Sometimes, knowing a creator’s work means realizing partway through a book that yes, this guy is seriously going to take everything he’s good at, put it down onto the page, and throw it right into your face. I was a couple of chapters into Naoki Urasawa’s sixth volume of Pluto when I realized that that was exactly what was happening.

Urasawa’s proven himself to be a master of tense, emotional confrontation, believable conversation, and careful pacing. What he isn’t as known for is high impact action scenes, but Pluto 6 manages to put that notion to bed.

The first third or so of Pluto 6 follows a formula similar to the earlier volumes. Gesicht is investigating and talking to people, there are brief asides where small robots break your heart into pieces with an equal mix of adorableness and poverty, a mysterious teddy bear does something frightening, and secrets are slowly passed out.

The difference here is that the secrets are passed out like candy. We find out exactly what Pluto is and where it came from. We find out why Gesicht killed a man. We find out what it looks like when a robot is consumed with hate. We learn just how deep certain characters are, and we get to see true grief in the face of more than one person. We learn the meaning of “500 zeus a body” and it’s the saddest thing.

We also finally get to see Gesicht in hard action. I’m talking wall running, hand turning into a laser gun, fighting a giant monster, dashing through the exploded remains of your enemy action. And Urasawa pulls it off just as masterfully as everything else. It’s horribly violent and utterly tragic all at once, as Gesicht is forced to fight something that either doesn’t know any better or isn’t interested in knowing better, because the truth is too awful to bear.

Pluto 6 is paced in a way that it all feels very inevitable. Inexorable. The first scene in the book is an uneasy conversation between Gesicht and a scientist from Persia. It sets the tone. Where Gesicht was once on top of things and ahead of the investigation, he’s apparently slipped a step. He finds out something surprising at the end of the first chapter, and the hits keep coming from there on out.

Tragedy is the fuel that makes Pluto go. By the end of the volume, we realize that Gesicht, our hero and point of view, has been lied to, betrayed, misled, and hindered by forces beyond his control. All of this despite being a more powerful being than most of the populace. He has to consult a murderous robot to even find a semblance of truth. He’s a good man in a world that doesn’t deserve him.

Pluto is that book where a conversation is just as tense as two robots fighting, and the last eight pages just raise the bar. Two people, one a robot, the other a human, embrace on the border of the past and the future. They open up in a traditional Japanese garden outside of a hotel, as a high-tech city looms menacingly in the background.

Pluto 6 is the best yet. There’s really no other way to put it. It’s everything that’s made Pluto the best series of the year, but simply done better than before. That’s impressive.

Matthew Brady has a good review of this volume. He includes some scans and it’s good reading.

You should be buying this comic. Blah blah blah, I don’t read manga, it’s backwards, it’s black and white, whatever- shut up. It’s the best. You’re doing yourself a disservice by missing out.

I’ve been sick for the past two days, but I’m almost back in fighting action now. While I recuperate, you get to enjoy these links to a couple of good posts.

-Tim O’Neill on the X-Men and longevity:

The weird part is that Marvel as a company aren’t ready to acknowledge that the franchise has peaked – or even that, if it hasn’t peaked, it needs some time off before it can perform again. When the X-Men were the number one franchise in comics they built an incredibly powerful editorial apparatus around the books to guide and control the direction. The books were so important that nothing could be allowed to pass unexamined: every creative decision was micromanaged and second guessed, characters and creators were treated as interchangeable and at the same time jealously guarded. This worked to a point – in the early-to-mid-90s when the books were at their inarguable peak, the machine ran smoothly.

-The Eastern Edge has a great translation of Naoki Urasawa talking abotu making comics.

The trouble is, will I be able to produce a drawing of the ideal acting that I have in my head. It’s a matter of whether I’ve got the skill in my drawing hand or not. For example if I’m drawing Kanna, whether she’s crying, laughing, or just standing there, I’ve got her face in my head but sometimes when I try to draw that it turns out completely differently. I feel like, “Ah, stupid right hand!”

-Kate Dacey talks about one of my all-time favorite comics, Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira. I love the sprawling and crazily detailed comic, and the movie even holds a special place for me, since it was almost definitely the first anime I saw.

