? And in black and white? And full of foreign concepts and terminology?” Who would have guessed?!

Much of the attraction is immediacy, the instant hit (I like to say that comics deal in “the art of what happens next”, while Manga is the “art of what is happening NOW”. They make for a more direct, emotional, and immersive experience). That on its own is not the basis for a long-term appeal, however. What makes for a more enduring marketplace is the strength of much of the material (principally the “classics” of the genre, Akira, Gon, Tezuka etc). Eventually, it makes for its own reward. Folks keep coming back for more.

If you as a reader look at most of what we get as manga over here at the moment and say “it’s not for me, I don’t like it”, fair enough – it’s not for me either (I stopped being a teenager a long time ago!), and nor do I personally read any of it.

BUT – manga and anime has been imported in some form or another (Marine Boy!) for decades now, and has heavily influenced the rising generations of comic creators, same as it has the movies and everything else. Those “early adopters” like myself, the first and second generations to embrace manga fully are now grown up – not only wanting the more sophisticated material in forms other than shonen and shojo, but also making their own manga, and more importantly making it their way.

Most impressive of all – 50% or more of manga readers AND manga creators are female. For the first time since the 1950′s the distaff half of the population is into comics, and for the first time EVER (in the west) they are producing them too. No one can tell me that’s a bad thing. (totally agree on that score, just look at Charlotte Goodacre in our comics insert in the new FPI catalogue – Joe)

Best New Manga (“BNM”) accurately reflects the scene for manga produced outside of Japan in that it conforms to those statistics. I didn’t have to search hard for female talent, or include it in any token way – it occurred naturally.

FPI: I understand that among some fans there is a lot of debate over what can and can’t properly be called manga, especially in relation to work done by artists in countries outside Japan, be it Korea, France, Britain or America. To those unfamiliar with the genre who may be thinking surely manga is manga, it seems quite odd, but some serious fans seem to think otherwise, with terms like manga-ka and nouvelle manga being touted about to differentiate between works. What’s your take on this and how do you think it relates to the collected work in the Mammoth Book of Best New Manga which you’ve been putting together? The book collects work from manga creators from all around the world, doesn’t it? Would you define it all as manga or would it be manga-ka or some other title?

ILYA: “Nouvelle manga”? Really? Is that like where there’s a single line in the middle of the page, surrounded by a dribble of sauce (” >)? Oh, and manga-ka or mangaka just means “maker of manga” or “cartoonist” (not a dirty word in my book. Will Eisner, Frank Miller, Kirby etc = cartoonists).

Manga creators ARE mangaka, they don’t make mangaka. Some them make and talk manga-kaka, though. Sorry, but I have a hard time taking all this random terminology seriously. I’m on the side of those unfamiliar with manga, if that’s indeed what they think: Eggs is eggs.

What makes the material in Best New Manga manga, partially at least, is because we say it is. Of everything included in the book, one of the criteria for selection is that it shows the influence or inspiration of (Japanese) manga and/or anime. The other main criterion is that it is also its own animal, an original response unique to the person that created it. Lots of people are just copying the manga they see. It is one way to learn. The best folks develop beyond that stage, or start out in left field. I have no interest in clones or copies, however proficient they might be, so everyone involved here is creating something essentially “new” – manga, but hybrid personal forms of manga.

The creators of Best New Manga are not Japanese, not trying to BE Japanese (not drawing backwards to their normal way of reading, not dropping gratuitous foreign language terms or setting everything in post apocalyptic Tokyo etc) – yet nor is the attempt anti-Japanese in any way.

Manga in Japan has its origins in Popeye cartoons and the American comic books left behind during six years of occupation following the end of WWII, merged with their own indigenous pictorial culture (Hokusai’s popular prints etc) and pictogram alphabets. The artwork and stories on display in Best New Manga are merely a continuation of that cross-pollination between east and west, taking place in comic form. It’s all comics! And manga are all-inclusive – comics of every type and on every subject under the sun. They deserve to be the most popular form of communication for the future, and on a global scale. Manga, after all, are like comics done right.

(I say that as a frustrated creator who has had to learn to cram his pages and his natural sense of pacing throughout his career, according to the prevailing tempo of storytelling and page counts available to me in US and European comics publishing.)

