Whether you know them as comic books, Manga or graphic novels, when it comes to Japan they are all synonymous with the name Sean Michael Wilson. As a comic book writer hailing from Scotland and now living and working in Japan, Sean is a pioneer in the art form who has been able to achieve considerable success and recognition. Working for some of the largest, and smallest, publishers in the industry, he has been seen as something of a link between Japanese manga and western comic books. Coming off of his recent nomination for the prestigious Harvey Award for the collection of indie style manga he edited, “AX”, Axiom joined Sean for a moment to talk about the process and experiences of this modern comic book creator.
All of Sean’s books are available here: [ link ]
To make things clear for the people reading, could you tell us a bit of what you do as a comic book writer?
In terms of my role, it’s not actually that long of a conversation. Manga is very popular in Japan and has a long tradition in Britain as well as in America, but most people don’t know how they are made. It comes across in some ways as not being all that complicated, but people don’t always get what goes into it. In Japan, when I say to Japanese people “Oh this is my book,” of course the first reaction is of amazement. “Huh? You’re a gaijin and you made this?” And then they see the big publisher “Kodansha” and they are amazed even more. What they say at the end of it is, “So you translated this?” to which I reply “No.” Simply because my Japanese isn’t good enough, although I greatly admire people who have that skill. On the other hand when they come to such conclusions it also comes across as quite insulting, as if translation is the only role I could play in making a book published in Japan. So I always get slightly annoyed at that and I say “No, I wrote it”. Then the next confusion is “Well what exactly does that mean?” Because the word “draw” and the word “write” in Japanese is almost the same word, “kaita,” and they don’t know what you mean, draw or write. Or they think you do both – it turns into a long conversation!
And then if you look at what the Kondansha actually has written on the books for my role in Kana, it says “sukuriputo” スクリプト. But still, people get a little confused because they don’t know exactly what script means, as Japanese people actually know that process as the word “scenario”. So they’ve picked up on this word “scenario” which is actually incorrect. But that’s the English that they’ve been introduced to that means you write the story. But a “scenario” is actually a plan or a plot and a scheme, whereas a script is a detailed description of pretty much anything that will happen in the comic. So you can see it’s not an easy conversation, even though I go through it almost every week. So what we decided to do in the second Kodansha book, “Yakuza Moon”, is to put a four-page section in the back explaining the confusion surrounding my role. So if you get a copy of that you’ll find three pages of details, going into what the stages are for writing an actual comic book, then we have an additional visual page by Michiru Morikawa, which describes what stages the art is going through as well.
Is that pretty unique as far as your publication goes; breaking down how the comic is made and who does what?
Well it’s just four pages at the end of the book, so it’s more of an appendix. But it’s the first time I’ve put it at the end of a book, to stop people being confused, rather than have me explain it badly. I did a talk about it a few days ago at the Kumoto Modern Museum with a PowerPoint presentation; going through it step by step, so yeah it’s something that I’m often asked.
What kind of responses do you get from those talks and meet and greets on the street? How do people react to you as a professional comic book writer?
A pal of mine came over a few years ago, a very good artist from Britain, Neill Cameron, and when he went back to Britain he wrote a little comic book for Neo manga magazine. In it he contrasted in visual form the reaction in Britain and the reaction in Japan when you say that you are a “Manga Ka”. He does this little thing where he says in Britain “I’m a comic writer,” and the person he’s talking to says “Ah… yeah,” and the guy looks at him like he’s a child molester. Then he goes to Japan and says “Boku ha Manga Kan desu” and the person goes, “Ehhhh?! Sugoi!!!” (“Woah, Fantastic!”). So most of the time in Japan, people are very impressed and can’t believe it.
In Japan, the word “Otaku” seems to have a more positive feeling that it does in the West. How does that affect your work?
Work wise, I don’t think that it particularly affects me. I think in Japan it has a slightly positive association, even the world “maniac or mania”, however they pronounce it, they consider it to be a pleasant thing, but actual mania is an extremely unpleasant psychotic experience! But that doesn’t help me all that much, because the problem is that although I live in Japan and work with Japanese publishers my main work is published in English. I work for what was Kodansha International, which is now Kodansha USA, since it changed. Their focus was and still is, Japanese manga for the North American market, Britain too, but North America is the greater part of their focus. Of course Japanese people are very impressed and they think that it’s great, but most of them can’t read it because it’s in English! I often get friends or people I’ve just met buying a copy of my book and sometimes they buy it from me right there and then. But that’s normally the ones who speak English already or are in the process of learning. So as one might guess, most of them have pretty poor English skills, so they cant really get past the “Woah” stage.
So the comic books you make are written in Japan but for foreign markets, how does that work?