The story itself has held up well. Its paranoid, don’t-trust-the-military vibe seems as resonant in 2009 as it did when the manga was first released in 1982, as does its message about the devastating consequences of WMDs. Watching China prepare for the Beijing Olympics in 2008 — leveling shanty towns, silencing protests — suggested parallels with AKIRA’s own Olympic subplot, both in the secrecy surrounding the facilities’ construction and in the Chinese government’s adamant denial of citizen opposition to the projects. Even Tetsuo and Kaneda’s brotherly drama, which was never one of AKIRA’s stronger points, seems better developed in the manga.

I kinda wish that Kodansha used Marvel’s color for the first few volumes, but c’est la vie!

Business as usual next week, hopefully including a post that’s four weeks in the making (four weeks late).

solanin‘s strength is in the way it takes a rite of passage most of us have to go through and shows how it affects one young girl. Its melancholy tone reflects our feelings about the difference between dreams and reality, resulting in a very sad, but powerful, read. We map ourselves onto Meiko and relate to her struggle.

Viz sent over a review copy of Inio Asano’s collection of short stories, What a Wonderful World! 1, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that it complemented solanin to an extraordinary degree. The first story made me wonder if it was going to tread over the same ground as solanin, with the slightly depressed post-college female lead, but it quickly took a hard left turn in a new direction.

What A Wonderful World! fits into solanin like a puzzle piece. It’s clear when you compare the capitalization of the books, even. solanin uses a time of trial to show how the harsh realities of life and lofty goals of dreams eventually intersect and even out. What A Wonderful World! takes people in bad situations and shows them just how beautiful life can be.

There’s a slight, but important, difference in the two approaches, and it’s one I appreciate very much. Each story has a person at a crossroads, or who has fallen from grace, and gives them a motivation to pick up the pieces. Sometimes it’s in the form of a crow, which is itself the embodiment of someone’s fear and self-loathing. At other times, it’s a man in a bear costume with a dark secret. And, once, it was a turtle who recognized that he was in a situation with a bleak future, so he did the only thing he could: changed.

What A Wonderful World! is not a subtle book. The exclamation point in the title is there for a reason. Characters repeatedly reiterate the message of the book, which is that life can be wonderful if you just reach out and grab hold, in very plain language. “There are times in life when we must go forward,” says one character. “Move on, despite everything. Even if I’m making a mistake, I won’t have regrets.” Clear as day, right?

The book is separated into nine chapters, called tracks in the table of contents. It immediately put me in mind of an album, which turned out to be very apt. If you’ve ever heard a record where each song leads into or relates to the next song, whether it’s Pink Floyd’s The Wall or Prince Paul’s A Prince Among Thieves, you can appreciate the fact that the relationship between the songs makes the entire album better.

That’s true in What A Wonderful World! as well. Something connects the current story to the next one. Sometimes it’s as deep as a character who appears in one track gaining a bigger role in the next track. Other times, it’s a shared location, or a dragonfly flickering from one scene to another. This connective tissue makes the book into something greater than the sum of its parts. Instead of being isolated tales of people suddenly discovering how to be happy, you get the feeling of happiness going from story to story, spreading like, well, a disease. You know how they say that a smile is infectious? Like that.

I really liked reading What A Wonderful World! 1, and the first thing I did when I finished was hop on Amazon and order What A Wonderful World! 2. Both books come out on 10/20, next Tuesday. After solanin and What A Wonderful World! 1, Inio Asano is a must-buy for me. He’s a member of the Naoki Urasawa club. His work is engaging and uplifting in a way that I respect, and honestly don’t see often enough. He’s got a deft grasp of cartooning, pacing, and emotion, which gives his comics real weight.

Inio Asano’s Solanin is about a young girl stuck in that period of time where youthful dreams give way to cold reality. Meiko, the main character, is forced to confront that she may not grow up and get to be whatever she wants to be, and may have to take what she can get.