Going back to defining your other terms – manwha is the name given to manga produced outside of Japan in the likes of Korea or China. I’m not that sure and to be honest I don’t care. I think the term was created to distance them from (Japanese) manga. Likewise, people are fighting over what to call western (or left-to-right reading) manga – is it Original English Language manga (OEL), global manga, international manga, or is it even manga at all? This, for me, is an irrelevant argument. It’s an internet-led storm in a teacup, a symptom of those early adopters of manga or nerdy fan types wanting to keep a hold of that special secret language I spoke of earlier. They don’t want everyone else to join their club and love manga too, not only for what it is but also what it can be.

BNM already includes creators from the UK, USA, Europe, the Middle East, Far East, even Japan. Again I didn’t especially set out to make it that way – but that’s how wide the net falls when it comes to manga, which tells you something all by itself. So as not to create confusion for the general reader (my specific target: I want BNM to be as popular and widely read as it deserves to be), I have gone for work that reads left to right (the way the creators have chosen to make it), but even so you can’t in all honesty call it “western manga”. It’s comics infused with the cultural influence of Japanese manga, but that’s not so catchy, so let’s just stop the whinging over all this divisive terminology and call it manga, plain and simple, and leave it at that. It is the term of convenience most widely understood – although largely misunderstood at present. I find the carping doesn’t help that any. Ignore it.

FPI: That’s interesting – I have sometimes thought that the people carping on about labels and defining what was and wasn’t real manga are a bit like the folks who love an Indy band until they become popular then spend ages online telling everyone why they used to be cool but are now sell-outs; it seems almost designed to shut out curious newcomers, but given manga sales it obviously isn’t stopping readers.

Along with the massive range of manga in the digest format from publishers like Tokyopop and DMP (as well as UK reprints such as Gollancz‘s range)we’ve also seen some more specialised translations such as the mature titles from Fanfare/Ponent Mon – would these also come under the general heading of manga? Although they are undeniably Asian I’ve found that those are a little more accessible to me, perhaps almost more European in certain ways.

ILYA: Sure, those are manga too. They have the same kind of coffee-table status appeal of yer Dan Clowes and Chris Ware. Sunday supplement readers will quietly applaud. Yes, its all good stuff, but almost like the other extreme end of the market. “Look, comics for kids!” “No look, sophisticated comics for grown-ups!” We’ve yet to pull away from either fringe with some truly mainstream pulp that almost anyone could get into – which is what embodies the vast majority of manga in Japan.

Most manga in Japan is pulp, and like anything else 90% of it is crap. The field is also big enough for everyone to find the kind of crap they prefer, and hopefully we are heading that way ourselves. Import Japanese manga can be confusing to most people, however much they might want to understand it – it does go backwards, after all! Even so, manga is getting big over here and it’s one of the few growth areas in publishing. I believe it would go MUCH farther if publishers invested in more (readily assimilated) homegrown product, and erring towards populist pulp at that.

FPI: Do you ever get a little tired over arguments about such labelling and feel readers should stop bickering about semantics and just enjoy reading the work and celebrating the fact that their favourite medium is reaching a larger world audience than ever?

ILYA: Absolutely. You said it, in a nutshell. Manga has in recent years become a household word – even if people don’t know what it means exactly, they’ve heard of it and that it’s “hot”. I teach workshops in comics and manga around the place, in libraries, schools, even prison. Out there in the real world, at ground level, I’m seeing folks genuinely excited by the idea of a word that essentially means “comics” – and that’s fabulous.

You don’t want to go spoiling all of that good will and curiosity with nerdy in-fighting, taking comics and keeping them in their tight little ghetto. Not all comics are manga, you can be sure, but nor is it necessarily something you can define at first glance – manga sensibility has very little if anything to do with the surface style, it goes far deeper than that. It is in the storytelling, the pacing, the emphasis on empathy and emotional content. We can’t make comics that are truly manga until we have thousands of pages to play with, but there are plenty of creators out there having a damn good go, and I think it very important at this time to be providing forums and encouraging a readership for that.

Sure I can see that, commercially speaking, Japanese publishers would rather we didn’t call what we do “manga” – they want to sell more imports of their own material rather than see home-grown productions proliferate: there’s sixty years’ worth of material, much of it truly amazing, for us to catch up on. None of my own favourite manga series’ have been translated or imported yet, and I’d love to be able to read them properly instead of just follow the pictures – but then they might turn out as disappointing to me in translation as, say, Moebius was – in other words best left to the imagination.