So my books are published by Kodansha USA Incorporated, part of the wider Kodansha group. The joke there is that it used to be call KI and now it’s called KUI so in a way all that’s changed, despite the big upheaval, is that it gained a “U”. So now the “Yakuza Moon” and “Hagakure” mangas are the responsibility of the New York office. It officially came out there last week in America (July), and it’s already had a couple of very good reviews. Then on the other side I work with Seirin-Kogeisha, which is pretty much the smallest publisher in Japan while Kodansha is the biggest – so I’m all over the place! They do entirely mature, independent artistic style manga, and I am in a way their ‘man in the west’. I am the editor of the English version of “AX”, that Top Shelf published, and also the forthcoming “Cigarette Girl” by Masahiko Matsumoto, the wonderful early gekiga style artist, his first work in English.
So do you have more creative freedom in the smaller companies?
It’s not really a massive difference I would say. The funny thing is when I first started to go to these publishers in Tokyo, I thought, “I’ll just go up and knock on doors and meet people.” So I went off with my Japanese colleagues and the publishers more or less said the same thing, they want to see stories that “only you can make”. But I would say that it was kind of a refreshing thing to hear. They would all say the same thing, even the very big firms. “Let’s see what you can do, don’t give us the same old stuff.” Of course that’s glossing over the differences you don’t see, but that’s what I heard from the editors.
What was your transition like coming to Japan as a comic book writer?
I was already in love with comics before I came to Japan. My key interest is not really manga. Comic books, particularly the British ones, are the ones that I really loved as a boy and still do, writers like Alan Moore and Grant Morrison. That’s where I started and that’s where my heart still is. In a way it is a kind of dream come true situation for me. What I’m doing now is a direct consequence of that passion that was put into me around the age of twelve. So far, I’ve now worked with three of the artists from that time, which is incredible. I recently worked with Mike McMahon who was the first artist for Judge Dredd, and that is an astonishing thing. If I could go back to my twelve-year-old self sitting in my bedroom and reading, and say that one day you’d be working with those very artists, I wouldn’t have believed myself!
You’ve said you’ve been working with the same people for a while now. Is that pretty common in the industry?
Yeah, I think so, it’s kind of like Woody Allen, he always uses the same people, right? I think it’s kind of a hassle to look for someone else so it’s a mixture of being lazy and feeling comfortable. If they’ve done a good job, you want to do work with them again, especially in this Internet age. It’s kind of an invisible continuity since you might never have met them, but you’ve exchanged two thousand emails or on Skype. If you don’t have online communications, the profession can seem really isolating. One problem for writers and artists is becoming fat, because you’re just sitting around all day, not moving. You gotta get some exercise! Which I do and reminds me of a joke about exercising and saving money at the same time: “Yes, I go to the gym everyday. I don’t actually go INSIDE – I just GO to there and then go back home again. The walk keeps me fit.”
Do you find yourself pulling a lot of influence from your experiences in Japan?
This is a slight problem in a way, a cliche. If you are a gaijin in Japan or Korea, China or Hong Kong, wherever; you’re going to repeat similar experiences and attitudes. Maybe there are five or six things that almost all gaijin go through, like an annoyance that Japanese people don’t say things “directly” and or they are not a very touching type of culture which can be a difficult thing – there are various basic things that gaijin feel. Now after awhile you might be like “What’s the point of doing another comic about that?” Adam Pasion, in particular, has comics about small details regarding things in life. He’s done many of them and he’s covered a bunch that I recognized and I’m sure you recognize many themes from his stories. Lars Martinson has done an amazing job at that as well. I’m hesitant to write a story like that because I feel like it’s going to be kind of cliched, because other guys have done it, so what’s the point? But on the other hand you want to talk about your experiences too. I’m not sure how I’m going to do that yet, but I do have an idea about what I want to do and how I will put my personal experiences in Japan on paper.
But there is also something else holding me back; if you really say what you want to say, then many Japanese people aren’t going to be happy about it. There is a scene in Lars’ book where the American character says to another character that you just want to shake the Japanese and say, “Be natural, be natural!” Now there are a lot of ideas going on there like “What is natural?” as in a cultural viewpoint. An American’s opinion may conflict with how Japanese people think, which raises the question is the western opinion always an improvement? There are positive, as well as negative, aspects to the Japanese being so even-tempered, as well as controlled about saying how they are feeling. There are definitely a lot of viewpoints in there. What I have found is if you really want to do it, you are going to upset a lot of people. So I’ve been hesitant about how to approach that so far.
So would you say comics are taken in a much different light as opposed to more traditional literary works?
