A few years ago I was a guest at a con I won’t name… because it was an entirely dismal affair sales-wise. Needless to say, I was bored to tears after a couple of hours sitting behind a table with zero happening. So, I began wandering around the floor trying to enterntain myself. Thankfully, there were tons of longboxes on the floor and one such $2 bin had a handful of old Comics Interview magazines from the 90’s in it–and among them was this gem, the September 1995 “Manga and Anime” issue:
There’s a ton of interesting stuff in here. It’s a fascinating time capsule of where the “mainstream” comics industry was at the time vis-a-vis manga. For context, 1995 was seven years after Epic starting publishing Akira as flipped, colored, individual comic book issues, but two years before Tokyopop woud start publishing unflipped manga in tankōbon format. So, we’re at a point here where manga is about to become a huge cultural force in comics, but it hasn’t quite happened yet. Hence, some now-hilarious-seeming articles in the magazine like “What is anime and why is everyone talking about it?” (And, as you can see on the cover, the term “Japanimation” is still in use!)
One of the longer articles is one of the most intersting: a big interview with a group of western cartoonists who took a Tezuka Studios-sponsored trip to Japan to hang out with Japanese comics artists and animators. Here’s the group. Not pictured is Will Eisner and foundational manga translator Frederick L. Schodt, who were also present.
The real gem of bunch, though, article-wise is a reprinting of a 1987 Frank Miller interview with Lone Wolf and Cub’s Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima! Frank Miller was obviously hugely influenced by Lone Wolf and Cub–most evidently in Ronin–and championed the English language publication of the series at First Comics, even providing cover art for a lot of the issues.
I posted a picture of one page of the interview on Twitter back when I first bought the magazine and read the interview but then pretty much forgot about it… until I was recently emailed pretty much out of the blue by an associate of cartoonist Paul Smith’s wondering if I could send them scans of the whole interview–which I did. Given that I now have nice scans of the whole interview, I figured I’d post them for general consumption! So, here you go–JPGs below and a PDF down at the bottom:
Frank Miller interviewing Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima [PDF]
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