COMICS JOURNAL, MONDAY, NOVEMBER 16, 2009
STAN SAKAI & CHRIS SCHWEIZER
by STAFF (COMICS JOURNAL, MONDAY, NOVEMBER 16, 2009)
Historical fiction is cartoonists Stan Sakai's and Chris Schweizer's stock in trade: The latter is best known for his graphic novel, Crogan's Vengeance, the first of 16 volumes that will trace a family throughout the centuries, beginning with the tale of the pirate Catfoot, while the former's acclaimed Funny-Animals-in-Feudal-Japan series, Usagi Yojimbo, has been chronicling the adventures of the titular rabbit samurai in single-issue and trade paperbacks for 25 years (almost as long as Schweizer has been alive). Schweizer, who teaches at the Savannah School of Art and Design in Atlanta, met up with Sakai at a library conference in Springfield, Mass., where they carried on the following conversation, ranging from the perils of research to process to the all-ages comics comeback to the perennial question of just where creators get their ideas.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: The first thing that I wanted to talk about was how you got into comics in the first place. Was it a specific goal? Did you stumble into it?
STAN SAKAI: I both stumbled into it, and got into it by design. I grew up in Hawaii and there is no comics industry in Hawaii, and when I was growing up - you know, I'm really old - I remember buying Fantastic Four #2 off the racks, because DC Comics had raised their prices to 12¢, but Marvel was still at a dime, so I saved 2¢. I grew up reading comic books, but it wasn't until much later in high school that I actually realized, "Hey, there are actually people making a living drawing these comics!" - Steve Ditko, Jack Kirby - and this was about the time that Marvel was listing creators. That's how I learned to associate Stan Lee with comics and Jack Kirby with comics. Before then, comics just appeared magically on the stands every Friday. [Schweizer laughs.]
The thought was, if you wanted to work in comics you had to live in New York. But I wanted to do artwork - commercial artwork or freelance artwork. And it wasn't until much later that I discovered you could make a living doing comic books. I moved up to California about a month after I got married. A company wanted to start a line of junior sportswear and they brought myself and a couple of other guys to create their line. I stayed with them for about a year, and then I quit to do freelance artwork.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: Were you doing comics during this time?
STAN SAKAI: Well, in the '70s, there were things like fanzines, I guess nowadays they call them independent comics, but back then they were fanzines; cheaply printed - well, not always cheaply printed - small-press comic books. And I would contribute to them. I did that kind of comics, but my paying work was mainly advertising art, record album covers, T-shirt designs, whatever I could find to pay the rent.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: Well, that's how people who have the intention to do creator-owned comics start out these days, doing the minicomics. I guess it's the same thing: sharpening your teeth on those, learning storytelling structure, learning your aesthetic. There's the adage that your first 1,000 pages are terrible, so it's best to get those out of the way in some capacity or another.
STAN SAKAI: Right, and start doing the good stuff. When I was doing freelance work I met Sergio Aragonés, and he invited me to a C.A.P.S. meeting, The Comic Arts Professional Society. It was an organization of print cartoonists started by Sergio, Mark Evanier, and Don Rico. There are so many comic-book artists in the Los Angeles area, but we never socialized. I joined the second year. I was told that the first meeting was in a church in Hollywood, and it was booked right after the Gay Christians Organization or something like that. Through the grapevine I learned about Steve Gallacci in Seattle wanting to do an anthropomorphic-comic anthology, but not having enough material. I sent him a Nilson Groundthumper story, a Funny Animal comic with bunnies, and he published it. Then he said, "I have another issue - what else do you have?" I sent him the first Usagi story.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: Nilson Groundthumper - a lot of the elements from that story ended up in Usagi. Did you do much with that character or with that storyline prior to Usagi?
STAN SAKAI: Well actually, the entire Nilson story was going to be a great epic. The premise of the story - it was going to be a 2,500 page story - would tell why there are Funny Animals, why there are real animals, and the rise of the humans. It was going to be my epic, my Lord of the Rings! It was going to end with a climax with a huge castle with the big war between the anthropomorphs and the humans and everyone is going to die, and it was going to be glorious! And Usagi was going to be a part of that storyline. He was to be introduced at about page 1,000. But I fell in love with that character after doing that first story, so I pretty much put Nilson on the side, and concentrated on Usagi.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: That's why the Lord Hikiji's character is a human. Only after hearing about the Groundthumper stories did that ever make sense, because I could never figure out why you had changed it to have one human.
STAN SAKAI: Yeah, Lord Hikiji was going to be the great menace in the Nilson Groundthumper story. The final remnant of Nilson is that Lord Hikiji was shown in one panel in Usagi as a human.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: The animals in Usagi also have tended to look less animal-like over the years. In Usagi Book One, Usagi is clearly a rabbit. He's got the skull structure of a rabbit. Gen is much more of a rhinoceros. Side-samurai look very much like their individual parts. What prompted the move? We recognize that they're animals, but we're not concentrating on what type of animals they are.
STAN SAKAI: Right. Well, I think it came as my style of drawing changed. It was unconscious on my part. Usagi's proportions have changed; he has a bump on his nose - suddenly. [Laughs.] People pointed that out to me, and I said, "I never noticed!" [Laughs.] The types of animals that I use now are more generic, rather than specific animals, like Carl Barks' generic dog-people that populate his backgrounds. I remember looking through some of my early stories, and yeah, I have a cow in there, but I haven't drawn the cow people in a long time. Back then I was concentrating more on animals, rather than concentrating on character designs.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: Also, my goal is not to demystify, but I'm curious as to how much of Usagi you had planned out, because so many of the characters that feature very prominently into Usagi's life - especially Jotaro - they are introduced incredibly early on in the series. The vast majority of the characters are released within the first few issues of Usagi - comparative to the larger scale. Did you just decide that you really liked those characters and wanted to continue using them?
STAN SAKAI: Well, that's the great advantage of having a creator-owned series, where you have one creator in charge of the life of the entire series. When I introduced Jotaro, I knew he was Usagi's son, but it wasn't revealed to Usagi until about five years later, or even longer, actually.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: I was curious as to whether or not you knew going in that you were going to be doing that? There was groundwork set, and it never felt like -
STAN SAKAI: Well, first of all, they look exactly alike. [Laughter.] I did set up groundwork for that, but it was something I wanted to reveal much later on in the series. Actually, there were times when I doubted that I'd ever reach that point. Back then, I was just concentrating on getting the next story finished, whereas now I'm thinking of storylines that won't be resolved for about another five or 10 years.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: I'm doing the same thing. Basically every time I do research, I'll start to see something that I know could maybe influence a different book, and so I try and think about inserting an aspect of that, even though I don't know exactly how it's going to pan out into the book I am currently working on. So that years from now people might read and think, "Oh! He had it all planned out," even though it's really not the case, but I do have some very specific ideas as to what to work in there.
STAN SAKAI: Right. Well, I'm amazed with your work; it's so cinematic! Your lines are just gorgeous. I used to use a brush, but I just got lazy. I don't like washing out the brushes. [Laughs.] So that's why I switched to pens, but I love the quality of the line-work that you get with a brush.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: The pens are so much faster. I really like my brush style, but any time I'm sketching, any time I'm doing anything that's not a page, I'm always using pens because I just love how intuitive they are. With a brush I've got to work with it. [Sakai laughs.] At dinner we were talking about the Crogan family tree, the framework for the series and how it really came about as a fluke: drawing a pilot and then a pirate, and because they looked similar, trying to see how they might be related - an afternoon's work with a pen and a calculator setting up this whole series. Usagi's initial creation, from what I understand, is not that much different in that he, too, manifested himself in a drawing. You just happened to draw a rabbit samurai, am I right about that?
STAN SAKAI: Well, I grew up with samurai movies. Just down the street from me was the old Kapahulu theater that showed samurai movies every Saturday. I wanted to do a series inspired by the life of Miyamoto Musashi, a 17th-century samurai. I was just sketching in my sketchbook and I drew a rabbit with his ears tied up into a chomage, a samurai top-knot, and I loved the design. It was graphically striking. It was unique. So, I just kept him as a rabbit.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: What amazes me is that something that just happened to be a quick sketch, that you might have done in an afternoon or something like that, would lead to a life's work. And I feel like my thing with the family tree is not that dissimilar, and with me, I assumed that I would be able to find other types of books. Even if I had never come up with a family tree, I would have found other stories to tell. Do you feel that same way? Would you have found a different -
STAN SAKAI: Oh you know, I might have, but before Usagi I wanted to do superheroes. I grew up reading superhero comics. After drawing Usagi and Nilson, I went on a different path, into more Funny Animals.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: You've been able to work a lot of different story genres into the Usagi framework. You've got mysteries with Inspector Ishida, you've got horror stories, you've got - to some degree - romance. You've got comedy, you've got war, you've got a lot of different specific stories. With Space Usagi you have science fiction. Are there any types of stories that you've had the desire to tell that the structure of Usagi has not permitted?
STAN SAKAI: Um, Civil War.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: American Civil War?
STAN SAKAI: Yes, American Civil War. That was a passion of mine for a while. I subscribed to all of the Civil War magazines and went to battlefields whenever I was in the East.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: Have you ever thought about trying to do anything with a Civil War book, or is that just too much to add to the plate?
STAN SAKAI: That's just too much to add. I've just been really busy with Usagi. Whereas in your case, you're doing all the research with these different time periods. Crogan's March that you are working on now, with the Foreign Legion. You had to do a lot of research for that.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: The plus side is that I really love researching. The downside is that I have to do entirely new research for each book. And I can't simply build on the research that I did in the previous books. So, that becomes difficult.
STAN SAKAI: Each one's a completely different subject.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: Yeah.
STAN SAKAI: Now for Crogan's March, did you get books? Did you watch Beau Geste?
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: I watched Beau Geste. What actually made me want to do it in the first place was seeing movies like The Majestic and Secondhand Lions where there are these obvious homages to these old '30s and '40s high-adventure North African movies. I realized after watching these movies that, while, like everyone else, I recognized those homages, I was unfamiliar with any of the movies they were referencing and I didn't know where to find those '30s and '40s high-adventure movies.
Among the ones that I found was Beau Geste. And the book is one of my favorite books, hands down. It starts off very frightening. They come across this fort, and all of the people are dead, and they don't know what's going on, and it's sort of this mystery that unravels over the course of the book and the movie. But, I really loved the idea of having a horror story set within the framework of a French Foreign Legion story, which is what this book originally started out as. That was going to be my theme. And it ended up, of course, as all things do, straying in an entirely different direction, but I still have a few of those elements there.
There is a section where they are in a cave and they're getting picked off one by one and they've heard that the cave is haunted by a djinn, which is an Arabic demon or spirit, and there are other clues throughout the story that lead you to think that it may be something else. But one of things that I'm trying to do is something I learned in no small part from reading Usagi, which is that there should be no throwaway dialogue. If anything specific is mentioned it will likely lead to something else.
Reading Usagi for me is a lot like watching a detective show, in that I know to pay careful attention because if someone's name is mentioned or if someone talks about, "Oh, I have to do this, or, oh, I have to do that," that will in some way come back later on in the plot. And anytime you do that it's incredibly satisfying for me as a reader, and presumably for your other readers as well. So that's something that I am very consciously trying to do with this book. Make sure that everything talked about relates to everything else and that there are no scenes for the sake of there being that scene - just heightening that storytelling.
