Introduction 9
Is manga really so different from the Western
style of comic? After all, if the West has the
traditional 4-panel comic strip running hori-
zontally across the page, Japan has the
yon-
koma
, a 4-panel comic strip running… vertical-
ly down the page. If the West has comics full
of superheroes, Japan has the
shonen
manga,
a whole genre dedicated to male adolescents
with an overdose of testosterone. If the West
has the graphic novel, Japan has the
seinen
manga, with adult themes and a graphic style
that is far more complex than the one used in
cartoons targeting a younger readership. And
let’s not forget the ninjas, who are nothing
more than the Delta Force equivalent of the
Japanese feudal past, or the mechs—gigantic
robots that to me (dare I say it) have always
looked like aircraft carriers from the U.S. navy,
capable of standing up, walking in a funny way
and inadvertently crushing terrified young
deer and lashing out left, right and center.
But make no mistake: manga
is
different from
the Western comic strip. Very different, in fact.
For starters, manga is not a genre, but a bit of a
hodgepodge where anything goes. There is no
human on Earth that is weird enough to be left
without a manga devoted to their own private
whims and obsessions. There are action man-
ga; manga for boys, for girls, for teenage lesbi-
ans, for mature lesbians; with a sports theme,
with a culinary theme; on basketball, on ping-
pong; gore manga, apocalyptic manga, horror
manga; surrealist, pornographic, educational,
minimalist, contemplative manga; Baroque,
offensive, epic manga… Manga is, in this re-
spect, larger than life. Manga can contain real-
ity plus anything that smacks of fantasy that
can be conjured up by human imagination.
Neither the European cartoon, nor the U.S.
graphic novel, nor the comics featuring super-
heroes, nor the “alternative” comics can evoke
even a hundredth part of what is meant by the
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10 1,000 Tips by 100 Manga Artists
word
manga
. In the West, we don’t even have
an equivalent word in our languages for the
Japanese mono no aware, something akin to
the awareness of the transient nature of things
and the feeling of repentance that accom-
panies their loss. In fact, I am not even sure
whether we Westerners have the slightest
awareness of the transient nature of things,
and I’m even less sure whether we have felt
even the teeniest nanobyte of repentance
over its loss. We might just conceivably feel a
bit of “pity.” And that’s the end of it. This thing
about mono no aware is s-o-o-o abstract…
So of all the countries on Earth, Japan is with-
out a doubt the one that is most unlike all the
rest. There are more similarities between the
Dominican Republic and Saudi Arabia, or be-
tween Vanuatu and Switzerland, or between
North Korea and the US, than between Japan
and any other country in the world. And that
includes any one you care to mention.
And that is reflected in manga.
And it is this feeling of strangeness that has
given rise to this book. There are dozens of
books on the market that teach you how to
draw manga. Although in fact what those
books really do is teach you how to imitate
manga. And there’s no denying that they are
very good at it. A few kinetic lines, a few fore-
shortened limbs, and one or two grossly exag-
gerated facial expressions are sufficient to do
the trick: if you can master these techniques,
no one will say you were born in Boston rather
than Kyoto. There are also dozens of books
that “talk” about manga. These books ex-
plain who Osamu Tezuka is, and Kinomoto
Sakura; they tell you why the Gonzo studio is
famous or what the origin of Totoro is. Some
books even include an interview with a fa-
mous mangaka—one of those characters that
sometimes also appear in the Sunday supple-
ment of a newspaper that has just discovered
manga: “Hey, just look at the funny characters
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Introduction 13
they’ve drawn here! And they’re really ob-
sessed with panties!”
In other words, all the books on manga treat
manga as a “genre.”
We, however, have treated it like a “philoso-
phy.”
For this book we have selected 100 artists.
Roughly half are Japanese. The other half are
American, German, British, and so on. Most
of them are professional manga artists. A mi-
nority are illustrators or think of themselves
as “artists.” What these artists have in com-
mon is that they all admit to having been in-
fluenced by manga in one way or another. In
some cases this influence is clear, since their
work revolves around manga. In other cases,
the influence is absolutely impossible to dis-
cern unless the artist themself owns up to it.
So we got these 100 artists, cartoonists and
illustrators together and asked them twenty
questions. Twenty questions on their relation-
ship with manga, on their work, on their tricks,
on their favorite drawing materials, on the tips
they would like to give youngsters interested
in drawing manga… Of these twenty ques-
tions, they were required to choose ten. And of
course, they had to provide answers.
In a second stage, we asked these same 100
artists to send us ten pictures that “represent-
ed” or “illustrated” their ten replies. These pic-
tures could be photographs, drawings, illustra-
tions, sketches, and so on. Some pictures are
directly linked to the answer given; in other
extreme cases, the relationship is thoroughly
enigmatic, and the artist is the only one that
knows why it was chosen. Some of the artists
in this book do not even like manga, although
they recognize its total influence on their
work. Others (the majority) are complete and
utter manga fanatics.
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