Not Turning Japanese

by Colleen Doran
I returned recently from a trip to Japan where I was the guest of Tezuka
Productions. The studio chose several American creators to attend a
symposium on cartoon art and among those chosen were Jeff Smith (Bone) and
Jules Ffeifer (winner of the Pulitzer Prize for cartooning). I learned a
lot about the Japanese comic industry and I've come to some conclusions
about the American comic industry that I think will be of interest to you.
No one is a bigger fan of Japanese comics than I am. In fact, I think I
was the only American cartoonist there who actually knew anything about
Japanese comics. I've been a fan since 1984 when MAD magazine cartoonist
Leslie Sternbergh sold me a slew of her collection and walked me over to
the Kinokuniya bookshop in New York where I subsequently blew a wad of
dough on countless books I could not read.
I admired the storytelling skills of the Japanese artists, their inking
techniques, their use of line, those dazzling backgrounds! Then I learned
that Japanese artists hcing up to 500 pages per month abounded.
Wow! Those Japanese artists must really be something! Who hasn't marvelled
at the dazzling detail in books like Akira ? We now even have a name for
all those little speed lines--Akira lines--that take many hours of tedious
dedication to draw. I walked around for years thinking the Japanese must
be inherently superior, harder working, more dedicated. I would spend up
to 120 hours working in a single week trying to duplicate their superhuman
feats of production, and all I could muster was a whopping 60 pages in one
month, and that achieved at the cost of my health and sanity! I was so
wasted after almost 72 straight hours at the drawing board that I had to
crawl across the floor to get to the bathroom where I promptly heaved up
all the caffeine and sugar I had been consuming to stay awake.
Even one of my ex-editors fancied herself quite the expert on Japanese
comics berated me endlessly for not being able to work and produce as well
as those dazzling Japanese creators. If cartoonist Yasuko Aoike could
produce 100 pages a month, why couldn't I? I must be lazy or stupid. "Look
at all that background detail!" she admonished. "Why can't you draw like
that?" I tried. Believe me I tried. I spent endless hours learning how to
render and ink in those styles and I came to the conclusion that I simply
didn't have what it takes. I learned a lot from studying the work of the
Japanese but I also learned that I don't want to draw like they do and I
don't want to kill myself drawing 100 pages per month. The Japanese are
just tougher, more dedicated, more hardworking, more talented, right?
Wrong.
After actually travelling to Japan and getting a close up look at the
publishing industry, the creators and their techniques I have come to one
inescapable conclusion: American cartoonists can't draw 100 pages every
month, and Japanese cartoonists don't draw 100 pages a month either!
"But, how can this be?" you may ask. Those animation and manga magazines
go on at great length about how hardworking those Japanese creators are
with their dazzling production feats and their amazing creations. Are they
lying, stretching the truth, pulling our yankee leg?
Well, they are certainly leaving a lot out, and here's some of what they
aren't saying.

First and foremost, don't think for a minute that Japanese creators are
drawing all that work themselves. It just doesn't happen. The average
cartoonist in Japan has about five assistants. Katsuhiro Otomo (of Akira
fame) has ten, I am told, and it is the assistants who spend many long
hours drawing all that tedious background detail and doing all that
rendering, not the principal creator. Assistants are very specialized and
may perform only one task. One artist may draw only buildings, while
another may specialize in cars and trucks. Still another will draw weapons
and another designs space ships and technical work. Others may do no more
than lay down tone sheets (plastic film preprinted with images) and get
coffee. Most artists also have a manager and an editor, both of whom may
be expected to get down and dirty and pitch in on a tight deadline.
Some artists draw nothing but the main figures, and others may do no more
than layouts. Rendering is done by assistants, but only the principal
creator gets any credit. There have been a number of scandals involving
creators who have done little or no work on which their names have
appeared. One artist that I asked be invited to a symposium was snubbed
because she had been involved in a such scandal in which it appeared that
her team of assistants had created an entire series on which the "name"
artist got all credit. The assistants sued and won rights to the book.
Speaking with some of the Japanese creators was kind of a hoot. They
seemed to enjoy ratting on each other about which artists don't pull their
own weight. "That woman", said a rival artist pointing out a venerated
creator, "draws nothing but the eyes."
While it is not uncommon for American artists to use assistants, the
extent to which uncredited assistants are employed in America is not as
common in Japan. American artists who take credit for the work of others
as their own are not well regarded by their peers and do not command
respect from the fans. The entire American creative team gets credit for
their contribution, as a rule. Listings for writer, penciler, inker,
colorist and letterer are routine. In Japan, only one person on that list
usually gets any credit at all. Though paintings, lettering, inking, and
even writing may not actually be done by the person whose name appears on
the book, the "name" creator walks away with all the glory. It's not one
person who is doing 100 pages a month. In actuality, it's at least five
people producing 100 pages a month.
According to Fred Schodt author of Manga, Manga: The World of Japanese
Comics and Dreamland Japan , at least one artist had about twenty five
assistants, including a manager and six or seven ghostwriters!
Also, and this may sound like a trivial thing, original art in Japan is
about 30% smaller than American comic art. I started working at Japanese
comic size a year ago, and my work output increased immediately a
corresponding 30%!
Most astonishing to me, was the wide variety of tone sheets available to
Japanese creators, none of which are available to their American
counterparts. On my book, A Distant Soil I have used tone sheets (usually
known by the brand name zip-a-tone) to give ethnic characters dark skin.
The sheets are thin, plastic film with an adhesive backing. I cut out the
shape and place it on my original art and the sheet produces a grey area
that can darken skin or make a gloomy alley gloomier.
However, in Japan, you aren't stuck with mere sheets of dots limiting you
to varying shades of grey. Oh, no. You can buy sheets with every
conceivable background, every special effect, every detail you could