STAN SAKAI: Well, for me it's because I'm limited to a specific number of pages. You know, I've got to figure out what's the most important thing to put in those pages, because otherwise I could go on for much longer.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: And I wanted to talk about your introduction to publishing. You said you started out doing the fanzines, and then working with Albedo. How did that eventually lead to your doing Usagi? And at what point were you able to be a cartoonist full-time?
STAN SAKAI: After leaving the garment industry, I was doing freelance cartooning, freelance artwork. I've been very fortunate in that the first Groundthumper story was the only thing I ever had to really pitch, and by pitching I mean submitting something. After that, publishers have come to me. I'm really fortunate. A couple of issues of Albedo came out and then Kim Thompson at Fantagraphics, co-publisher at Fantagraphics, wanted to create a Funny Animal anthology. He invited myself, Josh Quagmire and Steve Gallacci to contribute to Critters. Usagi was one of the more popular characters, and spun off into his own series. We did a summer special, just to test the waters. It did well, so we went into Usagi as a regular series.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: What is Usagi's publishing schedule, currently?
STAN SAKAI: It's published by Dark Horse and I do nine or 10 issues [a year].
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: I knew it wasn't quite monthly, but I knew that it was very close.
STAN SAKAI: It takes me about five weeks to do a complete issue. That's from the writing to the finished artwork. That's a good pace for me, because it gives me time to do other projects. I still do lettering for Stan Lee on the Spider-Man Sunday newspaper strips; I do lettering for Sergio and Mark when there's any new Groo project. I also do one or two fun little comic-book works, for other publishers. I did a Hulk story for Marvel and I just finished a pin-up for a Simpsons/Futurama book, and little things for other publishers. And for me, that's a good schedule. We also do one trade-paperback collection a year. And this year I am also doing a fully painted original graphic novel, titled Usagi Yojimbo: Yokai. Yokai are the ghosts, goblins and monsters of Japanese folklore.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: You're using watercolors?
STAN SAKAI: Ink and watercolor.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: The pages that I've seen look gorgeous. Is it dealing directly with Usagi's storyline? Because it seems like it's focusing on the mythology of individual -
STAN SAKAI: Yes, the regular series and the Yokai can be read independently, but it also advances the Usagi story. There are revelations about another character named Sasuke that happen in the story that you don't need to know the background of Sasuke or Usagi though it helps to appreciate the story better.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: And you say, "stand alone" and that's one of the things that I think is strongest about Usagi. That you can - and I have, it's how I got into it in the first place - pick it up with any particular volume and you don't have to be familiar with the characters.
STAN SAKAI: Right, you can get into stories fairly quickly.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: You regularly re-insert the little asterisks with what things are, no matter how many times it's been in. It never feels forced, and you always reintroduce characters. If - is it Kitsune?
STAN SAKAI: Kitsune, yes.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: If Kitsune comes in, then you establish very early on that she is a pickpocket. If Gen comes in, you establish very early on that he's a bounty hunter. Is that intentional on your part?
STAN SAKAI: That is very intentional, because, like any book, we need new readership. Readers fall out of reading your books for some reason or another, so we always need new readers. They have to be introduced to the story and to characters as quickly as possible. The way I operate is that I do short stories that lead up to one long epic and then go back to short stories. The shorter stories are a good place for new readers to come on board, but the older readers appreciate the longer stories, with the complexity, the character development and such. That's been my plan for quite a while.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: Well, it's really nice. It's something that I think comics should do more of. It's one of the reasons that we designed the Crogan books the way that we did, so that you could pick up any one of them, so that if you enjoy that one, you might want to pick up another one. One of the things that terrifies me most, though, is: What if they like that one, and say, "Well, that's good enough." Are you familiar with the Dungeon books by Lewis Trondheim? For a long time, I only read two of them, because the other ones featured different characters and I figured I'm good with these characters and if they put out more with them, I'll read those. And it wasn't until after I put out the first Crogan's book I realized that was a potential with mine and I got very scared.
STAN SAKAI: They were like Catfoot, but -
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: Exactly. Some people - I did a signing at Free Comic Book Day, and a couple people asked if I was going to be doing other books with Catfoot. The original plan was that there would be some characters that had more than one book. The gunfighter is the right age to be a younger man during the Civil War. And the Rough Rider, you know, could, two years later, be involved in the Boxer Rebellion, and then 15 years later be involved with Pancho Villa. So, there would be a lot of situations where I could do that but one thing that I've been thinking about doing is shorter stories that are meant for introduction, to be collected in floppies, using characters that I've already researched. Because I've already researched the pirates, I could do a Catfoot story while I'm researching a future book, because one of the hardest things for me is that period of research and no output. Although I know it is important, I feel like I'm not contributing anything and that I'm just sitting around reading all day. Your research you tend to do while you're in the process of working on another book.
STAN SAKAI: Sometimes. Much of my research is done while I'm already working on another project, or it may take years to do. It took about five years to do the research and write the story for Grasscutter.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: And all of Grasscutter, all of the details in Grasscutter are based on legend and historical fact.
STAN SAKAI: It's history, yes. And actually, that's why I did so much research for Grasscutter. That's why we started putting my story notes in the back of the -
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: So they weren't in the earlier books?
STAN SAKAI: They were in some of the comic books, the Mirage comics. I did a story about the Tanabata Festival - the festival of the Weaver Star. I did a lot of research for that but I could not put all the information into the story, because it would just slow down the pacing. I put that as story notes in the back of the comic book, but it was never reprinted in the trades, which is actually going to be corrected with the new editions. People enjoyed the story notes in Grasscutter, so just put 'em in the back.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: Right. I'm still planning on putting together a sketchbook that's an annotation sort of thing, but my biggest problem is that I'll note something and file it away, but not remember where I read it, or not write down where I read it. And then it becomes increasingly problematic to try and find that reference again. Especially if it was in a library book. When I was working on Vengeance, I had a stack of library books, two-dozen tall with Post-it notes all over the place, and luckily there is a lot of information on pirates out there. Not as much on pre-1940s Tuaregs, which makes it a little bit harder to do the Foreign Legion story, but the pirate story I could just snap my fingers and the sound would echo off a pirate book. For creating those story notes, are you taking more notes in preparation for the story notes than you might otherwise have done?
STAN SAKAI: A lot of times, yeah, but most of the time, I file it away in my mind, and that's where I get into problems - did I research it, or did I just imagine it? Now, one of the stories I'm doing is about soy sauce. There is a lot of different information on the modern procedures of soy-sauce-making, but not how it was made 400 years ago.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: You've got quite a few of those, sort of little tidbits of Japanese lore. Either a tea ceremony or how ink is made or -
STAN SAKAI: I was able to participate in a couple of tea ceremonies. I was a second guest at a ceremony with a master. I was very fortunate. They answered all of my questions very nicely. It's just that sitting with my legs folded under me for an hour... [Laughs.] Trying to get up... ow! I did a story about seaweed-farming that came about because my parents had visited a seaweed farm in Japan. They mentioned it and showed me pictures they had taken.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: My parents went to Trinidad not long ago. My father is a music composer and they were performing one of his operas down there with steel drums, and so he got really excited and my mother got excited as well, thinking that Trinidad was like a Bahamas-Beach type of thing, which it's not as much. And they brought back some stories that are just begging to be used in a story. There are gangs, the same way that there are gangs in a lot of these Central American countries that still do the drug-running and the kidnapping and ransom and things like that, except that they determine who is the head gang - who is going to be paid tribute by all of the others - by these steel-drum orchestra competitions. That they spend the majority of their money buying steel drums and paying for steel-drum lessons and practice all this, and each year there is this huge festival and the winner is the top gang.
And it's just so absurd that it's just begging for some sort of story treatment. Anytime I hear stories like that... it's really hard to not try to work them into whatever I'm working on right then. What's also amazing is that a whole story can shift around one tiny factoid that you might read or hear in a book. Has that ever happened with you?
STAN SAKAI: Oh yeah. I was watching a documentary, a TV documentary on the mountains of Japan and they had one line in it saying that at the base of Mount Fuji there is a forest whose trails are so convoluted that people go in and they can't find their way out, and they also mentioned that it's a favorite place for people to commit suicide. And I thought, "Oh, that's really neat!" So I took that idea and turned it into an area in Usagi's world called the Tangled Skein, and that's where all the ghosts and goblins and haunts of Usagi's world live. He escaped to the Tangled Skein after the Battle of Adachi Plain, and he met up with one of the Yokai there.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: I know that there are some towns that are real. Are your regions and towns actual regions and towns or are they invented to suit your narrative purpose?
STAN SAKAI: Well, some are invented, and some are actual. I mentioned Sendai, which is the Northern Province of Honshu. I talked about a shortcut over the mountains in one of the earlier Usagi stories; places like that actually do exist. Of course, Edo was really the capital of Japan at that time. But, most of it is just pretty much made up. I do have a timeline of Usagi in history and his travels throughout Japan, but it's very loose in my mind.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: Are there any larger shifts using that timeline that will alter the Usagi story sometime down the road? Any larger wars coming up -
STAN SAKAI: Not really. Currently, he lives in the winter/spring of 1606. Actually, you know, it was very loose in my mind. Someone had actually figured out all of Usagi's stories, where in history his stories take place.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: It's great when other people do the work for you.
STAN SAKAI: He had matched my timeline almost perfectly! Almost to an exact month!
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: Wow.
STAN SAKAI: I have never told that. There are just hints that I've dropped, such as when Ieyasu, the first Tokugawa Shogun had stepped down a couple of years after he had become military dictator so that he could pass on the position to his son. That took place in a specific year - 1605, I think. I would drop certain hints like that, and they figured it out and put everything in a nice orderly timeline.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: I know that art evolves organically over a long process. Has anything significant changed in your writing style or approach to how to do Usagi from the early comic version of "How I Make an Usagi Comic" [The Art of Usagi Yojimbo], has anything changed since then?
STAN SAKAI: Not really. I still do a script outline and the thumbnails, which becomes my final script, then it goes to the pencils, lettering, and, finally, the inks. The only thing that's changed is that I've gotten faster - or, that I've had to get faster. I remember early on during the Fantagraphics Critters days, I did an eight-page story in one month, and I thought, "Wow, I'm really blazing! Eight full pages!" Nowadays, you can't make a living doing eight pages a month.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: Well, mine's sort of the opposite. I went from doing ridiculous amounts of pages in a day to now being lucky if I can get two or three - really spending all day working on them. I feel like that's a good thing with me, that maybe I was too haphazard initially, but it also terrifies me that if this rate of slow-down grows exponentially then my next book will take years. Which I don't want. I want them to come out yearly.