Meiko’s struggle and listlessness is very easy to relate to. Meiko is at a point in her life that I think most, if not all, of us go through. She’s graduated from college and is working a dead-end job that she doesn’t enjoy. She feels like her live-in boyfriend is freeloading, just a little, and while she’s not unhappy, she isn’t in a very good state of mind, either. She needs a change, but she doesn’t know which change or even how to figure that out. So, at the beginning of summer, she quits her job and decides to live off her savings for a while.

Her boyfriend and friends are similarly familiar. Her boyfriend is Naruo Taneda, and she simply calls Taneda most of the time. He’s accepted post-college life as something that’s endured. He goes to work at his freelance illustration job, accepts the crap hours, and deals with the crap pay.

Kato is a slacker, still fooling around in his sixth year of college. His girlfriend tolerates it, because she knows that adult life sucks. It’s boring and it’s long, so she might as well let him have his fun before she has to really crack the whip.

The word for Solanin is “melancholy.” Meiko’s thoughts are spelled out in a monologue over the course of most of the chapters, and she’s equal parts unsure and hopeful. When she finds something that can give her the get up and go that she needs, she embraces it, but even that isn’t enough, and she soon falls back into old habits.

The characters have embraced the idea of “it is what it is.” No one is particularly satisfied by their lot in life. Meiko struggles to find something to give life meaning, Taneda noodles around in his band, and Kato dreams about betraying his girlfriend. Rip, another of their friends, isn’t sure if he’s happy in his life, either, but he tries to make the best of it.

What’s interesting about Solanin is that since the majority of the cast is searching for ways to be happy, every smile is a worthwhile one. They take happiness where they can get it, whether it’s through dumb pranks or genuine breakthroughs. When Meiko watches Taneda and the band perform their new song, she smiles and says, “Yes. This is how it should be.”

Really, every emotion is earned. While there is one telegraphed and basically cliche twist partway through the book, the payoff for it is excellent. The scenes where the band performs are powerful and portrayed as raw emotion. The band’s rediscovering what they love, and through that, trying to find happiness.

Solanin is about coming to terms with real life. As kids, we are told and taught and assume that we’ll have these exciting lives where we own our own business, act in movies or plays, sing, write novels, or do something exciting for a living. In reality, though, most of us will spend our time working toward making someone else richer. Over the course of the book, Meiko learns that you have to take happiness where you can get it. A life of pure bliss doesn’t exist, it’s a child’s dream, and you have to grow out of a thirst for that before you can enjoy life as it should be.

There’s a powerful image toward the end of the book, of Meiko bent over, her head touching the ground. Nothing’s visible except for her figure collapsed on the ground. It’s one of my favorite images in the book, in part because of what it represents. She came to terms with what life is about and has finally decided what to do.

Solanin is very good. Maybe it’s because I’m around the same age as the cast of the book. I like to think that it’s because Solanin is very good in and of itself. It’s some 400 pages long, but I burned through it in a couple of sittings. I wish I’d read it last year when it came out. However, Asano has a couple more books coming out this month– What A Wonderful World! volumes one and two. I’m definitely going to check those out just because Solanin was so enjoyable.

-Emi Lenox of EmiTown creates one of my favorite online comics, and one of the few journal comics I’m willing to read on a regular basis. Her art is very endearing, and her point of view is always interesting. She did a comic in 24 hours in honor of 24 Hour Comic Day, and it’s a good one. Check out the comic here. It’s pretty awesome.

-Jason Thompson discusses Felipe Smith’s Peepo Choo, which looks like exactly the kind of manga I want to read. I may order Smith’s MBQ just off the strength of this feature.

-Chad Nevett, once again proving that my opinions are the best opinions, agrees with my unspoken opinion that the first half of Hancock was very good and interesting and that the second half goes completely off the rails. He’s got some good thoughts on the movie, and Hancock’s motivations.

-Jim Rugg and Brian Maruca are dropping an Afrodisiac book later this year. You have bad taste in comics if you don’t pick it up.

-Kate Dacey dropped her Manga Hall of Shame, a list of terrible books that she’s read. In what I hope is the first of many, Erica Friedman does her own list for yuri manga. I don’t know if I could make a list of my own. Maybe the Cowboy Bebop mangas, which were both amazingly not charming at all? The Gundam tie-in manga that Tokyopop put out when I was dumb enough to buy every manga on the shelves?