possibly imagine. You can get city scapes from every angle, rendered in
different light and in different values. You get schoolrooms and
schoolbuildings inside and out. Dozens of different seashores, skylines,
mountainscapes, forests -- every background you can conceive of has
probably already been produced and is available, ready made. Ready made
airbrush techniques are available. The moon and Earth in all their phases,
as well as the sun and stars with dozens of shots per sheet can be had at
only about $3.50 each. Dazzling cloud banks, countless shots of the sun
shining through clouds and even flowers, trees and grass are to be had,
all predrawn for your convenience.
Of course there are countless sheets for rendering. Difficult hatching
techniques which take many long hours by hand are no problem for the
Japanese artist who need merely buy a sheet, peel it off and place it on
their finished art. You can even buy sheets to simulate tweed and paisley
and silk to duplicate the weave and print on clothes. One catalogue I
picked up contained over 250 pages of these sheets.
And yes, America, you can even buy those tedious Akira lines!
My brain nearly exploded when I saw that you can also buy--no
joke--cartoon characters in different poses. You can make a comic without
ever having to draw anything! And this is all well known in Japan. I found
these sheets for sale in comic shops and stationery shops!
Frankly, I was annoyed, and not just because an ignorant editor some years
ago got up my nose about not being able to meet Japanese production
standards. I was also annoyed because some of the Japanese creators quite
arrogantly proclaimed their American counterparts lazy complainers! If we
couldn't produce 100 pages a month like they could, it must be because we
Americans do nothing but sit around, drink beer and eat bon bons! Imagine
my surprise when, after getting an earful of this, I walked into a comic
book shop and bought nearly 100 of these sheets! At dinner the next day I
held them up before the eyes of Jeff Smith, Denys Cowan and Jules Ffeifer.
"Look at this! Can you believe this!!!" I was absolutely furious! I
thought Jeff Smith's eyes were going to pop out of his head. We couldn't
believe that we had just gotten a bellyful of insults and arrogance and
were now learning the amazing secret of manga production!
One of the editors of Shueisha Publishing, one of Japan's three largest
companies, was rather scornful when informed that many American creators
like myself can only produce about 30 pages of finished art per month, on
average. However, I made sure I also informed him that there was not only
a different standard regarding comic art in America. Most American comic
art is more realistic and detailed than Japanese cartoon art. Frankly,
most of the manga I saw was pretty awful. Production standards are very
low and the art is usually simple and sketchy, looking more like the kind
of work one might expect to see in bad small press 'zines produced on a
photocopy machine. The kind of fabulously detailed work we're accustomed
to seeing in books like Akira is the exception, not the rule. The bad
stuff never gets across the Pacific Ocean and there is a lot of very bad
stuff, even as there is a lot of bad stuff in America. But even the
Japanese agree--the art and production standards in America are
significantly higher than in Japan.
Also, I informed this editor of something he never considered--I actually
draw all my own work. Though I did employ an assistant, briefly, some ten
years ago, I was dissatisfied with the results especially when I found out
the assistant was farming his work out to, well, more assistants. I ended
up redoing most of the drawing later. However, I picked up the latest