STAN SAKAI: Well that's why I need a great editor like Diana Schutz. When I'm behind on my deadlines, I would get a call from her. She reminds me of my deadlines so sweetly, but with that tinge in her voice, you know? When we scheduled Yokai, I told her I needed at least three months to finish it. She gave me two and a half. I finished it in that time, with a couple of days to spare.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: James [Lucas Jones], he won't push hard about it, but he will act increasingly exasperated as deadline time approaches. So far I haven't gone over deadline, but this will be the year to decide whether or not I do. I don't expect to, and I'm going to try really hard not to, but it means that I am going to have to do between 10 and 16 pages a week.
STAN SAKAI: Wow, that's almost a whole book for me.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: But, it's during the summer, when I'm not teaching.
STAN SAKAI: So your approach to Crogan is much different than my approach to Usagi. You do most of your work in the preliminaries. Your thumbnails are incredibly detailed. Whereas mine are little more than stick figures. In fact, a lot of my panels are left blank. I do most of the story and the artwork in the final stages.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: Well, for me, I feel like my drawing - while I love doing it - is not my foremost concern. My foremost concern is the storytelling. The majority of my energy is put towards the pacing and which shots I'm going to be using and making sure that everything reads very clearly, because... we approach black and white on the two opposite spectrums: You use a lot of hatch-work to do multiple shades of gray and different values, and I like to stick to pure black or pure white, and sometimes making those forms overlap can be tricky while having everything remain clean. I don't want to have halos around the black shapes, and things like that. So the thumbnailing process for me is where I work all of that out, because it can be challenging and I do love the other parts, but once that thumbnailing is done, it's almost like going through the motions.
STAN SAKAI: I remember reading an interview with Alfred Hitchcock. He would put so much work into the preliminaries that once his storyboard was finished he almost lost interest in the movie.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: That's why I am glad that I do enjoy drawing, because otherwise that would be really hard. We were talking about animation earlier, and that's one of the reasons why animation pre-production is so appealing, but the actual execution of it is not so much. It is that, over and over, and over.
STAN SAKAI: Because you've already done all the work -
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: You've already done the fun part, which is figuring out what's going to go where. You are able to push that fun part to the last step, which is probably pretty smart. [Laughs.] Then you never get tired of what you're working on.
STAN SAKAI: Well, my thumbnails are more for the pacing of the story and for the final script as opposed to panel composition. I do the final compositions in the pencil stage.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: I write my dialogue as I'm thumbnailing. Do you do the same thing?
STAN SAKAI: I do it too.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: I think that a lot of writer-artists tend to do that, and I know a few people who have tried to move from just being an artist to being a writer-artist and still wanting to type up the scripts, because they are so used to doing art from scripts. But I find it so much more organic and better suited to the pacing.
STAN SAKAI: I've written stories for other artists and I would give them thumbnails. That is my final script.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: Do you use the computer at all?
STAN SAKAI: I use the computer for Internet and word processing. That's about it. I've had Photoshop for about five years, but I have never installed it on my computer! [Laughs.]
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: Really? See, I feel like I work very traditionally: I still do all my lettering on the paper. Everything that you see in the book tends to be on the paper, but the computer for me has sped up what would otherwise be my process so much. I do my pencils very small, almost like very tight thumbnails, and blow them up. Before I would just ink right over that, but now I end up tightening up the pencils on top and inking those, but also, for touch-up - I tend to notice the little things when I scan in the pages to upload them to the Oni FTP server. If the dialogue in the balloon is just a smidgen too far to the left, I can just move it right over, and I can also go in those places where the black or the white has gotten smudgy, I can go in and touch those up really well.
And for coloring, it's great. I use the computer to color everything, with a Cintiq, the ones that you draw with on the screen, but I've tried doing things without the computer, and even those few little steps make such a huge impact on the way that I go through it. I would be just completely lost without it. I'm also not that keen to adapt to new technology, so I wonder if we tend to find what works for us and continue doing so, regardless of what is introduced.
STAN SAKAI: I'm completely traditional. I love the feel of the two-ply kid-finish Strathmore and everything I do is on the original artwork. From the pencils to the inks to the Wite-Out at the end.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: That's something else that I try to do, is make sure that I do all of my corrections on the paper, because I used to do them and scan them in, and then I found my originals just weren't pretty. I'd leave sections of black open, and write, "black this in" and things like that. [Sakai laughs.] It's nice to have that big row of portfolios that are labeled that have the individual art that looks the same as the art inside the book.
STAN SAKAI: I use graphite pencils, rather than blue pencils because I like to have the original artwork look as pristine as possible.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: Do you erase your graphite?
STAN SAKAI: I erase everything. That's the part I really hate! [Schweizer laughs.] I used to pay my kids 50¢ a page to erase them, but they hated it worse than I did.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: See, I'm the exact opposite; I use the blue pencil because I really want to see that process. My grandfather was a big comic-strip fan and had written Walt Kelly a letter, shortly after Pogo started, just saying that he admired the strip and thought that it a was great, and Walt Kelly, sort of as a thanks for the thank-you note, sent an original Pogo page -
STAN SAKAI: Oh, wow.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: - to my grandfather, which he gave to my father, and which we had in my house growing up. It was a perfect page in terms of which one it was, the characters and the way they were talking, but he used the blue pencil underneath and you could see all of the building of the characters and lines and in seeing that blue pencil, I knew that it didn't - I would ask my dad about it and he said, well, it doesn't reproduce when you make copies of this. Knowing that I was seeing that a cartoonist was doing what nobody else could see, I felt like that was the secret.
STAN SAKAI: You're in the loop. [Laughs.]
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: And that was the way that you were supposed to make comics, was to use these blue pencils. So even now there are hundreds of different ways that you can approach how to do it, but I think at the core I still have that "real cartoonists use blue pencils underneath" mentality, so I want to approach it that same way, because that was such a big influence on my childhood. I would get those extra-waxy Crayola pencils, the sky blue, out of the pencil boxes at school - I'd always run for that one - and then I'd try to ink on top of it with just a regular Pilot writing pen, and it would break up the lines so badly on top, but I didn't care, that was the way I wanted to do my comics. So I was glad to discover the Col-erase pencils, because they're a lot less waxy. The ink will actually lay down on top of it.
STAN SAKAI: Even for my color work, usually I do it in watercolor, as opposed to the computer.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: Did you have a lot of painting experience, prior to doing -
STAN SAKAI: - I have a fine-arts degree, but I never did watercolor, it was mainly oils and acrylics. Watercolors came later because oils and acrylics just took too long to paint, whereas with watercolors it's immediate. I can do a watercolor page painting in a day or even less. When I was working on the Yokai book, the fully painted Usagi novel, and I could do up to four pages a day. With other mediums, I just can't do that.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: Presumably, your fine-arts education has heavily influenced the way that you work on Usagi. Were there any comic programs available to you at that time, and had there been so, would you have been interested?
STAN SAKAI: [Laughs.] No. Comics were frowned upon.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: They were as well when I was an undergrad. It was really hard to do. I was a graphic-design major and the majority of my graphic-design work was very line-based illustration with hand-done text. I actually really got into hand-lettering and sound-effect type of lettering, because I really hated typography and it was my way of circumventing having to do those for assignments. All of my assignments would have hand-lettering in it - not beautiful sign-style hand-lettering - my old garish hand-lettering.
STAN SAKAI: My advanced painting teacher was an abstract expressionist, so everyone's painting had to be abstract expressionism. Anything representational was frowned upon. Comics were so lowbrow.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: Yeah, we had a class that everyone called "drawing like..." and then the teacher's name. Which wasn't the title of the class, but we were expected to. I feel like that was a great opportunity for my coming in, because I knew that I wanted to do comics, but didn't really know how. And regardless of how many good books out there there are, the McCloud stuff, the Eisner stuff, the new one by Jessica Abel [and Matt Madden], I still really wanted hands-on experience. It's hard to get that hands-on experience when you're not already working. When you're a cartoonist you can talk to other cartoonists and get feedback and things like that, but if you're just interested in being a cartoonist, it's a lot harder to break those boundaries.
STAN SAKAI: Well, nowadays there is a lot of reference on the process of making comics. Back when I was starting out they did not have that. I remember I saw my first piece of original comic art - oh, this was when I was about 20 years old, someone had bought a Paul Gulacy piece somewhere, and this was before the Internet and everything, so that was the first time I actually realized, comics are drawn bigger! [Laughter.] The original artwork is much bigger than what is printed on the page!
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: And you bring up the Internet, that's been huge for me. Even not being a particularly computer-happy person. I don't have a Facebook account, I don't do a lot of the other things, I don't have a webcomic, but just the simple fact of the Internet existing has been both a benefit to me, in terms of finding and being able to acquire comic art that I might not have otherwise found that have been very influential, but also, meeting other people at a similar stage in their career. There are people that I am now friends with, J.P. Coovert and Eleanor Davis, people like that, who I met through the Internet. It just sort of happened that we ended up living in similar areas, but I would find somebody's work on their website and really like it, and maybe send them an e-mail, and maybe get an e-mail back. You know, ostensibly the same things could have been done with letters, columns, years ago, and has - and I'm sure that that is the way that that's developed - but it's so much faster now.
STAN SAKAI: Oh, yeah, it's immediate!
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: It seems to take less time to get projects off the ground and to start garnering an audience than it used to. And I think that's one of the reasons why you see so many newcomers coming straight into the book trade. That's something else that I wanted to talk about, because for me the book market was the only real publishing strategy that we ever considered. Going to the floppies wouldn't have been financially feasible, to break the book into multiple things, because they're designed to be one story. It just made more sense to do that. You came in on the entire opposite end, where going to books wasn't feasible, and floppies were -
STAN SAKAI: Right, well, when Usagi first started going to the trades - the collections - there were no graphic-novel sections at the bookstores. However, there were trade-paperbacks sections. Trade paperbacks were really popular, with books like 101 Uses for a Dead Cat and Kliban's Cats. That's why Usagi is in that strange format. It's not as big as a graphic novel. We kind of made a little niche in the market and kept it like that.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: Trades were making me think of some of the trades that I had from the '80s, one of them being the Ninja Turtles - Laird and Eastman were contemporaries of yours. Do you find that you were more influenced by your peers and those that were immediately before you, than by people who had been putting out comics a long time previous, or is it half and half, or are you not -
STAN SAKAI: I think it's half and half. My big influence was Steve Ditko, during his Spider-Man and Dr. Strange days for Marvel.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: That's similar with me. The Spider-Man Marvel Masterworks I got as a kid and that's how I think of my action sequences - very deliberately, plotted out - you can see Spider-Man is on a wall, and then he jumps to the floor, and then he jumps up to the ceiling, and there is a very clear progression from panel to panel as to what's happening. Which is sort of the opposite of Kirby, which sets the move for an action sequence and gives you the idea for it, but it's much less -
STAN SAKAI: It's more heavy on the power and the action. Ditko was very cinematic, and you could actually see a progression in his moves. It was very nice. Like I said, Ditko was my first comic-book influence. Later on, it became Kirby, even still, later on; it was the European books. Sergio Aragonés is a big influence. Not so much as a style, but as the approach to creating comics. He's the one who actually pushed into me to do my research. Even though Groo is a broad humor comic, he does a lot of research. If you look at the ships before Groo sinks them, you can see the rigging and everything. You can actually build a ship just from his design.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: He called me out on my rigging, looking at it. He said, "You don't have nearly enough!" To be fair, the rigging that's there, I think is right, but I did leave off all the things on the sides, so that you can see through it. It's hard to do all those lines with a brush, it's just too much. But, yeah, his ships are just gorgeous. And his battle sequences are amazing! I can't even comprehend how to do those.