To readers new to manga as well as the manga nerds (otaku), I say this – the more people get into manga, the more manga of all sorts there will be for everybody. Entire generations are making their own manga based on their own personalities and experience and imagination, and they should also be encouraged – and frankly I’m more interested in that aspect of manga’s new-found popularity. Those are my kind of people.

Things are crucial right here, right now. Manga is at the stage where it can cross over into the mainstream of culture and society – either as a teen phase, or as something more widespread and long-lived, as long as the material exists to encourage both younger pre-teen readers (who are insanely excited by the very idea of manga, but for whom very little is actually being published over here), and also catering to the tastes of readers growing out of the teen titles that make up 95% of the existing market (ditto). Manga won’t be truly big over here while it is still only imported – backwards and in black and white, and what’s more based in the mores and idiosyncrasies of a culture very different to our own. That is fine for purists and those that prefer their manga that way – but that ain’t most folks.

We can and do already produce our own manga that speaks of life as we know it or imagine it for ourselves – that speaks to the broader populace. That is where I believe our publishing efforts should be concentrated for a properly sustainable future as a truly mainstream medium of choice.

FPI: Well, anything which encourages the creation and reading of interesting new comics (of any type), especially by and for our own creators and readers can’t be bad. I find it interesting when you talk of creating work that will appeal to the teen manga audience and keep them reading as they grow out of that field. That’s something many comics readers will have experienced for themselves; I read huge amounts of comics when younger but by my late teens, with a few exceptions, I was struggling to find work that appealed to me as an older reader and I know from recommending works to older readers getting back into the genre after a gap that this is pretty common. Perhaps if there had been other older audience-friendly work available when I first read Akira I’d have stuck with it. Again it would be good to see that being addressed – especially if comics want to keep growing their appeal to a wider audience.

And talking of wider audiences, Eastern animation has become incredibly common on the numerous cartoon networks (to say nothing of the huge success of the wonderful Miyazaki feature films at the cinema) – do you think this has helped to prepare the new Western audience to read manga? And when I say ‘read’, I mean not only the normal use of the word but also as in that they have learned how to decode and interpret (or ‘read’) the styles and standards so that they find manga more accessible now (sorry if that’s getting a bit too media studies!)?

ILYA: No doubt in my mind at all – anime is the greatest spokesperson manga could have. Of course the two fields are closely allied – almost any majorly popular manga series will get made into a movie, as well as a book, musical, toy range, breakfast cereal, and everything else. The film directors concerned are often the very same mangaka who created the comic in the first place (Otomo with Akira, Shirow with Ghost in the Shell). And sometimes the film adaptations are live action, not anime (Oldboy).

Anime has been most people’s first exposure to manga and Japanese culture (Dragonball Z is behind a lot of the current popularity, as Akira was for my generation). Most folks are currently producing their own manga first and foremost on the web, not for print. For both of these reasons, the new manga is in colour. That, too, will make manga more popular than before with the vast majority of consumers, who have those kinds of expectations – and again, that is what will differentiate the homegrown product from the imported manga titles.

Most BNM creators work in colour and we hope to have the sales and thus budget to include colour in next year’s volume onwards. It’s early days but this is where I foresee the market going – full colour, homegrown manga. Even in Japan, I think they may yet switch to colour in years to come: they haven’t so far because of the pulp economics of bulk printing – their magazines and books sell by the million, not the thousand. Plus the economics of print technology are changing, as long as we don’t run out of trees first! So, full colour comics printed on hemp or seaweed. Read ‘em, roll ‘em, smoke ‘em if you got ‘em!

As for the second “meeja studies” part of your question (wags fingers as quote marks in the air), that neatly segues into that definition of “yaoi” you asked for. Yaoi is also expressed “BL”, or “boys’ love”. It is a uniquely Japanese genre – fantasy stories about gay male relationships chiefly by and for females. Nothing so simple as “gay comics”! The nearest equivalent we have is “slash fiction”, exploring the likes of the eternal Kirk/McCoy/Spock love triangle (always a giggle – I thought ‘Spock in Chains’ was a Slash classic. And now Star Trek – albeit non-slash variety – is in mainstream manga form from Tokyopop – Joe). Tee hee. For me, it just reinforces the idea that sexual fantasies are just that – they aren’t necessarily intended to come true. I remember seeing the first cover to the CMX import Eroica and laughing my socks off – probably not the intended reaction, but again I’m not the target audience.

