Manga Artists

"I've got Digimon!! I've raised it and put it into a fight, and then it died. There's no one around me having it..."

"[My] assistants have been encouraging me to watch the well received Evangelion, but I just don't have the time to watch it. I've recorded them into videos, but... how annoying!!"

"Recently, it seems that more and more authors are doing color manuscripts on computers. When it comes to coloring time, I definitely want to try it at least once!!"

"Modern science mentions that the “heart” resides in the brain. Am I the only one who finds it not boring?"

"It was my first time I participated in the cover shoot for the new year's issue. I was nervous being surrounded by senior authors."

"Nice to meet you. I am Kazuo Takahashi, the person who is having a comfortable life by making full use of my personal assets, in which my credit card installments are paid in 36 times. (!?) I'm very grateful and excited that I'm able to start manga serialization under the life that filled with uncertainty, such as blackouts, inability to make phone calls and other obstacles from everywhere."

"While I was in Spain, a terrorist attack occurred near my hotel! I would like to sincerely pray for the repose of the souls of those affected. Looking towards the future, we must never succumb to negative intentions! We must not lose to warmongers who stir up religious conflicts!"

"The threat of natural disasters is repeatedly shown on TV. Even though those images make me shiver, gasp, and freeze, I can still eat a decent meal and wrap myself up to stay warm. How valuable are these actions we do everyday? I wonder if, ironically, we won't even realize its value until we witness the death of people and towns."

"[The weather] suddenly gets colder. I visit Kyoto every fall, and I wonder about the autumn leaves this year. For the past few years, the leaves have not seemed to have the best coloring. I wonder if this has to do with the climate change..."

"I’m always thinking about just readers in Japan. So when an English reader reads my work, it might feel funny, or sometimes the nuance might not carry through. But don’t worry about those things too much. As you continue reading the manga, I hope you’ll get to discover new excitement. That would make me really happy."

"In terms of a short story, I'd like a more horrific/bad ending. In terms of longer stories, fans usually get emotionally attached to characters when reading long form. If I know that's the case, I want to end it on a good note, so people don't end up hating it. For me personally, I prefer short stories and ending it in a horrifying way because I'm also good at it."

"I think a lot about why people want to read horror or look at horror and what is the value of seeing something scary, why do we want to write something scary? I do think about that, and my thinking is that life is kind of uncertain. The future is uncertain; we don’t know what is going to happen. Maybe something bad is waiting for us, like, we don’t know, and there’s that uncertainty and that anxiety that comes from that. So if we see something scary, if we look at these scary things, then maybe we can prepare mentally for that. Maybe it’s some kind of readying our minds for possible future terrors."

"I think in horror the eyes are really important. How you draw them can totally change how scary a story is. I think the scariest part of the body is probably people’s eyes."

"A lot of modern movies take the approach of shocking the audience with things like jump scares. I grew up with the old-timey Hammer and Universal horror movies which focus more on creating a scary mood, so I prefer movies that gradually scare the audience with eerie atmosphere. Jump scares can certainly make people scared in the moment, but it's sort of a fleeting fear. I suppose it's all a matter of taste."

"I think pen-drawn art has its own charm. The brightness of the picture produced by the contrast between black lines and the white of the paper, and the atmosphere created from the drawn lines… I think they cannot be expressed by live-action so easily."

"Comics utilize images, angles, and feelings that are hard to create in the real world. I think it’s hard to reproduce the overall atmosphere of a comic into a movie, because a film must use real actors and actresses that are not perfectly matched with my original work."

"When I was working on the book there were times when production on the video game would pause, and then it would start up again. For instance, there was a long period of time between ' and '. So the publisher said, "because the game is not coming out, we don't really need to make a new manga.""

"As a huge fan of the series, I would like to make my own, but I kind of enjoys more taking what's there and giving it my own spin. As games go, I knows how hard it is to make games, so I would rather leave that work to other people and play the games they produce. But if they were willing to use my ideas, I would be happy to provide them with many, may ideas of my own."

"There is no light for those who do not know darkness."

"He crossed the road when the signal was red,that’s his problem!"

"When I am drawing the face expression of the character,I have the same expression on my face.I never realized myself,but people have told me so."

"If you can have vivid characters,they will make the story themselves.By putting them in certain situations or having one meet another,they naturally make stories by reacting to each other."

"I think about what the readers would see first when they open the next page:what would jump into his or her eyes first?"

"I really drew it in the way I liked,did whatever I wanted."

"You don’t want to be imitating his [Miyazaki] style. You’ve got to create something different, something that he hasn’t done."

"But... you can’t be Miyazaki, you can only be the second Miyazaki, and that isn’t something to aim for."

"Your Names success told me movies still have the power to connect with society. As a medium, it still has a power that resonates."

"I think animation can tell more than live action."

"If I had been born 10 years earlier, I don’t think I would be an animator."

"I think that science fiction can, by creating extreme situations and settings, draw out the essence of human relationships."

"But I do want to trigger emotions like his [Miyazaki] movies triggered our emotions."

"I consider my anime as if they were children who, once grown up, are free to take their own path and personally I do not want to intrude in their lives. No father should snoop in the affairs of their children."

"It is a part of puberty that we just want to go somewhere far away. We only have a vague image, like behind that mountain or a place more beautiful..."