STAN SAKAI: Actually there was one sequence in my first Nilson Groundthumper story, where Nilson was fighting a monster, and it flowed through about half a dozen panels. And Sergio acted it out just to make sure everything was right, even the way the hand rests on the staff and everything.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: I do that. It'll probably change eventually, but anytime I'd have any sword-fighting scenes I'd want them to be right. I'd have my yardstick, and I'd fling it behind and move it forward, and think, "OK, would I lunge with my left leg or my right leg?" I don't know, I have to get up and act out the action sequences to try and get them to make sure that they work.
STAN SAKAI: Right, right. You have to do that.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: What were some of the other influences? It's mostly stuff that you read as a kid and then -
STAN SAKAI: Uhh...
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: The Europeans, are they the ones that -
STAN SAKAI: The European stuff. My favorite samurai artist, or artist of the samurai genre, is a Belgian named Michetz. He does a series called Kogaratsu, and it's just wonderful. He does so much research on his artwork, it's phenomenal. Azpiri - I love the Spanish artist Azpiri's painted work, he has beautiful use of colors.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: Oh, if I were to work in color, the color that captures me more than anything else - have you seen the Beladone books?
STAN SAKAI: Yes, yes. I have those in French.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: I have those in French, as well. I love them as well. His palette is just perfect. It reminds me a lot of Franco Zeffirelli, both in his movies, but also in his operas. I saw a production of La Bohème that had that same palette. All warms with occasional spots of brilliant reds, or blues or golds. And then the rest being this mild sepia that is just absolutely fantastic. So, I look t0 the Europeans for color a lot, but so often they all work in four-color, and so the ink style is so much different than what I can ever use.
STAN SAKAI: You're right.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: First Second just put out Bourbon Island 1730 and it was difficult for me to read at first, because I'm so used to seeing [Lewis Trondheim's] work in color and he still approached it with that, or, it seemed to me that he still approached it with that same sensibility, only it being black and white. It was harder for me to tell what was going on in the first few pages. But there's that looseness to it that I feel, or sparseness to it, I guess - sparseness to the line-weight - that I never feel I can work into my own comics. And so often when I'm reading comics, I'm not reading them as much to enjoy them, although I do enjoy them, but to see what I can learn from them. And that's the hardest thing, when I find something that I love, but can't use.
STAN SAKAI: Since we're talking about the early days, one of the biggest advantages for me was timing. Albedo came out just about the same time that the Ninja Turtles came out. We are both celebrating our 25th anniversary. The Ninja Turtles sparked that huge black-and-white explosion in the '80s. Usagi was at the beginning of it, and the Turtles pretty much carried Usagi along. They were a big influence on Usagi's success. There were a lot more black-and-white books that came along after that that just disappeared.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: The black-and-white explosion - the readers that brought in, do you think that they were looking for a different type of comic than what was existing?
STAN SAKAI: You know, there were two different types of comic-book buyers during the black-and-white explosion. Some were the people who really enjoyed the comic books, and there are the others - speculators, hoping that something they'd buy would turn out to be the new Ninja Turtles. But, like I said, even though there were a lot of good black-and-white books at that time, most of them just disappeared. I think because Usagi was at the beginning of the black and white craze that it stood out, and that's one of the big reasons why it's still around.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: Were there any concerns about doing things in black and white before it had been proven to be commercially viable?
STAN SAKAI: You know, I remember at the first San Diego con that we had copies of Albedo #2; we could not give away copies. But the next year they were going for $100!
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: Was it because it was in black and white?
STAN SAKAI: Because they were black and white. Back then there was just a handful of black-and-white books. There was ElfQuest, Cerebus, Love and Rockets.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: Love and Rockets, was that even going on then?
STAN SAKAI: That was going on, yes. And Matt Wagner's Grendel. That's about it. And the Turtles, of course.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: I'm trying to think of what's comparable to that sort of publishing now, because there doesn't seem to be anything that is comparable. We've got webcomics and we've got minicomics.
STAN SAKAI: Nowadays, it's easier to be noticed; however, it's harder to be published, because print books just do not sell as much. Publishers can't afford to risk a comic book for a newcomer. But, it's difficult to invest money in a full-blown trade. In your case you started out with a graphic novel.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: I did. I was really lucky. But I had done a few minicomics for the love of doing them and to have stuff to trade. Minicomics are invariably a money-loser. You almost never make back what you spent printing them up. And definitely not the more ornate ones that require die-cutting and things like that, just because of the time involved. I put together for SPX a couple of years ago a 300-page rhyming minicomic that was four perfect-bound little volumes, each the size of a business card that slipped into this slipcase that had this fold-over flap and all these other things, and each piece of paper was cut to make 28 pages. Each one took about six hours to assemble. In terms of time management, that's about the worst thing you can do as a cartoonist, is to spend all of your time working on these.
But, I think that those, from what I've seen, tend to create validity for the artists that are doing them to the other cartoonists their age. It shows that they're serious about what they're doing. That they're willing to put in that legwork. And I think to some degree that shows to the publishers as well. Not necessarily for the ornate working, but the editors that I know, most of them want to see that people finish things. They're not going to offer a book based on a strong portfolio, they want to see if you can finish something. Even if that something is an eight-page comic that you put together yourself, the simple act of completion is such an important step to get published these days.
STAN SAKAI: The best thing you can do is leave something with a publisher - even if it is a minicomic. It gives an air of professionalism or legitimacy to it.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: It does. And I think it gives you as an artist a sense of professionalism. You talked about finishing that eight-page Albedo story and how that was this huge feat, and I felt the same way when I finished my first mini, because I had done tons and tons and tons of comic pages that were roughly set in the middle of my story and ended well before the end of my story. I wanted to draw this particular action sequence or capture this conversation or stuff like that, practicing more that anything else. But I'd never really completed a story, and so the first story that I did after I decided I wanted to be a cartoonist gave me the confidence to do a 12-page story, and then a 24-page story and then a 300-page rhyming minicomic.
And all of those made me feel prepared to tackle this larger historical project because it was something that I knew I wanted to do eventually, but was also sort of terrified of. It was very daunting in its scale. It's something that now I feel very confident about. I hope that it'll be good and I'll do everything that I can that it'll be good, but I know that I can get it done, which is something that I didn't know a few years ago.
STAN SAKAI: Well, there is that wondering, because like me, you do everything yourself. My editor, Diana, doesn't see the story until she gets the finished project, so sometimes I wonder if the story is any good. There was just one case, where I turned in a story and I wrote a note saying, "Read this as soon as you get it. I want your input on this." My first editor at Dark Horse was Jamie Rich, and he was great, because as soon as he'd receive a package from me, he'd read it, call me, and I'd have his input immediately.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: Were there ever any situations where you had to change anything?
STAN SAKAI: Just once when I was doing Usagi for Fantagraphics. One panel had Usagi cutting a guy's head open. There were brains flying out. There was blood spurting out of his ears -
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: I noticed that the blood is a lot less cartoony in the early books.
STAN SAKAI: Yeah. Kim [Thompson], my editor, called me and said, "This might be a little extreme," but even before he called me, I had shown it to my wife Sharon, and she said, "It's a bit too much." By the time Kim called me on it, it had already been changed.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: The way you talk about sending those in, that's similar to mine, I think. James didn't see the book until I gave him the whole thing.
STAN SAKAI: Yeah.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: Without the framing sequence [a modern dad telling his kids about their ancestors]... I knew I was going to do the framing sequence, but I hadn't written it yet. And it's sort of the same thing now. He's coming to Atlanta in about a week or so, and so I'll show him what I have so far, but I doubt he'll have the time to actually sit and read it. I think that'll be once it's completely done. My hope is that I do a good enough job that he doesn't insist on any changes, because one of the bad sides about doing everything yourself is that you plan it to fit in certain parameters, and you really can't change much. You can't just get rid of a panel or add a panel without changing the entire book, which is all but impossible. It's not like a novel where you can add a line or take out a line or something like that. It's structured in a way that makes editing extraordinarily difficult, at least for me.
STAN SAKAI: Where do you see the future of book publishing going?
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: I'd like to see more books aimed at kids, or friendly for kids. Part of my presentation tomorrow is on comics that are actually appropriate for all ages. Comics aimed at kids, but that are palatable to middle-schoolers or to high-schoolers and to adults.
STAN SAKAI: You have an Eisner nomination for Best Graphic Novel for Tweens, is it?
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: Yes. Tweens and teens. And the way that I'm approaching mine is what I always want to see. I write them for adults, but I make sure there is nothing in them that would prohibit kids from reading them. I think that kids are smart. They're a lot smarter than people give them credit for, and so because it's pirates, or it's a ninja, or something like that, in theory, the subject matter will latch them in and then I hope that the story will be enough for them to make it through, but I'm trying to write for adults so that whoever picks it up will enjoy it.
But there are a number of books out there that are like that. Aaron Renier's Spiral Bound is one of my favorites that I think carries across. Are you familiar with Eleanor Davis's work? She's done a few things for Mome, and she did that kid's book Stinky, but she's got a new book coming out called The Secret Science Alliance that is full-color and it's absolutely gorgeous, but I think that it's got the potential to be one of those books that's going to suck in a lot more kid readers, the way that Bone did. And the way that any number of other titles are, when they get into situations where they can be in book fairs and things like that.
My thought and my hope is that those readers will continue to read comics, and will read our comics so that we can make a living. That's the biggest thing: that, for years, kids were, to some degree, neglected, just by the industry at large. And I think we're starting to see a big shift away from that, with companies like First Second and Scholastic's line and things like that. I think that we're going to continue to see a shift towards all ages. Again, not just kids, but to where kids are included in the equation in a way that they weren't.
My generation of cartoonists, we don't really have any battles to fight. For so long people were trying to focus that comics can be literature and comics can be a valid art form, that now it seems that the majority of people tend to agree. Not everybody. I still have relatives, "Are you drawing Batman?" and stuff like that. At least most of the people who I know that are around my age that are making comics really don't feel the need to prove themselves or create stories that push the boundaries; they seem to be more just about the fact that they're telling stories - that they're working in comics. There isn't an underlying agenda that I think a lot of the earlier comics people had to deal with because there wasn't that artistic recognition, so thanks to you guys for fighting those battles for us!
STAN SAKAI: You write adult stories that kids can enjoy. For me, I don't write to adults and I don't write to kids. The stories I write are the stories I would like to read.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: Well, when I say adults and kids, I write for what I would want to read and for what I would have wanted to read when I was a kid. I say it's for other kids so that they won't feel left out. But that's the real joy of cartooning, that you do get to focus on these things that you love. And you get to tell stories about whatever! You feel like doing a Godzilla story, you draw him in there! You know, it's really nice to have that freedom to basically do whatever you want, and to tell these stories. You may never have the chance to helm a Godzilla movie.