I’ve read before, one of the things about comics is that they can fly under the critical radar because, even now, they are not considered to be “high art.” So they might not be given the same level of critical analysis as a novel would be. Take for example Christopher Hitchens, the English journalist who became an American and wrote a book called “God is not Great”. Of course he’s got into a lot of trouble for voicing his opinion, you’ve probably seen him on American TV. My point is that his writing in the New York Times or Washington Press or whatever and saying such culturally sensitive things is going to get a lot of attention, a lot of it critical, but if it were a comic book, perhaps it would have escaped a lot of attention. The second point in a case like where the American in Lars’ book says something ethnocentric – in comics we can show the visual of the other character raising his eyebrows to high heavens to indicate there’s a subtlety going on there in what the artist is saying. Comics can bridge that over in a way that only the visual element can accomplish.
I have written a comic, which is based in Hong Kong, called the “The Story of Lee.” That one came out Christmas 2010. It’s about a British guy and a Hong Kong lady and it’s partly based on my experiences of Japan too. Not that Hong Kong people and Japanese people are the same, they seem in some ways very different to me, but the contrast between them taught me things too. Some of my experiences in Japan have gone into the fiber of the characters and in their cultural contacts. For instance, when the main character “Matt” who is British, and the main female character “Lee”, from Hong Kong, first start to get physically intimate Matt is pushing and she is backing off. Which is possibly a universal thing where males push more than females, no matter which country you may be in, but a western man may often push the relationship forward considerably faster than an Asian girl wants it to go. That’s my experienced and seen around me anyway. So I put that in, as one aspect of this Western and Asian intimate contact. I thought I did it in a very soft way, but some female readers, were saying, “The guy comes off as an asshole. He’s trying to push her into sex!” And I was thinking well “Wow, I thought I wrote it quite moderately”. But some female reviewers thought that he was too aggressive, unpleasant and annoying. Those kind of views are also related to their culture background, I think. I learned from that too!
Could you tell us a bit more about “The Green Benches” project? It seems to be a different pace from your usual work.
What happened there was there’s a guy in Britain that I’ve done some work with before, scriptwriting for one of his games. He got back in contact with me and said that he was starting an environmental issues magazine and that it would focus on sustainability in business and personal life, etc., and it’s called “Blue and Green Tomorrow”. He then asked if I’d be interested in working on a cartoon, something that I hadn’t done. Which is another misunderstanding that people have when I’m discussing about comic books and Manga and they say “Oh, you write cartoons.” And I say, “No, I don’t.” They look at me confused and I then laugh and explain that a cartoon, in a way, is like an advert and what I write is more like a long film. A cartoon is point-point-point-point and then it’s finished. While a comic book is much longer and has a different rhythm, so doing one doesn’t necessarily mean you can make the other. It’s a different skill, in some ways. So when he first came up with this idea I thought, “I can’t do it,” that’s a cartoon every month and I have to come up with a new idea for each issue and put it into that point-point rhythm. Plus it has to be funny! Writing comedy is not an easy thing and it’s not something I’m used to, so I seriously doubted my ability to do it. But I thought, “Well, I’ll give it a try,” and we’ve done quite a few of them so far and it seems to be coming together one way or another. So I’m happy that I was able to overcome that fear and have something that came out pretty well. Carl Thompson is the artist there and he is excellent at subtle facial gestures in a comedic style.
Do you find that a common avenue when taking on a new project?
I’m not sure about what your thought processes are, but it seems to be a very significant thing: what inspires people do things. It’s also what holds people back about doing creative work of any type, whether it’s comics, films, writing poetry, singing, playing the piano or whatever. In my opinion, the barriers mostly comes down to self-doubt. So people are holding themselves back, no one else is doing it, it’s themselves. So the first thing is figuring out what do you want to do, and then the second is just do it. That’s it! I mean that’s a key issue and it worries me a little bit that so many people don’t know what they want to do. I think it’s a key problem for many people, and for society in general, since their doubt is linked to the very nature of the society they are in. But don’t get me started on attacking capitalism, or we’ll be here all night!
I’m not sure about other European people, but in my experience with British and American people, American’s have this image of what success is and it seems to be very money based and about status. Of course it needs to be more internal than that. You do what you do because it makes you feel good, gives you a sense of purpose. Where as British people have the opposite problem where they don’t really have a success orientated culture, but a more self-defeating attitude. So as far as I’m concerned, the solution to both of these things is asking yourself what you want to do, which is already a fundamentally difficult question. Then figuring out how you will do it, what has stopped you from doing it so far, and how you will know you’ve been successful. But I didn’t come up with this stuff, I learned it from other psychological literature, this is just my summarized version. I ain’t that smart! For me I have found what I love to do – make comics. And that’s what I want to continue doing.
To learn more about Sean Michael Wilson’s recent work and projects make sure to check out his personal webpage at: http://sean-michael-wilson.blogspot.com/
And don’t forget to show your support by picking up one of his books here: [ link ]
