When the gekiga genre of manga appeared on the American comics scene, it opened a window onto a very different kind of Japanese comics work. Gekiga offers the reader a more serious, dramatic and often eccentric story, focusing on narratives that reflect a world of hopelessness and tragically twisted events. Indeed gekiga has often been compared to American indie or alternative comics. Now, following such indie comics publishers as Drawn &Quarterly—the U.S. publisher of gekiga pioneer Yoshihiro Tatsumi will also publish his 800+page autobiography in 2009—PictureBox and Last Gasp, another indie comics house, Top Shelf, will join this experimental manga scene with plans to publish AX, the much anticipated Japanese alternative comics anthology. Edited by Sean Michael Wilson and AX publisher Mitsuhiro Asakawa, the 400 page anthology will appear in August of 2009. Wilson, who resides in Japan, visited the U.S. for the Alternative Press Expo earlier this month where PWCW was able to get the skinny on the forthcoming AX.
PW Comics Week: How did this project come about?
Sean Michael Wilson: The beginning of it was me going around to companies and talking about it and familiarizing myself with them. I recognized in AX something special. It’s an alternative focused book that I haven’t seen anywhere else so far in Japan. The publisher is entirely independent. When I went to Asakawa Mitsuhiru—publisher of AX—I just called them up and said “I’d like to meet you” and he hesitantly agreed. It’s still very rare for a westerner to appear at their door and that was an interesting thing for them. There was the issue of having a stranger, a foreigner, in their office, but once we met, we established a rapport. We discovered that we had the same taste in music—1950’s music. We decided to form a partnership where I do what I can do and he does what he can to get this independent style [of manga] out to the west.
There’s very little indie style manga in English. Recently it’s been increasing with publishers like Fanfare, D&Q, and Last Gasp, but there’s almost nothing. I think it’s a very bad state of affairs. I wanted to make a big effort to see if I could get a U.S. publisher interested and the publishers [I met] were falling over themselves over it. We were lucky. We got to choose our publisher. It seems to be one of those things where the time has come, where it really just snowballs.
PWCW: Can you give our readers a history of AX in Japan?
SMW: AX is a 400 page bimonthly anthology that’s been around 10 years now. The title is from a Bob Marley song about a little axe. It’s a song in Jamaica about chopping down big cartels. He says something like, ‘if you’re if a big, big tree, we’re a little axe, here to chop you down.” This is what we’re about; chopping down the big manga publishers [with AX].
[In AX] none of the artists actually get paid. That sounds bad but it’s a showcase and an avenue that they can put their heart into. It’s completely free of commercial constraints. And it’s proved itself successful. They sell about 5000 copies per issue. That’s little by Japanese standards, miniscule compared with larger anthologies, but good by U.S. standards. It’s a small market but very influential. Most manga fans don’t know about AX or gekiga. AX has national distribution in Japan, but 90% of Japanese don’t know what it is.
They also do tankoubon collectors editions (digest sized collectors edition books). They’re a productive publisher and they make just enough for them to continue at a small rate. They’re equivalent to Top Shelf and Last Gasp. AX has had some successes. They sold 100,000 copies of Hanawa’s Doing Time in the original Japanese Last Gasp’s Tokyo Zombie—that’s also from AX.
PWCW: You are working with AX publisher Mitsuhiru Asakawa on this anthology. How are you choosing which creators and which stories to include?
SMW: We selecting it from the 10 year archive so we’re talking about some 20,000 pages. That’s a lot of stuff to choose from. Basically, there are three things we’re thinking about. First, what would be representative of the slice of life, erotic, heta-uma, (ugly good, bad but good—it has a punk rock ethos to it) categories, the strange oddball comedy aspects of it. Also the artistic style manga coming directly from the gekiga [of the] 1950s and 1960s. But we also want to choose the best stories that are experimental in some way. Third, we wanted to present Asakawa’s personal favorites. We’re mixing the three criteria to choose the people in AX. It’s mostly young-ish mangaka, in their 30’s, except for Tatsumi and some of the old masters of gekiga. It’s all still rare. It’s rare stuff in Japan, too.
PWCW: How did you make the personal discovery of the gekiga genre of comics in Japan?
SMW: First thing is that I’m not a manga expert. Everything I know is from Asakawa-san. He’s been editing this thing for the last 10 years. All I’m doing is passing it on, processing it and passing it on in English. That’s my role.
PWCW: We met back in April of this year at New York Comic-con where you mentioned that gekiga is the next big genre to take off in the U.S.—you anticipated its popularity. What will fans of Tatsumi find in this anthology?
SMW: The main thing is that this is going to be left of center, out of the box. This is the artist doing what they want to do, experimenting with the subject matter and the form of manga in terms of plot, panel construction, artistic styles. They get to explore entirely what they wish with no interference. That in itself is a key thing and relatively new [in manga publishing in Japan]. With most manga, the editors have a large, large say in the plot. They want to keep the stories going because of sales. AX manga is where there is almost none of that. Be experimental, open and independent—the motto of AX is “manga should be open, manga should be independent, manga should be experimental.” This is a chance for readers to read manga that is more experimental and more mature, with a more experimental means of producing the manga.
PWCW: What about newcomers? Are you including something, like a forward or an introduction to help open up this genre to new readers?
SMW: The latest issue of AX focuses on the roots of gekiga. Asakawa-san has written an essay, “Gekiga: the Roots of Alternative Japanese Comics.” This will be in a separate issue of AX (U.S. edition).
PWCW: You’re also a comics creator yourself.
SWM: Yes, I’ve got nine books published so far. [Right now] I’m working on the translation of Times of Botchan for Fanfare/Ponent Mon. And I’ve got a book coming out from NBM called The Story of Lee where I’m working with Eve Yapp. We’re both featured in the book, The Best New Manga. As soon as I have some time, I’m going to focus on that as well.