STAN SAKAI: Right, exactly. I've been very fortunate. My publishers have always granted me a lot of leeway. And basically I just turn in the work, and they publish it.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: Yeah, it's a great gig!
by STAFF (COMICS JOURNAL, MONDAY, NOVEMBER 16, 2009)
Historical fiction is cartoonists Stan Sakai's and Chris Schweizer's stock in trade: The latter is best known for his graphic novel, Crogan's Vengeance, the first of 16 volumes that will trace a family throughout the centuries, beginning with the tale of the pirate Catfoot, while the former's acclaimed Funny-Animals-in-Feudal-Japan series, Usagi Yojimbo, has been chronicling the adventures of the titular rabbit samurai in single-issue and trade paperbacks for 25 years (almost as long as Schweizer has been alive). Schweizer, who teaches at the Savannah School of Art and Design in Atlanta, met up with Sakai at a library conference in Springfield, Mass., where they carried on the following conversation, ranging from the perils of research to process to the all-ages comics comeback to the perennial question of just where creators get their ideas.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: The first thing that I wanted to talk about was how you got into comics in the first place. Was it a specific goal? Did you stumble into it?
STAN SAKAI: I both stumbled into it, and got into it by design. I grew up in Hawaii and there is no comics industry in Hawaii, and when I was growing up - you know, I'm really old - I remember buying Fantastic Four #2 off the racks, because DC Comics had raised their prices to 12¢, but Marvel was still at a dime, so I saved 2¢. I grew up reading comic books, but it wasn't until much later in high school that I actually realized, "Hey, there are actually people making a living drawing these comics!" - Steve Ditko, Jack Kirby - and this was about the time that Marvel was listing creators. That's how I learned to associate Stan Lee with comics and Jack Kirby with comics. Before then, comics just appeared magically on the stands every Friday. [Schweizer laughs.]
The thought was, if you wanted to work in comics you had to live in New York. But I wanted to do artwork - commercial artwork or freelance artwork. And it wasn't until much later that I discovered you could make a living doing comic books. I moved up to California about a month after I got married. A company wanted to start a line of junior sportswear and they brought myself and a couple of other guys to create their line. I stayed with them for about a year, and then I quit to do freelance artwork.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: Were you doing comics during this time?
STAN SAKAI: Well, in the '70s, there were things like fanzines, I guess nowadays they call them independent comics, but back then they were fanzines; cheaply printed - well, not always cheaply printed - small-press comic books. And I would contribute to them. I did that kind of comics, but my paying work was mainly advertising art, record album covers, T-shirt designs, whatever I could find to pay the rent.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: Well, that's how people who have the intention to do creator-owned comics start out these days, doing the minicomics. I guess it's the same thing: sharpening your teeth on those, learning storytelling structure, learning your aesthetic. There's the adage that your first 1,000 pages are terrible, so it's best to get those out of the way in some capacity or another.
STAN SAKAI: Right, and start doing the good stuff. When I was doing freelance work I met Sergio Aragonés, and he invited me to a C.A.P.S. meeting, The Comic Arts Professional Society. It was an organization of print cartoonists started by Sergio, Mark Evanier, and Don Rico. There are so many comic-book artists in the Los Angeles area, but we never socialized. I joined the second year. I was told that the first meeting was in a church in Hollywood, and it was booked right after the Gay Christians Organization or something like that. Through the grapevine I learned about Steve Gallacci in Seattle wanting to do an anthropomorphic-comic anthology, but not having enough material. I sent him a Nilson Groundthumper story, a Funny Animal comic with bunnies, and he published it. Then he said, "I have another issue - what else do you have?" I sent him the first Usagi story.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: Nilson Groundthumper - a lot of the elements from that story ended up in Usagi. Did you do much with that character or with that storyline prior to Usagi?
STAN SAKAI: Well actually, the entire Nilson story was going to be a great epic. The premise of the story - it was going to be a 2,500 page story - would tell why there are Funny Animals, why there are real animals, and the rise of the humans. It was going to be my epic, my Lord of the Rings! It was going to end with a climax with a huge castle with the big war between the anthropomorphs and the humans and everyone is going to die, and it was going to be glorious! And Usagi was going to be a part of that storyline. He was to be introduced at about page 1,000. But I fell in love with that character after doing that first story, so I pretty much put Nilson on the side, and concentrated on Usagi.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: That's why the Lord Hikiji's character is a human. Only after hearing about the Groundthumper stories did that ever make sense, because I could never figure out why you had changed it to have one human.
STAN SAKAI: Yeah, Lord Hikiji was going to be the great menace in the Nilson Groundthumper story. The final remnant of Nilson is that Lord Hikiji was shown in one panel in Usagi as a human.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: The animals in Usagi also have tended to look less animal-like over the years. In Usagi Book One, Usagi is clearly a rabbit. He's got the skull structure of a rabbit. Gen is much more of a rhinoceros. Side-samurai look very much like their individual parts. What prompted the move? We recognize that they're animals, but we're not concentrating on what type of animals they are.
STAN SAKAI: Right. Well, I think it came as my style of drawing changed. It was unconscious on my part. Usagi's proportions have changed; he has a bump on his nose - suddenly. [Laughs.] People pointed that out to me, and I said, "I never noticed!" [Laughs.] The types of animals that I use now are more generic, rather than specific animals, like Carl Barks' generic dog-people that populate his backgrounds. I remember looking through some of my early stories, and yeah, I have a cow in there, but I haven't drawn the cow people in a long time. Back then I was concentrating more on animals, rather than concentrating on character designs.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: Also, my goal is not to demystify, but I'm curious as to how much of Usagi you had planned out, because so many of the characters that feature very prominently into Usagi's life - especially Jotaro - they are introduced incredibly early on in the series. The vast majority of the characters are released within the first few issues of Usagi - comparative to the larger scale. Did you just decide that you really liked those characters and wanted to continue using them?
STAN SAKAI: Well, that's the great advantage of having a creator-owned series, where you have one creator in charge of the life of the entire series. When I introduced Jotaro, I knew he was Usagi's son, but it wasn't revealed to Usagi until about five years later, or even longer, actually.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: I was curious as to whether or not you knew going in that you were going to be doing that? There was groundwork set, and it never felt like -
STAN SAKAI: Well, first of all, they look exactly alike. [Laughter.] I did set up groundwork for that, but it was something I wanted to reveal much later on in the series. Actually, there were times when I doubted that I'd ever reach that point. Back then, I was just concentrating on getting the next story finished, whereas now I'm thinking of storylines that won't be resolved for about another five or 10 years.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: I'm doing the same thing. Basically every time I do research, I'll start to see something that I know could maybe influence a different book, and so I try and think about inserting an aspect of that, even though I don't know exactly how it's going to pan out into the book I am currently working on. So that years from now people might read and think, "Oh! He had it all planned out," even though it's really not the case, but I do have some very specific ideas as to what to work in there.
STAN SAKAI: Right. Well, I'm amazed with your work; it's so cinematic! Your lines are just gorgeous. I used to use a brush, but I just got lazy. I don't like washing out the brushes. [Laughs.] So that's why I switched to pens, but I love the quality of the line-work that you get with a brush.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: The pens are so much faster. I really like my brush style, but any time I'm sketching, any time I'm doing anything that's not a page, I'm always using pens because I just love how intuitive they are. With a brush I've got to work with it. [Sakai laughs.] At dinner we were talking about the Crogan family tree, the framework for the series and how it really came about as a fluke: drawing a pilot and then a pirate, and because they looked similar, trying to see how they might be related - an afternoon's work with a pen and a calculator setting up this whole series. Usagi's initial creation, from what I understand, is not that much different in that he, too, manifested himself in a drawing. You just happened to draw a rabbit samurai, am I right about that?
STAN SAKAI: Well, I grew up with samurai movies. Just down the street from me was the old Kapahulu theater that showed samurai movies every Saturday. I wanted to do a series inspired by the life of Miyamoto Musashi, a 17th-century samurai. I was just sketching in my sketchbook and I drew a rabbit with his ears tied up into a chomage, a samurai top-knot, and I loved the design. It was graphically striking. It was unique. So, I just kept him as a rabbit.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: What amazes me is that something that just happened to be a quick sketch, that you might have done in an afternoon or something like that, would lead to a life's work. And I feel like my thing with the family tree is not that dissimilar, and with me, I assumed that I would be able to find other types of books. Even if I had never come up with a family tree, I would have found other stories to tell. Do you feel that same way? Would you have found a different -
STAN SAKAI: Oh you know, I might have, but before Usagi I wanted to do superheroes. I grew up reading superhero comics. After drawing Usagi and Nilson, I went on a different path, into more Funny Animals.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: You've been able to work a lot of different story genres into the Usagi framework. You've got mysteries with Inspector Ishida, you've got horror stories, you've got - to some degree - romance. You've got comedy, you've got war, you've got a lot of different specific stories. With Space Usagi you have science fiction. Are there any types of stories that you've had the desire to tell that the structure of Usagi has not permitted?
STAN SAKAI: Um, Civil War.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: American Civil War?
STAN SAKAI: Yes, American Civil War. That was a passion of mine for a while. I subscribed to all of the Civil War magazines and went to battlefields whenever I was in the East.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: Have you ever thought about trying to do anything with a Civil War book, or is that just too much to add to the plate?
STAN SAKAI: That's just too much to add. I've just been really busy with Usagi. Whereas in your case, you're doing all the research with these different time periods. Crogan's March that you are working on now, with the Foreign Legion. You had to do a lot of research for that.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: The plus side is that I really love researching. The downside is that I have to do entirely new research for each book. And I can't simply build on the research that I did in the previous books. So, that becomes difficult.
STAN SAKAI: Each one's a completely different subject.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: Yeah.
STAN SAKAI: Now for Crogan's March, did you get books? Did you watch Beau Geste?
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: I watched Beau Geste. What actually made me want to do it in the first place was seeing movies like The Majestic and Secondhand Lions where there are these obvious homages to these old '30s and '40s high-adventure North African movies. I realized after watching these movies that, while, like everyone else, I recognized those homages, I was unfamiliar with any of the movies they were referencing and I didn't know where to find those '30s and '40s high-adventure movies.
Among the ones that I found was Beau Geste. And the book is one of my favorite books, hands down. It starts off very frightening. They come across this fort, and all of the people are dead, and they don't know what's going on, and it's sort of this mystery that unravels over the course of the book and the movie. But, I really loved the idea of having a horror story set within the framework of a French Foreign Legion story, which is what this book originally started out as. That was going to be my theme. And it ended up, of course, as all things do, straying in an entirely different direction, but I still have a few of those elements there.
There is a section where they are in a cave and they're getting picked off one by one and they've heard that the cave is haunted by a djinn, which is an Arabic demon or spirit, and there are other clues throughout the story that lead you to think that it may be something else. But one of things that I'm trying to do is something I learned in no small part from reading Usagi, which is that there should be no throwaway dialogue. If anything specific is mentioned it will likely lead to something else.
Reading Usagi for me is a lot like watching a detective show, in that I know to pay careful attention because if someone's name is mentioned or if someone talks about, "Oh, I have to do this, or, oh, I have to do that," that will in some way come back later on in the plot. And anytime you do that it's incredibly satisfying for me as a reader, and presumably for your other readers as well. So that's something that I am very consciously trying to do with this book. Make sure that everything talked about relates to everything else and that there are no scenes for the sake of there being that scene - just heightening that storytelling.
