About me

Name: Lucas...
is a hyper-advanced cyborg- his body consists of all of his active drives; his memory of all of his active sources. These are all variable, but on a periodic basis his bio components crave energy and sleep and remind him of his basic identity-layer (yes, I crave sleeping)...

Email: lucas2501@gmail.com
Location: Malaysia
Mechanical Engineer

Holiday Notice: 18th to 22nd Aug 05
See you guys when I get back! ^_^

The works featured are copyrights to Masamune Shirow and the respective companies. All copyrights infringements on my pages are un-intentional and these pages are NOT in any way for commercial purposes.
Please inform me of any inconsistencies, mistake or copyrights breach on my part and it will be ammended/corrected.
Also, Views & Opinions on the MSHP are my own (Lucas) and not that of Shirow or the respective companies.

Free Image Hosting Thanks To Imageshack

Shirowgraphy - The Dark Horse Interview

Since there is little information or write up available on Masamune Shirow, one of the best ways to know and understand the personality of this legendary manga creator is through various interviews published in many magazines. Unfortunately for us English-literates, most of these already rare interviews are in Japanese. However, the few that are available are really great insights into the life and works of Shirow. Necessary PR on Shirow Sensei's side, but in a way valuable for us fans seeking to comprehend deeper beyond the Land Mates and Sailorettes of Shirow's personality.

The following undated interview was taken from Dark Horse Online, simply titled: Masamune Shirow. A good generic, cover-all-points interview where Shirow talks about his background, hobbies, working, influences and Japan's manga industry. For those who have come across this before, it doesn't hurt to do some refreshing on Shirow knowledge, eh? ^_^ Plus, I would comment and highlight certain points after the interview article. Read on...

Masamune Shirow

Fans of manga need no introduction to Masamune Shirow. His works are legend. It is our hope that during Manga Month at Dark Horse, we will bring some new readers into the fold... and no introduction to manga is complete without an introduction to Shirow. His published works include Black Magic, Appleseed, Dominion, Ghost in the Shell, Orion, Neurohard, and the deluxe illustration collection, Intron Depot.

The animated version of Ghost in the Shell is scheduled for theatrical release in Japan, the United States, and the United Kingdom in late 1995. It is expected to be a very high quality work, employing a great deal of computer graphics, and the best animation staff in Japan. Mr. Shirow is currently working on Ghost in the Shell Part 2, and he plans to serialize it in Kodansha's Young Magazine in the fall of 1995.

Almost all of his works have been translated into English by Studio Proteus, and are currently available through Dark Horse Comics. Ghost in the Shell will be released in March 1995.

Dark Horse: How would you describe your background?

Masamune Shirow: One way you can look at it is that since I was born in 1961 in Japan, I am a member of the color TV generation; it first appeared and became popular while I was growing up. As for Kobe, it is a long, narrow city hemmed in by mountains and the ocean, at the corner of an industrial region that stretches out from Osaka, Japan's second largest metropolis. Kobe is the second largest port city next to Yokohama, and historically it was an early port of entry for Western culture. In Japan today Kobe has a reputation of being a tourist city. When I made my debut with Appleseed, I lived only a few meters from the breakwater, but I drew Ghost in the Shell while living in a town in the mountains about nine kilometers from the sea, and I continue to live there today.

Dark Horse: What did you do prior to your professional debut as an artist?

Shirow: When I was in elementary school I used to do water colors without thinking about it much, and for fun I often went out to draw in the local mountains or at the seashore -- taking complicated illustrated reference books with me that I didn't really understand at all. When I was in junior high and high school I didn't draw much, and I instead devoted myself to sports (judo). Since I was fond of art, though, I later chose to enter the Osaka University of Arts, and I studied oil painting there. In college I met a friend who was a manga fan and was also doing self-publishing¹. And that's how someone like me -- who had never even bought a manga magazine before -- wound up drawing them.

Perhaps because of this, there's very little of the usual manga "know-how" in my work. Some people kindly refer to my style as "unique," but others say it's immature and lacking in understanding of some important and basic points that would make it more commercial. At any rate, after drawing manga for around two years, I was able to issue Black Magic -- my first manga paperback -- through the self-publishing group to which I belonged. Black Magic was noticed by a man named Harumichi Aoki, who is the president of a small publishing firm in Osaka called Seishinsha, and he invited me to make my official debut from his company. Thus began my first contact with the real manga world.

Since I wanted to concentrate on painting until I graduated from college, I had Mr. Aoki wait for a while. Then, upon graduation, in 1985, I drew Appleseed specifically for his company, Seishinsha, and made my commercial debut. Unlike others, I thus began my career never having working as an "assistant" for an established artist, and never having gone through the arduous process of submitting work to publishers as an unknown. I loved to draw and create stories and do research, and I knew that I wanted to enter a profession where I could do all those things, but it took a while after my debut for me to realize that this is, after all, what a comic artist is really all about.