Curiously enough Yaoi is quite popular over here, but you can be sure there are plenty of manga series (hell, entire genres) we will never see translated simply because the concepts or conceits behind them just don’t “read” – we have no cultural equivalents for them. I’ve dealt a little with Japan on a business level, and you can be sure, as much as there is similarity to be found in the things we enjoy, there are also worlds of difference – their entire culture, their ways of seeing or doing things even on an everyday, practical level, let alone in the realms of the imagination, can be very, very different. It can catch you out.

A for instance – we see characters with big eyes (and in anime, high voices) and assume they are meant to be children, and then we see some of the situations they get into – and suddenly the sex and / or violence becomes a huge issue for us, because we think children are involved. That is our cultural assumption, and our mistake. Various UK packager/publishers have asked me to assemble “erotic manga” packages, and I have so far refused. If I were to show them what they are talking about – they have no idea, no idea.

FPI: In a way that seems related to the problems some mature readers graphic novels encounter with conservative readers in the West, that the medium is for ‘children’ even if a title is clearly aimed at an adult audience – hence the row over Blankets and Fun Home in a US library which was in the news recently. I suspect that this is largely down to misconceptions by people who do not read the material and, as you say, have no idea really about it.

It isn’t just manga itself which is growing in the West, it has also been leaking into the arts in general and influencing them, so we see creators like Jill Thompson making works like her Death book in a manga-influenced style or Marvel creating manga digest versions of their characters for a younger audience. What do you think of that and can I also ask if the reverse is also true with some of the conventions of Western comics influencing Japanese comics creators? You mentioned previously that old post-war American comics left by G.I.s in Japan influenced the early manga creators.

ILYA: Oh yeah – Ed McGuinness on Superman, or Humberto Ramos, you see a huge influence, at least to the surface graphics. That’s grand. I respond to it, as long as its genuine love and influence, not someone cynically putting on the moves. As for format, the 32 page pamphlet (standard American comic) hasn’t been economically viable for decades – Jack Kirby, Gil Kane and others were looking to escape it in the 1970′s but the publishers didn’t listen or support them. If digest formats sell more copies, of course they are a good idea. It’s as natural a progression as from vinyl to CD and video to DVD, and for many of the same reasons. And who invents it all? The Japanese! They know all about compact living.

As for cross-cultural influence, the history of manga past, present and future is entirely that. Anybody who resists or argues against it is a fool. Akira stood out at the time (1980′s) for being a manga with a very strong western influence, which is one reason I am sure why we were quick to want it, understand it, and take it into our hearts. I’m sure western comics creators, myself included, were commissioned by Kodansha in the 1990′s specifically in order to study us and see what made us tick. As I say, at the end of the day it’s all comics. Vive la similarities!

FPI: So moving on to the Mammoth Book, it’s a pretty hefty tome (over 500 pages) and you have contributors from all over, including the Middle East, Far East and here in Britain. In fact I recognised the cover as being Neill Cameron’s ninja panda from his and Jason Cobley’s Bulldog Empire and I know he did a terrific mini manga representation of his trip to Japan recently (in NEO magazine) – is he one of the contributors inside as well as on the cover? Who else will we be seeing inside and what kind of material can we expect? Are they all up and comers from the independent end of comics or are there established creators in the mix as well?

ILYA: Neill is cover artist, our current web-monkey over at www.bestnewmanga.com, and we showcase the entire 64 page storyline of Bulldog: Empire in the book. The cover was largely a compromise – the publishers had horrendous ideas – and while the rising sun image is a tad embarrassing for a book deliberately made up of “manga not made in Japan”, it does make for a strong graphic. I like that the panda suggests the Far Eastern influence, but there’s equal elements of Rupert Bear and Little Nemo to Neill’s artwork in there too. It does seem to best represent the hybrid. As for their story, Bulldog is genuinely widescreen – you can see From Hell and The Authority / Ultimates in the mix as well as manga and anime, what with the mecha (giant robots), anthropomorphism, and the various transformations going on. It’s that good!