STAN SAKAI: Well, for me it's because I'm limited to a specific number of pages. You know, I've got to figure out what's the most important thing to put in those pages, because otherwise I could go on for much longer.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: And I wanted to talk about your introduction to publishing. You said you started out doing the fanzines, and then working with Albedo. How did that eventually lead to your doing Usagi? And at what point were you able to be a cartoonist full-time?
STAN SAKAI: After leaving the garment industry, I was doing freelance cartooning, freelance artwork. I've been very fortunate in that the first Groundthumper story was the only thing I ever had to really pitch, and by pitching I mean submitting something. After that, publishers have come to me. I'm really fortunate. A couple of issues of Albedo came out and then Kim Thompson at Fantagraphics, co-publisher at Fantagraphics, wanted to create a Funny Animal anthology. He invited myself, Josh Quagmire and Steve Gallacci to contribute to Critters. Usagi was one of the more popular characters, and spun off into his own series. We did a summer special, just to test the waters. It did well, so we went into Usagi as a regular series.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: What is Usagi's publishing schedule, currently?
STAN SAKAI: It's published by Dark Horse and I do nine or 10 issues [a year].
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: I knew it wasn't quite monthly, but I knew that it was very close.
STAN SAKAI: It takes me about five weeks to do a complete issue. That's from the writing to the finished artwork. That's a good pace for me, because it gives me time to do other projects. I still do lettering for Stan Lee on the Spider-Man Sunday newspaper strips; I do lettering for Sergio and Mark when there's any new Groo project. I also do one or two fun little comic-book works, for other publishers. I did a Hulk story for Marvel and I just finished a pin-up for a Simpsons/Futurama book, and little things for other publishers. And for me, that's a good schedule. We also do one trade-paperback collection a year. And this year I am also doing a fully painted original graphic novel, titled Usagi Yojimbo: Yokai. Yokai are the ghosts, goblins and monsters of Japanese folklore.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: You're using watercolors?
STAN SAKAI: Ink and watercolor.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: The pages that I've seen look gorgeous. Is it dealing directly with Usagi's storyline? Because it seems like it's focusing on the mythology of individual -
STAN SAKAI: Yes, the regular series and the Yokai can be read independently, but it also advances the Usagi story. There are revelations about another character named Sasuke that happen in the story that you don't need to know the background of Sasuke or Usagi though it helps to appreciate the story better.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: And you say, "stand alone" and that's one of the things that I think is strongest about Usagi. That you can - and I have, it's how I got into it in the first place - pick it up with any particular volume and you don't have to be familiar with the characters.
STAN SAKAI: Right, you can get into stories fairly quickly.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: You regularly re-insert the little asterisks with what things are, no matter how many times it's been in. It never feels forced, and you always reintroduce characters. If - is it Kitsune?
STAN SAKAI: Kitsune, yes.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: If Kitsune comes in, then you establish very early on that she is a pickpocket. If Gen comes in, you establish very early on that he's a bounty hunter. Is that intentional on your part?
STAN SAKAI: That is very intentional, because, like any book, we need new readership. Readers fall out of reading your books for some reason or another, so we always need new readers. They have to be introduced to the story and to characters as quickly as possible. The way I operate is that I do short stories that lead up to one long epic and then go back to short stories. The shorter stories are a good place for new readers to come on board, but the older readers appreciate the longer stories, with the complexity, the character development and such. That's been my plan for quite a while.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: Well, it's really nice. It's something that I think comics should do more of. It's one of the reasons that we designed the Crogan books the way that we did, so that you could pick up any one of them, so that if you enjoy that one, you might want to pick up another one. One of the things that terrifies me most, though, is: What if they like that one, and say, "Well, that's good enough." Are you familiar with the Dungeon books by Lewis Trondheim? For a long time, I only read two of them, because the other ones featured different characters and I figured I'm good with these characters and if they put out more with them, I'll read those. And it wasn't until after I put out the first Crogan's book I realized that was a potential with mine and I got very scared.
STAN SAKAI: They were like Catfoot, but -
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: Exactly. Some people - I did a signing at Free Comic Book Day, and a couple people asked if I was going to be doing other books with Catfoot. The original plan was that there would be some characters that had more than one book. The gunfighter is the right age to be a younger man during the Civil War. And the Rough Rider, you know, could, two years later, be involved in the Boxer Rebellion, and then 15 years later be involved with Pancho Villa. So, there would be a lot of situations where I could do that but one thing that I've been thinking about doing is shorter stories that are meant for introduction, to be collected in floppies, using characters that I've already researched. Because I've already researched the pirates, I could do a Catfoot story while I'm researching a future book, because one of the hardest things for me is that period of research and no output. Although I know it is important, I feel like I'm not contributing anything and that I'm just sitting around reading all day. Your research you tend to do while you're in the process of working on another book.
STAN SAKAI: Sometimes. Much of my research is done while I'm already working on another project, or it may take years to do. It took about five years to do the research and write the story for Grasscutter.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: And all of Grasscutter, all of the details in Grasscutter are based on legend and historical fact.
STAN SAKAI: It's history, yes. And actually, that's why I did so much research for Grasscutter. That's why we started putting my story notes in the back of the -
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: So they weren't in the earlier books?
STAN SAKAI: They were in some of the comic books, the Mirage comics. I did a story about the Tanabata Festival - the festival of the Weaver Star. I did a lot of research for that but I could not put all the information into the story, because it would just slow down the pacing. I put that as story notes in the back of the comic book, but it was never reprinted in the trades, which is actually going to be corrected with the new editions. People enjoyed the story notes in Grasscutter, so just put 'em in the back.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: Right. I'm still planning on putting together a sketchbook that's an annotation sort of thing, but my biggest problem is that I'll note something and file it away, but not remember where I read it, or not write down where I read it. And then it becomes increasingly problematic to try and find that reference again. Especially if it was in a library book. When I was working on Vengeance, I had a stack of library books, two-dozen tall with Post-it notes all over the place, and luckily there is a lot of information on pirates out there. Not as much on pre-1940s Tuaregs, which makes it a little bit harder to do the Foreign Legion story, but the pirate story I could just snap my fingers and the sound would echo off a pirate book. For creating those story notes, are you taking more notes in preparation for the story notes than you might otherwise have done?
STAN SAKAI: A lot of times, yeah, but most of the time, I file it away in my mind, and that's where I get into problems - did I research it, or did I just imagine it? Now, one of the stories I'm doing is about soy sauce. There is a lot of different information on the modern procedures of soy-sauce-making, but not how it was made 400 years ago.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: You've got quite a few of those, sort of little tidbits of Japanese lore. Either a tea ceremony or how ink is made or -
STAN SAKAI: I was able to participate in a couple of tea ceremonies. I was a second guest at a ceremony with a master. I was very fortunate. They answered all of my questions very nicely. It's just that sitting with my legs folded under me for an hour... [Laughs.] Trying to get up... ow! I did a story about seaweed-farming that came about because my parents had visited a seaweed farm in Japan. They mentioned it and showed me pictures they had taken.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: My parents went to Trinidad not long ago. My father is a music composer and they were performing one of his operas down there with steel drums, and so he got really excited and my mother got excited as well, thinking that Trinidad was like a Bahamas-Beach type of thing, which it's not as much. And they brought back some stories that are just begging to be used in a story. There are gangs, the same way that there are gangs in a lot of these Central American countries that still do the drug-running and the kidnapping and ransom and things like that, except that they determine who is the head gang - who is going to be paid tribute by all of the others - by these steel-drum orchestra competitions. That they spend the majority of their money buying steel drums and paying for steel-drum lessons and practice all this, and each year there is this huge festival and the winner is the top gang.
And it's just so absurd that it's just begging for some sort of story treatment. Anytime I hear stories like that... it's really hard to not try to work them into whatever I'm working on right then. What's also amazing is that a whole story can shift around one tiny factoid that you might read or hear in a book. Has that ever happened with you?
STAN SAKAI: Oh yeah. I was watching a documentary, a TV documentary on the mountains of Japan and they had one line in it saying that at the base of Mount Fuji there is a forest whose trails are so convoluted that people go in and they can't find their way out, and they also mentioned that it's a favorite place for people to commit suicide. And I thought, "Oh, that's really neat!" So I took that idea and turned it into an area in Usagi's world called the Tangled Skein, and that's where all the ghosts and goblins and haunts of Usagi's world live. He escaped to the Tangled Skein after the Battle of Adachi Plain, and he met up with one of the Yokai there.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: I know that there are some towns that are real. Are your regions and towns actual regions and towns or are they invented to suit your narrative purpose?
STAN SAKAI: Well, some are invented, and some are actual. I mentioned Sendai, which is the Northern Province of Honshu. I talked about a shortcut over the mountains in one of the earlier Usagi stories; places like that actually do exist. Of course, Edo was really the capital of Japan at that time. But, most of it is just pretty much made up. I do have a timeline of Usagi in history and his travels throughout Japan, but it's very loose in my mind.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: Are there any larger shifts using that timeline that will alter the Usagi story sometime down the road? Any larger wars coming up -
STAN SAKAI: Not really. Currently, he lives in the winter/spring of 1606. Actually, you know, it was very loose in my mind. Someone had actually figured out all of Usagi's stories, where in history his stories take place.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: It's great when other people do the work for you.
STAN SAKAI: He had matched my timeline almost perfectly! Almost to an exact month!
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: Wow.
STAN SAKAI: I have never told that. There are just hints that I've dropped, such as when Ieyasu, the first Tokugawa Shogun had stepped down a couple of years after he had become military dictator so that he could pass on the position to his son. That took place in a specific year - 1605, I think. I would drop certain hints like that, and they figured it out and put everything in a nice orderly timeline.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: I know that art evolves organically over a long process. Has anything significant changed in your writing style or approach to how to do Usagi from the early comic version of "How I Make an Usagi Comic" [The Art of Usagi Yojimbo], has anything changed since then?
STAN SAKAI: Not really. I still do a script outline and the thumbnails, which becomes my final script, then it goes to the pencils, lettering, and, finally, the inks. The only thing that's changed is that I've gotten faster - or, that I've had to get faster. I remember early on during the Fantagraphics Critters days, I did an eight-page story in one month, and I thought, "Wow, I'm really blazing! Eight full pages!" Nowadays, you can't make a living doing eight pages a month.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: Well, mine's sort of the opposite. I went from doing ridiculous amounts of pages in a day to now being lucky if I can get two or three - really spending all day working on them. I feel like that's a good thing with me, that maybe I was too haphazard initially, but it also terrifies me that if this rate of slow-down grows exponentially then my next book will take years. Which I don't want. I want them to come out yearly.
STAN SAKAI: Well that's why I need a great editor like Diana Schutz. When I'm behind on my deadlines, I would get a call from her. She reminds me of my deadlines so sweetly, but with that tinge in her voice, you know? When we scheduled Yokai, I told her I needed at least three months to finish it. She gave me two and a half. I finished it in that time, with a couple of days to spare.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: James [Lucas Jones], he won't push hard about it, but he will act increasingly exasperated as deadline time approaches. So far I haven't gone over deadline, but this will be the year to decide whether or not I do. I don't expect to, and I'm going to try really hard not to, but it means that I am going to have to do between 10 and 16 pages a week.