In parallel with my manga debut with Appleseed, I also became a high school teacher. I taught for five years, but I eventually realized that school education merely demands that teachers transmit information², and that I could have a much more direct and deeper dialog with people as a manga artist, so I'm now taking a break from teaching. Around the time I stopped teaching I began drawing Ghost in the Shell and Orion (Seishinsha), and that brings us up to the present. Since my debut, I've been supported by many people and by fortunate circumstances around me, and I feel that I've been incredibly lucky. I'm enormously grateful, for example, for all those at Studio Proteus and Dark Horse who have helped make it possible for my works to be read by my fans in America.

Dark Horse: What are your primary influences?

Shirow: Rather than manga, I think I've been more influenced by animation and TV dramas (especially those from the U.S. and the U.K.)³. Gundam is an example that comes to mind of one influential animation work. Of course I do believe that my work is original in its own way, but there's always some past experience or memory that triggers the ideas I come up with. I may be able to build on ideas, to adapt them, and thus come up with something new, but I have doubts about whether it's truly possible for anyone to create something completely new and original. Emphasizing a combination of females and mecha, as I do, is something that's been around for a long time, and neither the idea of computer brains nor Special Forces units are themselves new, either. But as with cooking, even if the ingredients are the same, the way they are mixed together and the goal of the person doing the mixing creates a different flavor. In that sense, if the result of cooking can be called original, so, too, can my work. I always try to draw manga that are true to myself.

Dark Horse: Are there any foreign artists whose work you particularly enjoy?

Shirow: Unfortunately, there are very few non-Japanese comics sold in Japan, so we have very little opportunity to get to know foreign artists. I'm really happy that I've recently, finally, been able to obtain DC Comics' Arkham Asylum and Moebius' Made in L.A., but I've only been able to catch three episodes of Max Cabanes' Colin-Maillard⁴, which was serialized in one of Kodansha's magazines. Someday when I can find the time I want to take a vacation and tour bookstores throughout Europe scouting for comics⁵.

Dark Horse: Would you ever consider working off another writer's script?

Shirow: I personally like working alone. I like thinking up my stories (even if I'm not very good at it...). Whether using scripts is good or bad is a case-by-case situation, and it would depend on each writer's circumstances and involve some judgment. (From my experience, though, script writers all too easily specify "a young girl so beautiful one falls in love at first sight" or "a heroic clash of mounted armies," and frankly as the person who has to draw the pictures, I'm not very interested in working with them then⁶. Of course, it does depend on the writer, though).

Dark Horse: How do you view the relationship between manga and animation?

Shirow: I do believe that commercial success with manga makes it much easier to get animation projects off the ground. But there are too many people who think that they only have to do a half-way decent job of animating the drawings of a best-selling manga, and I don't agree. I think there are ways to demonstrate and produce animation that are unique to animation. Also, in order to establish animation as a truly unique medium of expression, I think it's better to work from an original concept than to base the work on a manga, or, if producing animation based on a manga work, I think it's better to at least rewrite the story for the animation⁷. It's also true that there are some manga that are truly superb when read, but that are not necessarily suited for animation because of their pacing, style, or length of story. Rather than stressing the "animation of manga," I think it's better to evaluate each work on its own merits (as either manga or animation), and see whether it is good, or whether there is room for improvement.

Dark Horse: What do you consider your best work?

Shirow: I think of my works as my own children, so they're all equally precious to me, and I can't say which is best. But in an overall sense I suppose that Appleseed⁸ stands out the most.

Dark Horse: What do you do in your spare time?

Shirow: I take photographs of spiders and make paper-mache figures (unfortunately, I haven't been doing much of this recently). Since I have always loved to draw, it's hard for me to differentiate between work and play⁹.

Dark Horse: Some of your color work includes very unusual textures. How do you achieve these effects?

Shirow: I use a color copy machine and copy rock or metallic images onto a "transparent film with an adhesive on one side," (reversing or flipping positive and negative images, altering colors, and changing sizes), and then cut and paste them into the drawing. I usually use acrylic paint and apply several thin layers... I avoid a high contrast look with sketches, because when I draw very realistically "the flat, deformed, and unrealistic-looking" faces of my characters¹⁰ tend to dissolve into the surroundings there, and appear odd.

Dark Horse: Do you work together with anyone?

Shirow: I have no drawing assistants or special manga production staff. Even if I wanted to, in the Kobe City area, unlike Tokyo, there are almost no such people anyway. For business matters such as accounting, handling rights, and general negotiations, I have formed a company, however. This allows me to leave business matters up to the company and to concentrate on my creative work. As far as my comics are concerned, it's easier for me to work on my own.

Dark Horse: How much money do manga artists in Japan make?