-Leylaaker (apologies if I missed a real name) writes about a pretty sour experience visiting comic shops on both coasts. Dear comic shops: get your acts together. Comic Shop Guy should be an aberration, not the norm.

-Ian from The Eastern Edge posts the final part of his six part Naoki Urasawa interview translation project. It’s a good read, and links to the previous installments are in the post.

-Brandon Graham’s blog is a must-read, though it’s sometimes NSFW. He renewed my eternal love in this post and with these words: “Where did that L7 square, space wingtip wearing motherfucker ever come up with the feet for that robot? Those feet were clearly designed by someone that regularly mastrerbates into a pair of 93 Reebocks.”

-Jog wrote a wrap-up of SPX 2009, and as usual, it’s must-reading. It ranges from a look at old Mazzucchelli art to panel recaps to books he picked up at the show.

-FBB did a podcast on Frank Miller and Dave Gibbons’s Martha Washington books. I haven’t listened to it yet, but black people.

–A brief bit of Richard Corben animation from 1968. NSFW, but guess what: it’s Richard Corben. Props to Sean Witzke for the link.

-Cheryl Lynn is reading a couple comics on recommendation from Ragnell and David Uzumeri. Which did they recommend? Tarot and Fantastic Four. Prologue is up, and part 2 covers Tarot.

Yotsuba&! 6 is very, very funny. Easily the best book in the series thus far, if only due to the way the stories end up snowballing into a larger tale. Yotsuba’s trek to Fuuka’s school did an amazing job of capturing just how awesome real life is, which is something Yotsuba&! already does very well.

You already know how much I like Yotsuba&! Rather than doing a recap and review of volume 6, I want to discuss something that makes me love it a little less.

My problem is with the translation. It’s not to my liking, to be honest, and pales in comparison to the ADV Translation. It’s not that it’s bad, exactly, but it is a little too faithful to the source material.

Part of the beauty of Yotsuba&! is that the source material is very, very strong. The relatively few cultural jokes have easy analogues, as in Miura visits the Ayase household dressed as a cardboard robot. In the ADV translation, she says that her name is Cardbo. That’s pretty easy, right? Cardbo->Cardbord->Cardboard robot. It makes sense.

In the Yen Press translation, Miura calls herself Danbo, a reference to the Japanese word for cardboard. And, okay, that’s cool, but it isn’t a joke, exactly. It’s a reference with a footnote. It’s like when someone tells you a joke, and you don’t laugh because you don’t get it, and then they explain why it was funny. The problem is that after all of that… it still isn’t funny. You get it, but you don’t laugh.

Similar to the Danbo translation is the use of honorifics– chan, san, and so on. While an integral part of Japanese, they don’t really have any place in English. It’s another joke that doesn’t work. There are ways around it, of course– Fuuka-neesan can just be “big sis,” for example. Oftentimes, however, nothing is truly lost by leaving them out. An adult referring to Yotsuba in Japan may say “Yotsuba-chan,” while an American would say “Yotsuba.” Both are equally valid and both read the same. The chan is just a clue for us to go “Oh! She’s talking to a child!”

The sound effects are also left untranslated, for the same reason that I assume the honorifics were left in. Untranslated isn’t exactly right, though. There are little notes next to the first iteration of each sound effect in a group that explains what the sound is. Otherwise, the sfx are untouched.

It’s a little lame and distracting, if I’m being perfectly honest. It’s another case of being too faithful. I’ve been reading manga for a long time. I know that “doki doki” is the sound of a heartbeat, “ora ora ora!” is what people say when they’re punching someone over and over, and that chicks go “piyo piyo!”

The thing is, that sort of thing doesn’t really translate. It tends to just look silly, and yep, in Yotsuba&!’s new translation, it looks silly. When the Japanese sound effects are left in the text, the book ends up looking more like a fan translation rather than a professional work.

Fans are notable for being extremely reluctant to be anything but absolutely faithful to the source material in an attempt to be truly authentic. This often leads to awkward, or nonsensical translations. Yotsuba&! being strong enough to shine through an awkward translation doesn’t make the translation any less awkward. The honorifics don’t add anything to the book, beyond it seeming more “Japanese.” It’s like the book has been translated, but not localized.