STAN SAKAI: Wow, that's almost a whole book for me.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: But, it's during the summer, when I'm not teaching.
STAN SAKAI: So your approach to Crogan is much different than my approach to Usagi. You do most of your work in the preliminaries. Your thumbnails are incredibly detailed. Whereas mine are little more than stick figures. In fact, a lot of my panels are left blank. I do most of the story and the artwork in the final stages.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: Well, for me, I feel like my drawing - while I love doing it - is not my foremost concern. My foremost concern is the storytelling. The majority of my energy is put towards the pacing and which shots I'm going to be using and making sure that everything reads very clearly, because... we approach black and white on the two opposite spectrums: You use a lot of hatch-work to do multiple shades of gray and different values, and I like to stick to pure black or pure white, and sometimes making those forms overlap can be tricky while having everything remain clean. I don't want to have halos around the black shapes, and things like that. So the thumbnailing process for me is where I work all of that out, because it can be challenging and I do love the other parts, but once that thumbnailing is done, it's almost like going through the motions.
STAN SAKAI: I remember reading an interview with Alfred Hitchcock. He would put so much work into the preliminaries that once his storyboard was finished he almost lost interest in the movie.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: That's why I am glad that I do enjoy drawing, because otherwise that would be really hard. We were talking about animation earlier, and that's one of the reasons why animation pre-production is so appealing, but the actual execution of it is not so much. It is that, over and over, and over.
STAN SAKAI: Because you've already done all the work -
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: You've already done the fun part, which is figuring out what's going to go where. You are able to push that fun part to the last step, which is probably pretty smart. [Laughs.] Then you never get tired of what you're working on.
STAN SAKAI: Well, my thumbnails are more for the pacing of the story and for the final script as opposed to panel composition. I do the final compositions in the pencil stage.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: I write my dialogue as I'm thumbnailing. Do you do the same thing?
STAN SAKAI: I do it too.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: I think that a lot of writer-artists tend to do that, and I know a few people who have tried to move from just being an artist to being a writer-artist and still wanting to type up the scripts, because they are so used to doing art from scripts. But I find it so much more organic and better suited to the pacing.
STAN SAKAI: I've written stories for other artists and I would give them thumbnails. That is my final script.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: Do you use the computer at all?
STAN SAKAI: I use the computer for Internet and word processing. That's about it. I've had Photoshop for about five years, but I have never installed it on my computer! [Laughs.]
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: Really? See, I feel like I work very traditionally: I still do all my lettering on the paper. Everything that you see in the book tends to be on the paper, but the computer for me has sped up what would otherwise be my process so much. I do my pencils very small, almost like very tight thumbnails, and blow them up. Before I would just ink right over that, but now I end up tightening up the pencils on top and inking those, but also, for touch-up - I tend to notice the little things when I scan in the pages to upload them to the Oni FTP server. If the dialogue in the balloon is just a smidgen too far to the left, I can just move it right over, and I can also go in those places where the black or the white has gotten smudgy, I can go in and touch those up really well.
And for coloring, it's great. I use the computer to color everything, with a Cintiq, the ones that you draw with on the screen, but I've tried doing things without the computer, and even those few little steps make such a huge impact on the way that I go through it. I would be just completely lost without it. I'm also not that keen to adapt to new technology, so I wonder if we tend to find what works for us and continue doing so, regardless of what is introduced.
STAN SAKAI: I'm completely traditional. I love the feel of the two-ply kid-finish Strathmore and everything I do is on the original artwork. From the pencils to the inks to the Wite-Out at the end.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: That's something else that I try to do, is make sure that I do all of my corrections on the paper, because I used to do them and scan them in, and then I found my originals just weren't pretty. I'd leave sections of black open, and write, "black this in" and things like that. [Sakai laughs.] It's nice to have that big row of portfolios that are labeled that have the individual art that looks the same as the art inside the book.
STAN SAKAI: I use graphite pencils, rather than blue pencils because I like to have the original artwork look as pristine as possible.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: Do you erase your graphite?
STAN SAKAI: I erase everything. That's the part I really hate! [Schweizer laughs.] I used to pay my kids 50¢ a page to erase them, but they hated it worse than I did.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: See, I'm the exact opposite; I use the blue pencil because I really want to see that process. My grandfather was a big comic-strip fan and had written Walt Kelly a letter, shortly after Pogo started, just saying that he admired the strip and thought that it a was great, and Walt Kelly, sort of as a thanks for the thank-you note, sent an original Pogo page -
STAN SAKAI: Oh, wow.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: - to my grandfather, which he gave to my father, and which we had in my house growing up. It was a perfect page in terms of which one it was, the characters and the way they were talking, but he used the blue pencil underneath and you could see all of the building of the characters and lines and in seeing that blue pencil, I knew that it didn't - I would ask my dad about it and he said, well, it doesn't reproduce when you make copies of this. Knowing that I was seeing that a cartoonist was doing what nobody else could see, I felt like that was the secret.
STAN SAKAI: You're in the loop. [Laughs.]
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: And that was the way that you were supposed to make comics, was to use these blue pencils. So even now there are hundreds of different ways that you can approach how to do it, but I think at the core I still have that "real cartoonists use blue pencils underneath" mentality, so I want to approach it that same way, because that was such a big influence on my childhood. I would get those extra-waxy Crayola pencils, the sky blue, out of the pencil boxes at school - I'd always run for that one - and then I'd try to ink on top of it with just a regular Pilot writing pen, and it would break up the lines so badly on top, but I didn't care, that was the way I wanted to do my comics. So I was glad to discover the Col-erase pencils, because they're a lot less waxy. The ink will actually lay down on top of it.
STAN SAKAI: Even for my color work, usually I do it in watercolor, as opposed to the computer.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: Did you have a lot of painting experience, prior to doing -
STAN SAKAI: - I have a fine-arts degree, but I never did watercolor, it was mainly oils and acrylics. Watercolors came later because oils and acrylics just took too long to paint, whereas with watercolors it's immediate. I can do a watercolor page painting in a day or even less. When I was working on the Yokai book, the fully painted Usagi novel, and I could do up to four pages a day. With other mediums, I just can't do that.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: Presumably, your fine-arts education has heavily influenced the way that you work on Usagi. Were there any comic programs available to you at that time, and had there been so, would you have been interested?
STAN SAKAI: [Laughs.] No. Comics were frowned upon.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: They were as well when I was an undergrad. It was really hard to do. I was a graphic-design major and the majority of my graphic-design work was very line-based illustration with hand-done text. I actually really got into hand-lettering and sound-effect type of lettering, because I really hated typography and it was my way of circumventing having to do those for assignments. All of my assignments would have hand-lettering in it - not beautiful sign-style hand-lettering - my old garish hand-lettering.
STAN SAKAI: My advanced painting teacher was an abstract expressionist, so everyone's painting had to be abstract expressionism. Anything representational was frowned upon. Comics were so lowbrow.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: Yeah, we had a class that everyone called "drawing like..." and then the teacher's name. Which wasn't the title of the class, but we were expected to. I feel like that was a great opportunity for my coming in, because I knew that I wanted to do comics, but didn't really know how. And regardless of how many good books out there there are, the McCloud stuff, the Eisner stuff, the new one by Jessica Abel [and Matt Madden], I still really wanted hands-on experience. It's hard to get that hands-on experience when you're not already working. When you're a cartoonist you can talk to other cartoonists and get feedback and things like that, but if you're just interested in being a cartoonist, it's a lot harder to break those boundaries.
STAN SAKAI: Well, nowadays there is a lot of reference on the process of making comics. Back when I was starting out they did not have that. I remember I saw my first piece of original comic art - oh, this was when I was about 20 years old, someone had bought a Paul Gulacy piece somewhere, and this was before the Internet and everything, so that was the first time I actually realized, comics are drawn bigger! [Laughter.] The original artwork is much bigger than what is printed on the page!
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: And you bring up the Internet, that's been huge for me. Even not being a particularly computer-happy person. I don't have a Facebook account, I don't do a lot of the other things, I don't have a webcomic, but just the simple fact of the Internet existing has been both a benefit to me, in terms of finding and being able to acquire comic art that I might not have otherwise found that have been very influential, but also, meeting other people at a similar stage in their career. There are people that I am now friends with, J.P. Coovert and Eleanor Davis, people like that, who I met through the Internet. It just sort of happened that we ended up living in similar areas, but I would find somebody's work on their website and really like it, and maybe send them an e-mail, and maybe get an e-mail back. You know, ostensibly the same things could have been done with letters, columns, years ago, and has - and I'm sure that that is the way that that's developed - but it's so much faster now.
STAN SAKAI: Oh, yeah, it's immediate!
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: It seems to take less time to get projects off the ground and to start garnering an audience than it used to. And I think that's one of the reasons why you see so many newcomers coming straight into the book trade. That's something else that I wanted to talk about, because for me the book market was the only real publishing strategy that we ever considered. Going to the floppies wouldn't have been financially feasible, to break the book into multiple things, because they're designed to be one story. It just made more sense to do that. You came in on the entire opposite end, where going to books wasn't feasible, and floppies were -
STAN SAKAI: Right, well, when Usagi first started going to the trades - the collections - there were no graphic-novel sections at the bookstores. However, there were trade-paperbacks sections. Trade paperbacks were really popular, with books like 101 Uses for a Dead Cat and Kliban's Cats. That's why Usagi is in that strange format. It's not as big as a graphic novel. We kind of made a little niche in the market and kept it like that.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: Trades were making me think of some of the trades that I had from the '80s, one of them being the Ninja Turtles - Laird and Eastman were contemporaries of yours. Do you find that you were more influenced by your peers and those that were immediately before you, than by people who had been putting out comics a long time previous, or is it half and half, or are you not -
STAN SAKAI: I think it's half and half. My big influence was Steve Ditko, during his Spider-Man and Dr. Strange days for Marvel.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: That's similar with me. The Spider-Man Marvel Masterworks I got as a kid and that's how I think of my action sequences - very deliberately, plotted out - you can see Spider-Man is on a wall, and then he jumps to the floor, and then he jumps up to the ceiling, and there is a very clear progression from panel to panel as to what's happening. Which is sort of the opposite of Kirby, which sets the move for an action sequence and gives you the idea for it, but it's much less -
STAN SAKAI: It's more heavy on the power and the action. Ditko was very cinematic, and you could actually see a progression in his moves. It was very nice. Like I said, Ditko was my first comic-book influence. Later on, it became Kirby, even still, later on; it was the European books. Sergio Aragonés is a big influence. Not so much as a style, but as the approach to creating comics. He's the one who actually pushed into me to do my research. Even though Groo is a broad humor comic, he does a lot of research. If you look at the ships before Groo sinks them, you can see the rigging and everything. You can actually build a ship just from his design.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: He called me out on my rigging, looking at it. He said, "You don't have nearly enough!" To be fair, the rigging that's there, I think is right, but I did leave off all the things on the sides, so that you can see through it. It's hard to do all those lines with a brush, it's just too much. But, yeah, his ships are just gorgeous. And his battle sequences are amazing! I can't even comprehend how to do those.
