This is the continuation of Chapter 7.
Lone Wolf and Cub (English Version Released in 1987) was immensely popular among North American fans of Japanese manga and also had a great influence on creators.
As I wrote in Part 1, famous comic writer and artist Frank Miller fell in love with and drew the cover for the English version of Lone Wolf and Cub. Additionally, a third-generation Japanese-American comic artist named Stan Sakai, influenced by Lone Wolf and Cub and famous Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa, began drawing and publishing a series of feature-length American comics. Stan Sakai is a popular American comic artist who has received several Eisner Awards, also known as the “Academy Awards of Comics,” for his work Usagi Yojimbo.
兎用心棒 (Usagi Yojimbo) is the title in Japanese. Usagi means “rabbit” in English and Yojimbo means something along the lines of “bodyguard.”
The title became very popular in the U.S. and the spin-off “Space Usagi” collaborated with the famous U.S. superhero series Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Both Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Usagi Yojimbo are still being serialized, and a fourth-generation Japanese-American staff member of Manga Planet of course knew these works as well.
In this way, Japanese manga has had a major influence on Americans and American comics since 40 years back. So why was it Lone Wolf and Cub? To put simply, it is probably because samurai and Japanese period dramas depicted a specifically Japanese culture. Ninjas, too. The Legend of Kamui is a ninja story, and later, from the 2000s, Rurouni Kenshin became a very popular work in the U.S. based on the last samurai of the late Edo period, and Naruto became a bestseller worldwide as a ninja story.
On the other hand, why was it AKIRA? Of course, the basic premise is that the artist Katsuhiro Otomo’s overwhelming compositional and drawing skills were highly acclaimed, but I think there are other reasons as well: because it is in the Science-Fiction genre and because the setting is stateless. In a way, famous Hollywood blockbusters Blade Runner and The Matrix are of a similar world. The words “Science-Fiction” and “stateless” are key. For example Dragonball, One Piece, Attack on Titan…
Interesting things are timeless. Interesting things know no borders. This is an ironclad rule of entertainment common to the world, and among these, manga has extremely high potential and has also influenced numerous artists from around the world. Equally, many Japanese manga artists have been influenced by artists from abroad as well.
Thus, a world where artists stimulate and influence each other is an essential element of creativity, and that is why we, the readers/fans, get excited. That is why I hope this phenomenon is not crushed by commercialism and is something universal.
In the next chapter, I will consider various issues as I return to my own experiences and learnings.
Hyoe Narita started as an editor at Shogakukan Inc. for women’s magazines and manga for eight years from 1988. In 1996, Narita moved on to work for VIZ Media, LLC (San Francisco, California, USA) and eventually served as the Executive Vice President. There, he founded and became the first editor-in-chief of North American SHONEN JUMP. From 2012 to 2017, Narita was the President of Viz Media Europe with offices in Paris, Berlin, and Lausanne. Simultaneously, he served as the Vice President of the Chambre de Commerce et d’Industrie Japonaise en France between 2014-2017. Narita is now President of Humony International, Inc., Chairman of FANTASISTA, INC., and Professor at the Anime and Manga Department at Kaishi Professional University.