Part of the draw of Yotsuba is how it’s fairly minimalist, to borrow an idea from Jeff Lester. His specific example was toward the end of Yotsuba & Delivering, when Koiwai bonks Yotsuba on the head for bicycling so far away from home. It’s a completely white panel with Koiwai, his fist bonking Yotsuba on her gigantic head, the sound effect in kana, the romanization of the sound effect (“go”), and “bonk” in parentheses.

In the original Japanese, it’s a very simple and to the point panel. However, in Yen Press’s translation, it’s got the romanization and the actual translation on top of the kana, which just clutters things up. It takes away from the minimalist style of the panel. The problem is that editing out the kana and simply inserting a “bonk” sound effect in an appropriate style would’ve been much more straightforward and, well, funny. The panel has two bits: Koiwai bonking Yotsuba and the “bonk” sound. Instead, it has the bonking action, a symbol that’s essentially meaningless to me, the translation of that symbol, and then the actual sound effect. It’s too much. It weakens the joke by layering on too much information.

My favorite translation, bar none, is the Geneon Lupin the Third dub. It took an old series that would not have benefitted very much from a direct translation (judging by the original Monkey Punch manga I used to own), looked at the characters and their personalities, and crafted new lines and jokes based on that. The characters never felt out of character or inappropriate, and the jokes were actually funny, rather than just being references to Japanese pop culture. This is an extreme example, of course, but it shows how this kind of thing can work.

It’s similar to how ADV approached their Yotsuba&! translation. Certain things won’t translate seamlessly, but rather than compromise a very funny book by making it less funny, they bent the rules a little and kept the book’s spirit, if not its letter.

I totally understand why Yen Press’s translation is the way it is. JuYoun Lee, Senior Editor at Yen Press, gave an illuminating interview with Deb Aoki over the translation. I don’t agree with the way they chose to go, but it makes sense from a certain angle. It’s more accurate and exact, but I don’t think that that is a universally good thing. It leads to too many jokes ending up explained, rather than allowed to breathe, distracting gremlins ending up on the page, and having to qualify my love for the series when recommending it to people.

At one point during Yotsuba&! 6, Koiwai says, “I love the way she reacts to stuff like this.” That sums up the entire series. It’s got a strong dose of humor, wonder, and love. The source material is some of the best out. Yotsuba&! is a very, very good series, but certain aspects of the translation are disappointing. That isn’t a dealbreaker, but I wish it were a little better. It deserves it.

Yotsuba&! is basically the best manga.

I mean, there may be better. I’m pretty fond of Akira and Pluto, and Pluto is hands-down the best comic to come out this year, but Yotsuba&! is basically the best. It’s the one that leaves me in the best mood after I finish it. Where Akira and Pluto are something to ponder and mull over, Yotsuba&! is a book to enjoy.

ADV published Yotsuba&! up until 2007’s volume 5. Volume 6 was scheduled for early 2008, but it never appeared on shelves. Luckily, Yen Press is there for us, as volume 6 comes out this month. Either this week or next, depending on your local retailer. Perfect time for a look back at the series, right?

Kiyohiko Azuma’s Yotsuba&! began life in March 2003 as an ongoing feature in Dengeki Daioh. His previous strip, Azumanga Daioh, was a four panel strip, called a 4-koma, that was set in a high school and had a cast that was largely composed of high school girls. It was another feel-good strip, which was turned into a successful anime. However, Yotsuba&! surpasses it by far.

Azumanga Daioh, successful as it was, was pretty simple, visually. The comics were four vertical panels, about half a page wide or so, with light background work. He added just enough detail so that you’d know that the characters were in a class room, or a pool, or outside, and then put most of his effort into funny facial expressions and pratfalls.

Azuma’s work on Yotsuba&! switches that up completely, as he works with normal-sized comics pages, and rare goes higher than five panels a page. This gives him plenty of room to display a pretty stunning level of talent. He’s created a realistic world that still meshes with his cartoony and expressive art. So, when something crazy happens and Yotsuba’s eyes go swirly or Fuka’s mouth goes wide, it all works. It doesn’t yank you right out of the work, like other deformed works can.