STAN SAKAI: Actually there was one sequence in my first Nilson Groundthumper story, where Nilson was fighting a monster, and it flowed through about half a dozen panels. And Sergio acted it out just to make sure everything was right, even the way the hand rests on the staff and everything.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: I do that. It'll probably change eventually, but anytime I'd have any sword-fighting scenes I'd want them to be right. I'd have my yardstick, and I'd fling it behind and move it forward, and think, "OK, would I lunge with my left leg or my right leg?" I don't know, I have to get up and act out the action sequences to try and get them to make sure that they work.
STAN SAKAI: Right, right. You have to do that.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: What were some of the other influences? It's mostly stuff that you read as a kid and then -
STAN SAKAI: Uhh...
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: The Europeans, are they the ones that -
STAN SAKAI: The European stuff. My favorite samurai artist, or artist of the samurai genre, is a Belgian named Michetz. He does a series called Kogaratsu, and it's just wonderful. He does so much research on his artwork, it's phenomenal. Azpiri - I love the Spanish artist Azpiri's painted work, he has beautiful use of colors.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: Oh, if I were to work in color, the color that captures me more than anything else - have you seen the Beladone books?
STAN SAKAI: Yes, yes. I have those in French.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: I have those in French, as well. I love them as well. His palette is just perfect. It reminds me a lot of Franco Zeffirelli, both in his movies, but also in his operas. I saw a production of La Bohème that had that same palette. All warms with occasional spots of brilliant reds, or blues or golds. And then the rest being this mild sepia that is just absolutely fantastic. So, I look t0 the Europeans for color a lot, but so often they all work in four-color, and so the ink style is so much different than what I can ever use.
STAN SAKAI: You're right.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: First Second just put out Bourbon Island 1730 and it was difficult for me to read at first, because I'm so used to seeing [Lewis Trondheim's] work in color and he still approached it with that, or, it seemed to me that he still approached it with that same sensibility, only it being black and white. It was harder for me to tell what was going on in the first few pages. But there's that looseness to it that I feel, or sparseness to it, I guess - sparseness to the line-weight - that I never feel I can work into my own comics. And so often when I'm reading comics, I'm not reading them as much to enjoy them, although I do enjoy them, but to see what I can learn from them. And that's the hardest thing, when I find something that I love, but can't use.
STAN SAKAI: Since we're talking about the early days, one of the biggest advantages for me was timing. Albedo came out just about the same time that the Ninja Turtles came out. We are both celebrating our 25th anniversary. The Ninja Turtles sparked that huge black-and-white explosion in the '80s. Usagi was at the beginning of it, and the Turtles pretty much carried Usagi along. They were a big influence on Usagi's success. There were a lot more black-and-white books that came along after that that just disappeared.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: The black-and-white explosion - the readers that brought in, do you think that they were looking for a different type of comic than what was existing?
STAN SAKAI: You know, there were two different types of comic-book buyers during the black-and-white explosion. Some were the people who really enjoyed the comic books, and there are the others - speculators, hoping that something they'd buy would turn out to be the new Ninja Turtles. But, like I said, even though there were a lot of good black-and-white books at that time, most of them just disappeared. I think because Usagi was at the beginning of the black and white craze that it stood out, and that's one of the big reasons why it's still around.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: Were there any concerns about doing things in black and white before it had been proven to be commercially viable?
STAN SAKAI: You know, I remember at the first San Diego con that we had copies of Albedo #2; we could not give away copies. But the next year they were going for $100!
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: Was it because it was in black and white?
STAN SAKAI: Because they were black and white. Back then there was just a handful of black-and-white books. There was ElfQuest, Cerebus, Love and Rockets.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: Love and Rockets, was that even going on then?
STAN SAKAI: That was going on, yes. And Matt Wagner's Grendel. That's about it. And the Turtles, of course.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: I'm trying to think of what's comparable to that sort of publishing now, because there doesn't seem to be anything that is comparable. We've got webcomics and we've got minicomics.
STAN SAKAI: Nowadays, it's easier to be noticed; however, it's harder to be published, because print books just do not sell as much. Publishers can't afford to risk a comic book for a newcomer. But, it's difficult to invest money in a full-blown trade. In your case you started out with a graphic novel.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: I did. I was really lucky. But I had done a few minicomics for the love of doing them and to have stuff to trade. Minicomics are invariably a money-loser. You almost never make back what you spent printing them up. And definitely not the more ornate ones that require die-cutting and things like that, just because of the time involved. I put together for SPX a couple of years ago a 300-page rhyming minicomic that was four perfect-bound little volumes, each the size of a business card that slipped into this slipcase that had this fold-over flap and all these other things, and each piece of paper was cut to make 28 pages. Each one took about six hours to assemble. In terms of time management, that's about the worst thing you can do as a cartoonist, is to spend all of your time working on these.
But, I think that those, from what I've seen, tend to create validity for the artists that are doing them to the other cartoonists their age. It shows that they're serious about what they're doing. That they're willing to put in that legwork. And I think to some degree that shows to the publishers as well. Not necessarily for the ornate working, but the editors that I know, most of them want to see that people finish things. They're not going to offer a book based on a strong portfolio, they want to see if you can finish something. Even if that something is an eight-page comic that you put together yourself, the simple act of completion is such an important step to get published these days.
STAN SAKAI: The best thing you can do is leave something with a publisher - even if it is a minicomic. It gives an air of professionalism or legitimacy to it.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: It does. And I think it gives you as an artist a sense of professionalism. You talked about finishing that eight-page Albedo story and how that was this huge feat, and I felt the same way when I finished my first mini, because I had done tons and tons and tons of comic pages that were roughly set in the middle of my story and ended well before the end of my story. I wanted to draw this particular action sequence or capture this conversation or stuff like that, practicing more that anything else. But I'd never really completed a story, and so the first story that I did after I decided I wanted to be a cartoonist gave me the confidence to do a 12-page story, and then a 24-page story and then a 300-page rhyming minicomic.
And all of those made me feel prepared to tackle this larger historical project because it was something that I knew I wanted to do eventually, but was also sort of terrified of. It was very daunting in its scale. It's something that now I feel very confident about. I hope that it'll be good and I'll do everything that I can that it'll be good, but I know that I can get it done, which is something that I didn't know a few years ago.
STAN SAKAI: Well, there is that wondering, because like me, you do everything yourself. My editor, Diana, doesn't see the story until she gets the finished project, so sometimes I wonder if the story is any good. There was just one case, where I turned in a story and I wrote a note saying, "Read this as soon as you get it. I want your input on this." My first editor at Dark Horse was Jamie Rich, and he was great, because as soon as he'd receive a package from me, he'd read it, call me, and I'd have his input immediately.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: Were there ever any situations where you had to change anything?
STAN SAKAI: Just once when I was doing Usagi for Fantagraphics. One panel had Usagi cutting a guy's head open. There were brains flying out. There was blood spurting out of his ears -
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: I noticed that the blood is a lot less cartoony in the early books.
STAN SAKAI: Yeah. Kim [Thompson], my editor, called me and said, "This might be a little extreme," but even before he called me, I had shown it to my wife Sharon, and she said, "It's a bit too much." By the time Kim called me on it, it had already been changed.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: The way you talk about sending those in, that's similar to mine, I think. James didn't see the book until I gave him the whole thing.
STAN SAKAI: Yeah.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: Without the framing sequence [a modern dad telling his kids about their ancestors]... I knew I was going to do the framing sequence, but I hadn't written it yet. And it's sort of the same thing now. He's coming to Atlanta in about a week or so, and so I'll show him what I have so far, but I doubt he'll have the time to actually sit and read it. I think that'll be once it's completely done. My hope is that I do a good enough job that he doesn't insist on any changes, because one of the bad sides about doing everything yourself is that you plan it to fit in certain parameters, and you really can't change much. You can't just get rid of a panel or add a panel without changing the entire book, which is all but impossible. It's not like a novel where you can add a line or take out a line or something like that. It's structured in a way that makes editing extraordinarily difficult, at least for me.
STAN SAKAI: Where do you see the future of book publishing going?
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: I'd like to see more books aimed at kids, or friendly for kids. Part of my presentation tomorrow is on comics that are actually appropriate for all ages. Comics aimed at kids, but that are palatable to middle-schoolers or to high-schoolers and to adults.
STAN SAKAI: You have an Eisner nomination for Best Graphic Novel for Tweens, is it?
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: Yes. Tweens and teens. And the way that I'm approaching mine is what I always want to see. I write them for adults, but I make sure there is nothing in them that would prohibit kids from reading them. I think that kids are smart. They're a lot smarter than people give them credit for, and so because it's pirates, or it's a ninja, or something like that, in theory, the subject matter will latch them in and then I hope that the story will be enough for them to make it through, but I'm trying to write for adults so that whoever picks it up will enjoy it.
But there are a number of books out there that are like that. Aaron Renier's Spiral Bound is one of my favorites that I think carries across. Are you familiar with Eleanor Davis's work? She's done a few things for Mome, and she did that kid's book Stinky, but she's got a new book coming out called The Secret Science Alliance that is full-color and it's absolutely gorgeous, but I think that it's got the potential to be one of those books that's going to suck in a lot more kid readers, the way that Bone did. And the way that any number of other titles are, when they get into situations where they can be in book fairs and things like that.
My thought and my hope is that those readers will continue to read comics, and will read our comics so that we can make a living. That's the biggest thing: that, for years, kids were, to some degree, neglected, just by the industry at large. And I think we're starting to see a big shift away from that, with companies like First Second and Scholastic's line and things like that. I think that we're going to continue to see a shift towards all ages. Again, not just kids, but to where kids are included in the equation in a way that they weren't.
My generation of cartoonists, we don't really have any battles to fight. For so long people were trying to focus that comics can be literature and comics can be a valid art form, that now it seems that the majority of people tend to agree. Not everybody. I still have relatives, "Are you drawing Batman?" and stuff like that. At least most of the people who I know that are around my age that are making comics really don't feel the need to prove themselves or create stories that push the boundaries; they seem to be more just about the fact that they're telling stories - that they're working in comics. There isn't an underlying agenda that I think a lot of the earlier comics people had to deal with because there wasn't that artistic recognition, so thanks to you guys for fighting those battles for us!
STAN SAKAI: You write adult stories that kids can enjoy. For me, I don't write to adults and I don't write to kids. The stories I write are the stories I would like to read.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: Well, when I say adults and kids, I write for what I would want to read and for what I would have wanted to read when I was a kid. I say it's for other kids so that they won't feel left out. But that's the real joy of cartooning, that you do get to focus on these things that you love. And you get to tell stories about whatever! You feel like doing a Godzilla story, you draw him in there! You know, it's really nice to have that freedom to basically do whatever you want, and to tell these stories. You may never have the chance to helm a Godzilla movie.
STAN SAKAI: Right, exactly. I've been very fortunate. My publishers have always granted me a lot of leeway. And basically I just turn in the work, and they publish it.
CHRIS SCHWEIZER: Yeah, it's a great gig!