issue of A Distant Soil and flipped through the pages. "Every line in this
book is mine", I said. "I even do my own lettering." The editor looked at
me as if I had dropped down from another planet. "Don't you have
assistants?" he asked. I do use assistants today, but they don't draw
anything. They lay down tone sheets, and fill in black spots. I still do
all the drawing. In fact, I've been annoyed lately as I've received
letters from fans complimenting my assistants on the background work and
costume detail--work they don't do!
"Why," asked the editor, "don't you get a computer to do your lettering
for you?" Almost all lettering in Japan is done on computer. I informed
him that I felt hand lettering better complimented the idiosyncracies of
original art than did computer lettering. I went on to say, "American fans
expect the artist to do the work they say they do. If they find out you
have an assistant doing your work for you and you don't say so, you will
lose respect." The editor went dead white and we did not discuss the
superiority of Japanese cartoonists any more.
Osamu Tezuka, the founder of Tezuka studios is legendary for having
produced some 500 pages in one month. But he didn't do it alone. Tezuka
and a team of ten assistants produced 500 pages in one month. It is said
that Tezuka reserved all the primary creative work for himself and did the
story and layouts for all those 500 pages himself, which is a significant
accomplishment. However, there is a major difference between doing 500
pages alone and doing 500 pages with ten other people. It boils down to
about 45 pages per person. Well shoot. I've done that !
I do respect and admire many of the Japanese creators and I learned a
great deal from my trip. Most significantly, I learned that our industries
are simply too different to compare equitably. A Japanese creator who is
required to churn out 100 or more pages of work with his creative team can
never expect to be able to produce a book with art as dazzling as that of
Alex Ross on Kingdom Come. In fact, Japanese creators don't get royalties
on their monthly/weekly comics. They work for page rate only and get
royalties only on graphic novel collections. Page rates for major
publishers in Japan are not always as favorable as U.S. page rates. Tokyo
is an incredibly expensive city, the most expensive in the world, and most
artists are required to live in or near Tokyo. So they must produce huge
volumes of work to make a decent living, especially if their work is not
being reprinted in graphic novel format! American artists may live
anywhere they like, so the page rate on a single monthly book from a major
publisher can provide a comfortable living for most creators. Of course,
in Japan, the page rate is a flat rate. Their is no division of labor
payment, no separate rates for writing, inking, or lettering. If you get
$100 per page, that is what you split with your assistants. If you only
produce 40 pages per month, you won't make enough money to afford even a
small apartment in a bad Tokyo neighborhood!
There are many wonderful things going on in Japan and everyone in America
envies the huge sales figures of Japanese comics. But the presumption on
the part of the Japanese publishers that Japanese comics sell better
because they are better is simply false. There are many reasons why the
Japanese and American industries developed so differently.
First and foremost, in 1950's America, we had some yahoo named Frederick
Wertham who decided that comic books were evil things that turned kids
into juvenile delinquents. He wrote an idiot book called Seduction of the
Innocent that boondoggled millions of Americans into believing that comics
were turning their darling tots into the spawn of the pit of hell (or at
least motorcycle riding shoplifters). So Congress called meetings, moms

and dads all over America burned comics in bonfires, we got the ludicrous
comics code, and thousands of stores stopped selling comic books. Kids
started turning on to a much more wholesome form of entertainment--can you
guess what that is? That's right! Television!
What was happening in 1950's Japan? It was after World War II and the
place was bombed to rubble. There were no televisions. Few could afford
any form of entertainment. So, what did they do? They read comic books.
Many Japanese couldn't even afford to buy comic books, so they rented
them. In 1956 Japan, there were over 30,000 comic book rental shops, more
than ten times the number of comic book retail shops in America today. So
while generations of American kids were being plugged into the idiot tube
as their primary form of entertainment, generations of Japanese were
turning to comic books for their jollies.
One Japanese critic declared that the Japanese cartoonists had also faced
censorship, but by no means did the Japanese comic industry face anything
like the scope of the 1950's censorship spawned by Seduction of the
Innocent. Japanese comics that have come under protest generally contain
explicit sexual or violent content. American comics intended for children
like Batman and Wonder Woman were attacked because Freudian psychologist
Wertham believed that there was that--well--Freudian sexual content
floating around. Mind you, there wasn't actually any sex going on, he just
thought little kids might see sex if they looked hard enough. He thought
Batman and Robin were gay and Wonder Woman was a lesbian, as if eight year
olds in 1956 had a clue what that meant. A major, major difference between
the American and Japanese market is the fact that comics in Japan are
considered a medium, capable of conveying many different types of stories
for many different types of consumers, while comics in America were
considered toys for children and all comics had to be safe for five year
olds. The restrictions of the Comics Code Authority simply never happened
in Japan. Censorship in Japan has been restricted to material with
extremely explicit content, not to all comics of every kind. Moreover, for
many years, American comics could not be distributed unless they carried
the Comics Code approval stamp. If an American comic wasn't appropriate
for a small child, you simply couldn't buy it in your local store.
Comic books are mass medium entertainment. In Japan, there are masses of
masses of people, over half the population of the United States crowded
onto an island no bigger than California. It is so crowded, a few times I
nearly hyperventilated just looking around at the mob. That mob, those
millions upon millions of folks use mass transit (clean, safe, nice
smelling mass transit--if only it were so in New York!) every single day
and every single day, those galloping hoards of salarymen pass legions of
kiosks, and newsstands overflowing with comics, comics and more comics.
They're everywhere. Exposure to comics is constant, relentless. Nowhere in
Japan can you go more than a few yards without some kind of exposure to
comics or animation, either in merchandising or advertising or Hello Kitty
wear. Who am I to resist? I now have a Hello Kitty keychain. Even in the
oh-so-fashionable-oh-so-filthy-rich Ginza district, you'll find dazzling
jeweled handbags made in the shape of Astro Boy's head.
Try finding comics in a New York subway, or at a Washington bus station.
They're just not there. But in the miles and miles of underground shops
below Tokyo, commuters can grab their weekly comics fix at one end of
their route, read 'em on the train (it only takes about a half hour to
read a 300 page Japanese comic magazine: the stories are rather thin), and
toss the intended-to-be-disposable comic printed on intentionally
atrocious newsprint in the recycling bin at the other end of one's route
while on the way to work or school. Japan has a virtually captive audience