Yotsuba herself is a very young girl who isn’t naive so much as she is a child. She’s less mischievous than Calvin, but enjoys life just as much. Everything has its charm, and nothing gets her down. She lives life full throttle, never pausing for breath. She takes everything in stride, and all of it’s awesome. When she learns about global warming, she angrily confronts her father about being an enemy of the earth because their house has an air conditioner. When she gets locked in a bathroom early in the morning, she just crawls out of the window and goes for a walk in her pajamas.

The cast is small, but effective. There are three sisters who live next door with their mother, Yotsuba’s father, his best friend Jumbo, and a couple other characters who move in and out as time goes on. Jumbo is extremely tall for a Japanese man, sending new friends into hysterics, and is amazingly lazy. The three sisters are various ages and of varying temperaments, leading to fun interactions with Yotsuba. Her father is a translator by trade, and doing the best he can with his adopted daughter.

Yotsuba&! is, if anything, a look at real life through a child’s eyes. It’s a reminder of just how awesome all these things we take for granted, like rain, ice cream, cicadas, and good friends. Yotsuba approaches everything with the same amount of wonder and glee.

Yotsuba&! is a lot like a warm hug, if I can get sappy for a minute. It’s the kind of book that leaves you feeling good after you read it, like payday or a smooth date. If you can read it and not be charmed… well, you should probably see a doctor about some antidepressants.

Yen Press has released six volumes of Yotsuba&! this week. The first five (Amazon: one, two, three, four, and five) are re-releases of the volumes that ADVManga printed before they went belly-up. The sixth is brand new and fresh out. I’ll have my copy later today, so look for a review of it later this week!

You know what’s weird? At some point over the past few months, probably after I finished Monster and started Pluto and 20th Century Boys, Viz Media became my favorite comics publisher. If they had Yotsuba&, I’m pretty sure I could just read Viz’s books and be happy for the rest of my life.

The NEW PEOPLE shopping complex/cultureplex opens up today, and it has a heavy Viz presence. There are four stories, including the Mezzanine. The bottom floor is a 143-seat underground theater called Viz Cinema, which is showing a Bleach movie, the first of the 20th Century Boys trilogy, and Death Note currently. Above that is the first floor, which features food and Blue Bottle Coffee. The Mezzanine features New People the store, sounds kinda gift shop-y, with merch geared specifically around the New People complex and fancy Japanese tech goods.

The second floor is all retail, with a mix of stores that feature gothic fashion, lolita fashion, or both, and some fancy looking kicks. Take a look here. The third floor is the SUPERFROG gallery, which is described as “providing a direct link to emerging artists that draw their inspiration from Japanese popular culture.” It looks pretty interesting, and will probably be one of my first stops. Currently, it’s displaying some work by Yoshitaka Amano.

I’m definitely going to be making my way over there in the next week, if not tomorrow. I want to check out the first 20th Century Boys, since it covers up to the books I’ve read so far, and check out the SUPERFROG gallery. It’s in the heart of Japantown, so I can hit up Kinokuniya, too.

Adam Warren was kind of enough to consent to an email interview, so of course I immediately bombarded him with way too many questions. As a result, we’ve got a long, and wide-ranging, interview that I think is pretty interesting. We cover a lot of ground, and Warren does it with good humor. And I do mean a lot of ground– this thing weighs in at over 5800 words. I went through and added in links for context or reference, in case you’re curious about a few of the topics that come up.

Thanks to Ken Kneisel for supplying me with the majority of Warren’s run on Dirty Pair, Jacq Cohen at Dark Horse for turning an offhanded Facebook comment into a fun interview, and finally, Adam Warren for answering a million questions.

After you finish reading, you should buy some Empowered (One, Two, Three, Four, Five), Dirty Pair, Iron Man: Hypervelocity, and Livewires. While you’re waiting for those to arrive, visit his DeviantArt to look at some art.

Let’s get it in.

(and yes, adam warren week is just three days long. shut your face.)

At the time that I’m writing this, Empowered has been out for a couple of weeks. What’s your workday like now that it’s on shelves? Do you take a vacation between books or get right into working on the next volume? What do you do to relax?