We have established indie names such as Andi Watson and Craig Conlan, with all new works – 50 pages each from both those gentlemen – alongside many creators active on the small press or the web, but who will all be new talents to the general public and indeed many comics readers. There’s Asia Alfasi, a talented lady from Libya via Birmingham (truly a cosmopolitan comics work! – Joe) – her work has created much excitement among journalists and started a publishers bidding war because her work is informed by her experience as a female Muslim, and she makes her debut here with the manga series Jinn Narration. The overall category winner of last year’s International Manga and Anime Festival, Michiru Morikawa, is included, along with her prize-winning entry, Advent (that and Andi’s strip show the influence of kids’ book illustration as much as manga. I went for it for the same reasons the IMAF judges did – it’s utterly original).

A previous IMAF winner (although I didn’t know it at the time) is Joanna Zhou, who contributes a delightful set of single page gags, scattered throughout, featuring Carlos (a surly hedgehog) and Sakura (a cute bunny). They’re really smart and funny, and now being merchandised as t-shirts etc. Liverpool’s David Goodman the same, he remixed some of his mini-comics into short strips to break up the main features. There are various Sweatdrop creators from the UK’s very own manga collective. I could go on, but you get the idea.

Stories represent every genre you can think of, and quite a few more besides – True-to-life Drama, Science Fiction parable, medieval Fantasy, updated Chinese Myth, Historical, Romance, Time-travel, Comedy, Bizarro, Horror, Funny Animal – sometimes all of it happening at once! It’s a monster portion of fantasy, reality, humour, action, and drama, executed in a wide variety of exciting and distinct styles.

20 creators! 25 stories! 560 pages! £9.99!!

Seriously, go look for it in your local bookstore and comics shops (and our webstore of course, where we’re offering a very generous discount because we really want folks to try this – Joe) and see for yourself. As an artist-editor, I have very exacting high standards for good artwork and story. It is a very handsome looking (and fat) package. Big as a brick – The Mammoth Book of Best New Manga! Irresistible by definition!

FPI: Coming from a more mainstream book publisher (Constable & Robinson, who have produced some great prose anthologies over the years, terrific Best SF and Horror collections) rather than a comics publisher is it fair to say that this is (hopefully) going to make some headway in the general bookshops as well as the comics shops? I’m assuming manga fans will be interested, but for the curious but inexperienced manga reader, say someone like me who is mostly immersed in European and American comics culture, will it offer me an easier way to slip into the manga waters a bit more and see what kind of work is on offer? My usual experience of anthologies of books or comics is that they usually are a good way to take a little taste of a genre you don’t know; is that one of the hopes you have for the Mammoth Book, that it can act as an introduction or primer?

ILYA: Exactly so. Without sounding too whorish or dumbed-down, this is meant to be your Richard and Judy manga, this is the manga anthology for people who (think they) don’t like manga. Manga for everyone! But yes, it definitively waves the world flag for manga produced outside of Japan as much as it does the medium itself.

FPI: I know you’ve been involved with promoting this collection at conventions and the like, but you also try to raise the profile of the medium outside of promotional work for this book – could you tell us a bit about that work?

ILYA: Most of my own comics work has to be done outside of the comics industry (indie or so-called “mainstream”) in its current state, in places where you get paid properly and have the kind of circulation figures that actually mean something.

I do a lot of work for educational resources on issues surrounding health (smoking, skin cancers, STD’s, sex education). These tend to make for good horror story exposés on the covers of the scandal sheets (“Peddling Sex To 13 Year Old Girls” – but hey, at least it wasn’t ME that got them pregnant). These titles sell year on year in the millions and do a lot of good out there (I wish I was on a penny a copy royalty!). And they get your average bod reading comics, which is my own secret agenda. But yes, you are more likely to find me at your local clinic than at the comics shop, for now (in comics form, we hasten to add, not because of serial illness or stalking of medical professionals – Joe).

I also teach those workshops on manga and comics I mentioned earlier, around the country and sometimes abroad, as well as give away a lot of sketches at conventions and BIG DRAW type events to promote self-expression and love of drawing (I get youngsters to draw ME a sketch and then swap them one of mine, of whatever they want. That way I gets to draw Spidey and Thor etc without feeling like a graverobber for doing so). Every little bit of it I think helps to encourage the next generation of artists.