"But the thing about getting rejected is that you reflect and think and analyze about why you got turned down. You learn a lot more from stories about getting rejected than stories about becoming happy."

"I think most directors and people who make anime would agree that their latest film is probably the one they feel the most confident in, that they have done their best and put everything into."

"It’s the situations that these distant relationships create that interest me more than the distance itself."

"I first followed the comics of Tagawa Suihō and Yokoyama Ryūichi. But suddenly, once I became devoted to Disney, I set out to copy and master that stuffed-animal style, eventually ending up with how I now draw."

"Q: It’s been pretty rare that we’ve gotten good adaptations of Tezuka’s work. Pluto is one of the rare ones that's really good. Why do you think that is?"

"Q: There’s been this roller-coaster ride of Tezuka’s reputation in the West. He went from being unknown to being known as the “Astro Boy guy” to it being almost reversed and people knowing him for super dark adult comics. How do you think he ought to be remembered?"

"Q: You could read some lightly anti-capitalist themes in some of his work, but it’s hard to say how much is just anti-authority."

"Most of the time he was outside of the system in a sense because he was a manga artist. Manga were not as accepted as they are today. So he was this highly intellectual individual working in a field that doesn’t have a lot of legitimacy like it does today. So in that sense he could comment on things as an outsider. He tended to sometimes stake out slightly different positions. Let’s put it this way: sometimes he would modify his positions a little bit depending on who he was talking to. But he was very anti-war, anti-military, that is through and through in all his life. And actually it’s not just Tezuka, but also everyone in his generation. It was an ideology."

"[H]e also saw manga and anime as a vehicle for — not to sound too idealistic — international peace. And he really believed in international communication. He believed that better communication was the key to world peace. In today’s world that sounds almost naïve."

"Q: Tezuka passed away in '89. He didn’t live to see Evangelion or Pokémon happen. Of course it’s difficult to speculate, but what do you think he would think to see what happened since then?"

"After Tezuka passed away there were so many memorial publications and documentaries. He was so lauded, it was a huge national event in Japan. And then of course inevitably after a certain number of years there’s this “anti-Tezuka movement,” simply because his influence was so great, at some point you have to revolt against him. Some people have said, “how could he possibly have done all that stuff? It’s not possible.” From the standpoint of Americans, they would think nobody could be that productive. You could not draw that amount of stuff. But of course in the case of Americans, they’re usually not aware of the Japanese production system that Tezuka was responsible largely for developing, how that operated. He was like a movie director: He had people who would fill in the bushes in the background, spot the blacks and that kind of thing, but he was in charge, he drew the characters and he broke down the story. He may have had all kinds of assistants drawing the squares on the page for the panels and spotting the blacks and doing background designs and stuff, but it was his work."

"He had few opportunities to talk with foreigners in Japanese. And Tezuka was an intensely curious person, because he was drawing so much. He always needed stories, he always needed information. Because he often had in parallel three or four stories that he was working on. He was like a sponge. He was a real intellectual, kind of unique, differentiated a little from other manga artists in the sense that not only had he gone to college, but he had gone to medical school. He was a licensed physician. He had read German literature, Russian literature, American literature, Japanese literature. He was from a completely different orbit. An anomaly in the industry, and he remains so. So I think he was always interested in what’s going on in the outside world, and I think with Jared and me, since we both spoke Japanese very well, he found some value in a friendship with us. He was very nice to me, I must say. He changed my life. I only knew him from 1977 to when he died in 1989, so a relatively short time. But I often wondered how is it that he had time to even think about some things. Like sometimes he’d send a postcard, or sometimes he’d call, he wanted to know something like, “what do you think about this?” And then he would always say something like “when you going to get married?” Something like that, like a father almost, because he was older than I was. I’ve often wondered how he had time to think about it, or write. I have letters that he wrote, I don’t know how he had time."

"Would we have manga without Tezuka? According to Gravett, the question "is rather like asking if we would have French-language comics without Herge, or American comic books without Jack Kirby. Tezuka was pivotal and a huge inspiration [for manga artists].""

"For Tezuka, a doctor is not just someone who heals the body, but someone who appreciates the value of life, and inspires others to value it as well. In Tezuka's Buddhist cosmology all life is sacred and nothing is more valuable than creating or continuing life."

"Tezuka was born in Toyanaka City, Osaka, in 1928. Though he attended medical school and became a licensed physician, he chose not to work as a doctor and instead devoted himself to writing and drawing manga and making animated films. Over the course of his long career Tezuka became a defining force in shaping the genre, publishing more than 700 manga running to more than 150,000 pages. Early Tezuka characters had large eyes, inspired by their American counterparts Betty Boop and Disney's Bambi. Large eyes have since become a stylistic hallmark of the whole genre."

"Tezuka continued producing work at an astounding pace right up until his untimely death from stomach cancer at 60. Nothing could slow him: not censorship, the demands of various editors nor changes in drawing trends (even when more realistic — i.e., more time consuming — illustrations became popular)."

"Tezuka could never completely abandon medicine. Although he never actively practiced, he became a licensed doctor later in life, and one of his most famous manga series stars the rogue genius doctor, Black Jack. But life as both a doctor and an in-demand (though underpaid) young artist was difficult. Tezuka struggled to meet deadlines and commitments. His family feared for his health and begged him to focus on medicine, but he had become too successful, and too passionate, to stop."