of habitual comic book buyers who pass by the places comics are purchased
in hoards of millions every single day.
In America, comics aren't a habit, they're a commitment. They're expensive
compared to their Japanese counterparts costing almost as much for twenty
pages of art and story as for 200 pages of a Japanese comic. You get
better paper and production values for your money and you can always sell
your American comic later, but it can be an expensive hobby. America, with
twice the population of Japan, has only a fraction of a percent of the
number of outlets to purchase comics. Their are more places to purchase
comics in Tokyo alone than in all of the United States. I am told there is
only one comic book shop in all of Wyoming.
Comics is a mass market medium. In America, where the masses are, the
comics aren't. Compared to the masses in Japan, America doesn't have a
mass population at all. My home state of Virginia has a population that is
only about one-third that of the city of Tokyo alone. To achieve the kinds
of sales publishers enjoy in Japan, American publishers would have to
duplicate the conditions that exist in Japan and I don't believe that can
be done! The vast majority of the United States is still rural. I grew up
in a town with only 900 people. You not only can't buy any comics there,
until recently, you couldn't even buy a TV Guide.
Back in the good old days of comics, kids all over America could buy their
favorites in local groceries and small shops, independently owned markets
which no longer exist having been driven under by chain grocery stores,
most of which won't sell comics. As a matter of fact, it was the low price
of the old comic books which no longer made them desirable to retailers. A
retailer has a certain amount of space in his store and that space must
earn so much money per square foot to be profitable. When comic books were
only pennies a copy, and when that price remained low for decades,
retailers could not move enough volume to make the comic books pay. Candy
bars, quickly consumed by the customer and consuming very little space on
the rack while costing as much or more than the average comic, were far
more profitable. Ironically, lower sales on comics helped drive the price
up and made comics more desirable for retailers to carry again. However,
the higher prices decrease the overall volume of sale, making comic books
less desirable as a retail item all over again. Catch 22.
I went to Japan expecting to learn the secrets of the Japanese comic
market, lessons I could then employ here in America. What I learned is
that there are many things that make comics sell in Japan and not all of
those things are possible to duplicate in America. Nor would I want to.
While I'd love to be able to be as rich as some of those Japanese artists,
I didn't get in to comics to have a team of people to do my work for me.
I'd rather do it myself. I think American fans appreciate the skill of the
artist. When computer graphics or other methods are employed to enhance
the work, the artist is less impressive to me, and to most fans, I think.
And while the Japanese artists have the fame and money most Americans
would envy, my standard of living is much higher than even that of wealthy
Japanese in super-expensive Japan. Also, I was surprised to learn that the
level of creative freedom many American cartoonists enjoy is rather rare
in Japan. Editors exhort a great deal of control over much of the work and
lives of even successful cartoonists. Artists who miss deadline must
endure the "canning" process, a ritual where the creator and his
assistants are locked into a room and held there until they finish the
job; no matter how long that may take! Some artists were very interested
in speaking to Jeff Smith and I about self publishing!
I remain a great fan and admirer of Japanese comics and I respect the

accomplishments of their industry, but I no longer see that industry

through rose-colored glasses. My new perspective enables me to find much
to admire about manga while still respecting and admiring much of what we
have accomplished in America. Most importantly, I realize that our
industries are just too different, and that manga and comics are different
mediums with different standards and practices. The Japanese have not
mastered comics they have mastered mass production. The language of manga
and the language of Western comics are merging and I hope that if I have
another opportunity to meet and discuss our unique mediums again with my
Japanese counterparts, the dialogue will be more about our art and less
about who sells more and does more. I am not interested in a-uh-big sword
contest. Boys, get a clue. It's not the sword, it's the swordsman.
To reply to Colleen Doran's EGO editorial, email her at
CDoranSoil@aol.com
Copyright 1997 Gareb Shamus Enterprises, Inc.