Right now, I’m working on an Empowered one-shot (in conventional comics format, for once!) and frantically trying to wrap up a few other miscellaneous art jobs before I head off to the San Diego Comic-Con this week (ouch). This is more or less par for the course, as I usually try to work up other pitches or grind away at brief stints of better-paying work before I go back to full-time work on the next Empowered volume; in a way, though, this almost is a vacation, compared to the crazily long hours I often have to work as a volume’s deadline looms ever nearer.

As for relaxing, well, once the workday’s over, I might read some books, watch a DVD (starting over with The Wire season 1, at present), or crack a Sam Adams or two and catch some Craig Ferguson in the wee hours… (Though the latter’s not an option, of late. Since the spectacular onset of the digital TV revolution, my remote neck of the woods went from receiving about eight different TV stations’ signals to receiving a grand total of none whatsoever; yay, DTV! So, no Craig Ferguson for me, nowadays.) Ah, the manifold joys of the rural-dwelling freelancer’s off-work lifestyle…

How fast are you, art-wise? Do you do any digital work, or are you strictly lo-tech? What do you listen to while you draw?

I certainly wouldn’t claim that I’m an especially speedy artist in general… but, when working in the straight-to-pencil format used for Empowered, I can usually turn around at least two pages per full workday, which isn’t too shabby a production rate.

That’s the whole point of the format, really: to move on to the finished page as quickly as possible, leaving out all the intervening stages that used to slow me down as an artist. As in, my technique used to progress from scrawled roughs to very tight but undersized layouts to even more tightly penciled, full-size pages to final inks that were even tighter still; on Empowered, I jump from the thumbnail/rough stage straight to final, penciled pages (at the wee 8.5” X 11” size, BTW), a considerably more streamlined process.

While the technique I use on Empowered is indeed extremely “lo-tech”—nothing but graphite on letter-size copy paper, without resorting to such high-tech, cutting-edge, space-age innovations such as bristol board or inks or a separate lettering stage—I  can’t say that it’s strictly lo-tech, as the pages still wind up getting scanned into Photoshop, then tweaked and cleaned up (and lettering-corrected, as necessary) at Dark Horse. Contradictorily enough, only modern scanning and printing technologies make Empowered’s primitive process viable in the first place…

Nowadays, I listen to a helluva lot of talk radio when I’m working, mostly of the sports-related variety (I am a New England native, so Pats/ Sox/ Celts interest comes naturally to me), occasionally mixing in some books on CD for variety… I do, however, switch over to music from the ol’ iPod when working on scripts, due to the sad fact that talk radio’s babble frequently derails my train of dialog-related thought. (Unless I actually want to mix references to KG and Jonathan Papelbon and Randy Moss into my scripting, which is rarely the case.)   

While doing research for this interview, I realized that you don’t sell your original art. I don’t think that you travel to many cons, either, so genuine Adam Warren Sketches(TM) are pretty rare. Do you prefer to keep your art within the confines of published books, rather than sketches and such?

It’s not that I’m particularly opposed to selling my artwork; it’s just that I’ve never clawed out enough free time to set up some means of actually selling the stuff. (Plus, I am a tad paranoid that some Empowered material might need to be rescanned at some point; such are the problems inherent to working in the ever-tricky medium of grayscale.)

I should say that, back when I used to attend considerably more conventions than I do now (the invites dried up a long time ago, for better or for worse), I did crank out a goodly number of commissioned sketches every year… Empowered is descended from the last major clump of such commissions (mainly of the “damsel-in-distress” variety) I took on, after all. Now, though, I no longer have the time to deal with many (or any) more such requests along those lines.

Side note: Come to think of it, my attendance at San Diego this year will mark my first convention appearance during the entire time that Empowered has been coming out… Alert the media! Well, perhaps not.