Shirow: Manga are quite established as a creative medium in Japan -- although they are not given a great deal of public recognition -- and there are many different genres. There is also a vast gap between the lowest and the highest incomes of manga artists. (For your information, although Japan is said to be an economic superpower, it is really the corporations that have all the money, and not the individual citizens. Japan is a peaceful and fortunate place, all right, but to buy a house typically takes between 20 to 30 times the average white-collar worker's annual pay). According to a rumor I have heard (and I can't guarantee its veracity), the annual income of a certain top manga artist is $3 million (perhaps half of this is taken by taxes, but it's still more than 70 times the average white collar worker's annual pay!) and the lowest annual income is around $500 (which would obviously require depending on one's family). But with a page rate of $100, a thirty-page work serialized in a monthly magazine for a year comes to around $36,000, or almost the same as the average salaried employee's annual wage of $40,000. And if the artist draws 200 to 300 pages, he or she can issue a paperback volume and enjoy royalties as well, with almost no limit as long as the work sells well. Major publishers usually demand that artists produce between 20 to 30 pages a week, and they pay more than $100 per page. Artists are also generally paid between $500 and $5000 for the rights to use a single illustration for a video game package, etc., so with talent and luck (depending on whether the masses love you or not), you can see that it can be considerably more profitable to work as a manga artist than as the salaried employee of a company. Nonetheless, things don't always go the way you expect in this business, so a manga artist is definitely an occupation with a considerable element of gambling to it.

Finally, it takes considerable expense to hire the multiple assistants necessary to meet the volume-production demanded by publishers, and to set up and maintain a production space. You have to do good work in order to succeed commercially, but whether you'll succeed commercially just by doing good work involves a gamble.

For Ghost in the Shell I drew an average of forty pages per episode and it took me around forty days to do one episode. But the number of hours I can work, and the efficiency of my work fluctuates, so it's not always possible to do a page a day. It's a real struggle simply to adjust my schedule to "meet the deadlines...!¹¹

"As with cooking, even if the ingredients are the same, the way they are mixed together and the goal of the person doing the mixing creates a different flavor. In that sense, if the result of cooking can be called original, so, too, can my work. I always try to draw manga that are true to myself^.12"

1. I suppose this is the much-mentioned Atlas fanzine.

2. Shirow doesn't mention whether he teaches art or something else in high school. Yes, being a teacher in Japan, or for that matter any Asian country can be a pretty rigid profession. The focus is always priority on Exam Results, not the learning process. This is speaking from experience! ;-)

3. I wonder what kind of US / UK TV dramas does Shirow watch.... Maybe something like Monthy Python or Dallas or CSI or what?? :-)

4. I have absolutely no idea what is this Collin-Maillard & Max Cabanes..... I suppose I'll need to look this up.. (note, note).

5. Shirow specifically mentioned that he wants to shop for comics in Europe... I gather he must have seen some really good stuff from there, because otherwise I suppose most of the popular comics are US-based, even Arkham Asylum... Or could be that for the scenery and experience Shirow prefers Europe, and comic shopping is a secondary purpose.

6. "a young girl so beautiful one falls in love at first sight" ..... somehow I find this portion of the interview really amusing!... :-) However, looking at Shiow's current selection of works, something in the key of "a young greasy girl so beautiful one falls in physical love at first sight"... (damn that sounds so wrong! No offence to Grease fans though, whatever floats your boats :-)) I just find Shirow's selection these days quite mysteriously questionable...

7. Perhaps this is the reason why Mamoru Oshii's GITS and Innocence doesn't quite ring a bell with Shirow's original manga. However, I think Stand Alone Complex with the Laughing Man plot seriously deserves praise, and in my opinion is a very successful animation of GITS.

8. There you have it. Appleseed is the Shirow-defining work, from the master himself. After all its Shirow's eldest 'child', not necessarily as successful as the youngest though (Ghost In The Shell). Considering the period of time when Appleseed was conceived, and seeing how it has progressed with Shirow's career through the years, Appleseed is the title that is in every way uniquely represents Shirow.

9. Shirow plays alot of video games too! But that is another interview for another time.

10. One can't help but appreciate Shirow's skills when dealing with this. Shirow's characters are still sketched out first I believe, and then only the colouring and fine-tuning done in CG. Its different from say creating an entirely 3D character, so to achieve the quality of work Shirow managed to, its very impressive.

11. Do the maths. I think Shirow's main issue is mainly deadlines. Financially I think he is doing very well thank you! ^_^ In this sense I understand the Grease Gals. Shirow needs to eat also I suppose...

12. "I always try to draw manga that are true to myself" Its precisely this kind of attitude and quality control that makes Shirow's works such everlasting reads. By not sacrificing his own principles and ideas just to please the masses, Shirow's works truly deserves their legendary status.  

posted by: Lucas at 01/14/05 10:01 | link | comments | Category: shirow sensei

Comments: