Since its launch in 2003, Vertical Inc., a New York-based Japanese publisher specializing in translations of contemporary and historical Japanese literature for the U.S. market, has made the design of its books a key component of its publishing program. In fact, book-design celebrity Chip Kidd has been designing Vertical’s books since the house’s inception. Now Kidd is moving on to other projects and has handpicked a new freelance art director for Vertical, Peter Mendelsund, a noted book designer who, like Kidd, works full-time at Alfred A. Knopf, which is part of Random House.
“Chip approached me about a year ago to design the Dororo series [by legendary manga creator Osamu Tezuka],” said Mendelsund, who is a senior designer at Knopf and has designed covers for scores of Random house titles. “He said Tezuka's [classic] manga really needed a fresh eye, and I was ridiculously excited. I knocked out all three volumes in a couple of weeks,” Mendelsund said about his start with Vertical. Mendelsund also noted Vertical’s willingness to experiment with the cover designs of its book licenses. “Finding a client who's willing to push the boundaries creatively, stylistically, productionwise, who's open to new interpretations of what a book could look like is increasingly rare. I always had the feeling with Vertical that outlandishness is a virtue.”
Mendelsund will be in charge of the Vertical catalogue starting with the fall ’08 releases. He will also be working on the release of Tezuka’s legendary Black Jack, a famous series with a lead character who is a heroic surgeon with phenomenal therapeutic skills. Vertical editorial director Ioannis Mentzas said Black Jack is renowned for its dark political themes, even though the series was originally created for a teenage audience in the 1970s. Mendelsund compares Black Jack to the TV show House, about a brilliant but eccentric medical surgeon. “BJ is essentially a medical drama starring a prodigiously talented surgeon,” said Mendelsund, “[although Black Jack] is a bit more restrained. As it takes place ostensibly in the so-called real world, I’ve made the basic grid more prosaic in many ways. In both of Tezuka’s books [Black Jack and Dororo], there is an emphasis on innards and viscera.”
Vertical publishes both contemporary Japanese fiction and manga in English translation, and its market is not limited to the American otaku (or fanatic) market that licensors of Japanese content tend to focus on. Vertical looks to engage a wide range of consumers. According to Mentzas, the design of Vertical’s books has been a priority for the publisher from the very start. Kidd embodied that effort. He used Tezuka’s own iconic black and white character designs in the prize-winning design for Tezuka’s biography of Buddha, one of Vertical’s first manga successes. Vertical has worked against the general consensus of the North American manga industry, which generally tries to maintain the original Japanese cover designs whenever possible.
As U.S. sales of manga have boomed over the past five years, American manga publishers have tried to appeal to U.S. fans looking for “pure manga” and want their manga unflipped, i.e., kept in the right-to-left reading format of the original Japanese language, along with the existing cover and logo designs from Japan. Popular series published by houses like Tokyopop, Viz and Dark Horse such as Fruits Basket, Kare Kano, Nana, Ghost in the Shell or MPD Psycho were generally altered as little as possible to let the manga-ka’s art do the selling. But Vertical has departed from that trend, redesigning the covers of Tezuka’s work as well as the covers of acclaimed Japanese horror novelists Koji Suzuki and Kaoru Morimoto. Kidd attempted to draw readers to Suzuki’s novel Spiral by using a dizzying graphical vortex on the book’s cover, and he used a simple bar of soap on the cover of Nonami Asa’s novel Now You Are One of Us, to evoke the book’s tale of anxiety about a so-called perfect marriage.
Mendelsund pointed to a childhood love of ninjas and samurai swords as a foundation for his approach at Vertical. “I was obsessed with Japanese culture when I was a kid,” he said, and “some vestigial [Japanese design] lust kicked in instantly when I got my first Vertical list.” Mendelsund said his mandate is to adapt Vertical’s book to the changes taking place in book design and popular culture, 40 years after some of the works were created. “The mandate seems to be ‘do something cool!,’ ” said Mendelsund. “There’s very little self-censoring when I work for Vertical.”