In general, I suppose that I do prefer to keep my artwork within the confines of a published book, or at least within the confines of a story… Drawing as such doesn’t interest me all that much, save for as a means of conveying a narrative. I’ve never filled a sketchbook, I don’t draw people in the subway (er, that is, assuming I moved to a location that had a subway), I don’t hang around sketching with fellow artists after conventions (though the first part of the social “Drink & Draw” experience does appeal); in short, I don’t do the things that a real artist, someone who’s Crazy In Love With Drawing, should do. Luckily, this isn’t a major, psyche-twisting source of angst for me, as I pretty much see myself as a writer who happens to be able to draw.
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I’m just young enough that I can’t really remember a time without anime or manga. I had an early introduction to Akira via my uncle and discovered both Saturday Anime on the SciFi Channel and the burgeoning anime section at my local video store. By that point, it was over for me. 8-Man After All, Dominion Tank Police, Bubblegum Crisis, Robot Carnival, Demon City Shinjuku, A-Ko, Vampire Hunter D (the first one), Galaxy Express, and Fist of the North Star were huge to me. I mean, I used to watch (and own) Tenchi Muyo. You could say that I was spoiled. I got the best of Japan (well…), the best of America (well…), and it was all normal to me. I managed to catch that wave just in time. (Do you guys remember Burn Up?)

Before that, though, Japanese animation and manga weren’t quite the powerhouses they are now. There were a few early adopters, of course. Frank Miller was a Lone Wolf & Cub fan, and Ronin is chock full of Japanese influence. Another was Adam Warren, who, if not the first guy to do “original english language” manga, was definitely one of the first.

I came to Warren’s Dirty Pair late, particularly in comparison to the time when I first discovered the Lovely Angels (that lovely time known as “puberty”). In the late ’80s, Warren and Studio Proteus acquired the rights to Takachiho Haruka’s Dirty Pair, a tale of two girls (a boisterous redhead and a demure brunette) who work for the 3WA as “Trouble Consultants.” However, people call them “the Dirty Pair” on account of the fact that if they’re involved, collateral damage goes through the roof.

I knew Adam Warren’s Dirty Pair existed, but never managed to pick any up until earlier this year. Ken Kneisel, murderer of Flex Mentallo, savior of Emma Frost, and pretty much the nicest guy I know, hooked me up with just about the whole set. I tore through the books as I got them, with an eye toward writing about them later in the year.

What’s really interesting about these books is that Kei and Yuri, the titular Dirty Pair (though they prefer Lovely Angels) could easily be written as The Assertive One and The Doormat, respectively. Rather than fall into that trap, Warren twists their dynamic a little. Kei is a hard-drinkin’, hard-fightin’, hard-shootin’, loud tomboy with a foul mouth. Yuri’s more reserved, sure, but she’s far from a wilting flower. Both of them are capable, funny, hate each other’s guts in that way that only best friends for life can.

They get along and complement each other very well, despite being nominally different. Warren even gets to play with their relationship a bit, when a clone of Yuri is tricked into thinking she’s on a VR training exercise and able to do whatever she wants. So, we get a more Kei version of Yuri than we’ve ever seen before. All of her insecurities, as well as all of her strengths, are put on display while she runs around a planet causing mayhem.

The action in DP tends toward the huge and explosive. Suns go supernova, characters are infected with wardrugs that make them into violent beasts, bio-organic monsters run rampant, and sometimes people get shot right in the face with lasers. It’s a very action movie kind of violence, the kind of thing where the heroines can come across dead bodies and go “Yuck!” rather than vomiting.

And, you know what? It works. Adam Warren’s Dirty Pair feels like the kind of story you’d see in a Die Hard or Lethal Weapon. The action keeps you riveted, but the relationship bits in between keep you going. Kei and Yuri have a great dynamic, and they get into funny and exciting situations. It’s definitely a product of its time, a period where high heels and laser beams go hand in hand, but that was a fun time. I hesitate to call it dated, if only because the science fiction still feels fresh in its approach. The hair styles can be a little ’80s anime-style, but I never really felt like I was reading a specifically ’80s comic, like you tend to with so much of Marvel and DC’s output from the same time period.

Dirty Pair still feels fresh, or is interesting enough to eliminate any of those feelings of the awful ’80s. Kei and Yuri are great heroines, almost like a sci-fi version of Riggs and Murtagh. It’s funny, exciting, and a blazingly fast read. Good stuff.

(all images yapped from ComicArtCommunity)