In some ways my efforts with BNM are an extension of that same work. It’s down to what one of the characters said in Alan Bennett’s otherwise a bit dodgy play and film The History Boys – when the pass-the-parcel came around to me there was nothing in it for me but the paper wrapping. So it’s my duty to pass it on to the next person, and hope there’s something in it for them.

If comics can be revived as a viable medium – and I think that IS happening – there’ll be proper paying work and careers to be had in the future, if not so much right now.

FPI: Now that’s something everyone – publishers, creators, retailers and readers all want. So what’s next in the pipeline for you?

ILYA: Any number of things but I find it a jinx to actually make mention of anything before it happens – I’ve had countless projects come to nothing, magazines and publishers collapse under me, and even editors die on me in the past!

There’ll be a second and maybe a third BNM before I seek to pass that on (other titles in the Mammoth series have reached 18^th and 19^th volumes by now). I created the Manga Drawing Kit last summer, partly to try and correct a lot of the rubbish peddled on the How To market about “manga style” and how to do it – that’s done very well, so there may be some sort of follow up to that. That said I’d rather folks were publishing more comics instead of the plethora of “wannabe” books on how to DO comics, which is anyway by and large a self-taught medium (I don’t want more Scott McCloud books on comics technique, I want to read some more Scott McCloud comics!). So, as long as I can secure a reasonable enough advance I mostly want to set up another graphic novel project with one of the bigger book companies. Anything, really, that will allow me to do what I do best – make comics.

For a long time now there has been no comics publishing in the UK worth speaking of, very little activity indeed. There are signs that is changing but it is still very early days, so basically first off I am doing whatever I can to make sure that the opportunities are there for creators in the future – myself included. Despite the total lack of encouragement there’s an amazing amount of comics work being originated out there, much of it very excellent indeed, but not nearly enough knowledge of it among the book publishers (I confess to having given up on the comics industry editors and publishers – intransigent bunch of fanboys), and not nearly enough outlets for it to be widely seen. As to what is being published, there are some very odd choices being made. I’ll be doing whatever I can to correct that, to point new folks in the right places.

FPI: It’s a bit naughty to make you choose, I know, but are there any creators or series out there (in this collection or otherwise) that you would especially recommend to someone looking to read more manga but unsure where to start? Obviously recommendations depend largely on the reader’s tastes, but are there any in general you would recommend in the same way that I might recommend something like V For Vendetta to a person who doesn’t normally read comics as a good place to start?

ILYA: Anything by Osamu Tezuka (Godfather of manga) is a pretty sure bet – try Buddha or Adolf. Gon is wordless and a good starter book series about a tiny dinosaur with a mean attitude. Barefoot Gen is a classic, as big and harrowing as Maus in its way (completely agree, a real classic and glad it was reissued the other year – Joe).

Outside of Japanese manga, obviously the whole point of BNM is as a showcase of the best, new manga for general readers not already fans of the medium. So buy the book! It will lead you on to countless of the creator’s influences, all name-checked, and also their own websites and other output. It is designed to be a gateway product.

FPI: Which books and comics are on your bedside table right now?

ILYA: Just this morning I read and much enjoyed the latest trade paperback of Ultimate Fantastic Four. Girls is about the best regular series coming out. Pirates Of Coney Island is new out, a riot. Offroad, from Oni, was about the best bit of pulp I read last year – likewise David Lloyd’s Kickback (so if you liked V, read that). I like Ross Campbell’s stuff. Really, there’s just so much. Finder I love. Criminal I think I will enjoy because it’s Sleeper without the redundant superhero angle.

Other creators I want to see playing with their own toys in their own pens are Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale, Darwyn Cooke, Frank Quitely, Grant Morrison – enough with the rehashes, everyone! If the big two won’t let you outside of their universes, leave them behind already.

On the small press, I have high hopes for Paul B Rainey with his series There’s No Time Like the Present (one of my UK small press favourites too, and another featured in our first ever comics insert – Joe), and Daniel Merlin Goodbrey’s Unfolded Earth stuff is great fun too.

FPI: The Mammoth Book of Best New Manga is released in November and is available for pre-order now at our special discount (go on, give it a try, we’re making it easy for you!) and there will be a launch on Saturday November 25th at the Cartoon Museum in London (details on the site). Ilya, thank you very much for joining us.

ILYA: No, no, thank YOU.