2009 has witnessed the launch of the VIZ Signature IKKI online magazine. So…what is IKKI anyway? If you’ve asked yourself that question, you’re not alone! Even I, the self-proclaimed “Level 50 IKKI reader,” have not yet found the answer for it. So I went straight to the original source, the ultra-genius editor in chief of IKKI, Hideki Egami, and asked him about the roots of IKKI. What makes him an ultra-genius? Read on and find out!
–Misaki “Slave of Manga” Kido
The IKKI UNDERGROUND is your fastest connection between Japan and America's Manga Evolution. For easy travel and trip planning, access Transit Map from here.
M: So tell us what IKKI is all about and what its significance is.
E: When IKKI was about to be launched as Big Comic Spirits Special Issue, we faced so many obstacles, mostly trademark issues in coming up with a name for the magazine. The deadline was looming and I was getting pretty desperate. So, as a last resort, I came up with a plan to devise a name from ideas submitted by readers.
M: Are you serious?
This ad was an announcement soliciting the public for ideas for the name of the new magazine in exchange for a $10,000 reward. Right underneath the reward, there was a list of “rejected names to avoid due to various circumstances”. This was mostly due to copyright and legal reasons. On the list of rejected names was PULP.
E: It’s true. We already had an ad ready for it. The ad was to nudge the audience by saying, “Look! What you can come up with is going to be the name of the new magazine! Aren’t you excited?!” But then when my boss at the time found out what I was planning, he yelled at me, “What the hell are you thinking, letting the readers decide the name of the your magazine!” and “This is a completely preposterous thing to do as an editor!”
M: [Laughs.] Right off the bat, you were already under pressure!
E: Suddenly, instead of running that ad, we had to make another ad that announced the name of the new magazine. So in the middle of the night I went to Sobue-san, the designer who worked on the overall design concept of IKKI, and asked him to change the ad. But we didn’t know what, exactly, we should change it to. We racked our brains, trying every combination of letters. Then suddenly we both thought of “IKKI.” It was a word with several possible good meanings, it had a nice ring to it, and the copyright was clear, so we just had to believe it was the right one.
Hold on a second. Didn’t you just look at this image? No no, look at it carefully. This was an announcement incorporating the magazine name IKKI.
M: So you just came up with the name freestyle?
E: Yes, but in the end I’m so glad we went with IKKI. There are so many possible meanings and also a certain inevitability to the word. I think because I was struggling so hard with it, maybe god was like, “Okay, you earned it this time,” and gave me the name.
M: Like the pieces of a puzzle coming together?
E: This is a dumb analogy, but I remember back when I was in elementary school there was this puzzle that consisted of odd geometric shapes that you had to put together to create a perfect square. I’m not very good at this kind of thinking, so once I took the pieces out of the box I could never put them back together.
M: Never?
E: Never. There were basic instructions on the back of the box so you could at least put the pieces together if you followed the directions. Also on the box was a tagline: “Devised by the calculations of a super computer, there are ten thousand possible combinations for this puzzle!” And I couldn’t even come up a single combination! So I remember thinking to myself that that meant there were ten thousand possible solutions that I gave up on. This is something that has stuck with me ever since. I think even for manga, there has to be ten thousand other ways to do it.
M: There’s got to be a super computer by now that could calculate the remaining possibilities of manga. [Both laugh.]
E: I’d seriously like a computer to calculate that for me. There’s got to be at least that many solutions to manga that god has already planned out.
The very first issue of Gekkan IKKI.
M: Tell us about the meaning of the IKKI tagline, “Comics are at the dawn of a new era.”
E: We’ve been using that tagline since the launch of the magazine. By the time IKKI was launched, manga was already in decline.
M: Wow, that’s depressing…
E: It’s true. In general terms, both the creativity of the mangaka and the sales of manga magazines had already hit their peaks. We all felt like we’d tried everything already, that everything was a remake of everything else. It felt like that there wasn’t anything completely original anymore in any field of creative endeavor.
M: In movies, music, fashion…
E: Yeah, I really wanted to prove that wrong. Let’s say in a hundred or two hundred years from now, we’re looking at history textbook from the 22nd century. Under the section on 20th-century culture maybe there’s a line or two about “the birth of manga.” Maybe there might be a little more detail and it’d include names like Osamu Tezuka, Taiyo Matsumoto, and Katsuhiro Otomo.
M: Yeah!
Manga Hall of Fameers.
E: When I think about it like that, it almost seems as if only a really short period of time has elapsed in terms of the evolution of manga, that there will be more and more mangaka in the future who could be right up there next to Tezuka.
M: So in a technological analogy, it’s like we’re still only at the phase when Edison invented a light bulb.
E: [Laughs.] Right. It would be far too conceited to think we’ve already seen it all or that everything has been done. We are still at the beginning of manga, we’re at still the dawn of a new era.
M: Tell me what you know about PULP
E: My understanding of PULP is that Narita completely took advantage of the freedom afforded by making manga in America and put together a high-power list of his favorite stuff. And as happy I was to see the works of the creators I have worked with like Taiyo Matsumoto, Naoki Yamamoto, Saruman, and Toyokazu Matsunaga getting published in the States, I was also worried about it.
In 2007, IKKI serialized Saruman 2.0, which is the sequel series to Even a Monkey Can Draw Manga, published in the U.S. by VIZ.
M: PULP did have a lot of mangaka in common with IKKI.
E: The more I hear about it, the more I realize that PULP opened the way for IKKI to be accepted in America, that it was a gateway to manga for a lot of creatively minded people.
M: And a lot of people in the prison system.
[Both laugh.]
E: …So it did reach a “wide” audience. Narita may not realize it himself, but PULP definitely did accomplish its mission. The work of those PULP creators even spread to different regions of the world. Last year, when I went to book fairs in Spain and Brazil, the local people there mentioned about it to me, and they appreciate IKKI there too. That really encouraged me to be engaged in the sigikki.com project.
M: People who got into manga through PULP now are creating things themselves. You may not realize this yourself, but that’s because most of the manga in IKKI speaks to certain common feelings we all possess regardless of our background or where we’re from.
E: I’m glad to hear that.
M: PULP was like a Bizarro figure to IKKI. IKKI is really mellow on Ero-Guro, which I think was shocking to some people and also conveyed the message that this was a new genre of seinen manga.
E: Yeah, sure. I do have Ero-Guro in me though.
M: I got it in me too.
E: Humans by nature loves scandalous things. I have those moments in the middle of the night when I’ll walk into a convenience store and read a trashy tabloid. At that moment, I do enjoy reading about somebody else’s misfortune, although it’s not a great feeling. I won’t deny that.
M: Right.
E: But I’ll also go to the art book section in ABC in the middle of the night, and I enjoy that too in a different kind of a way. I definitely feel a certain kind of passion for and comfort in it. Then of course I could be watching porn in the middle of the night and I’d be happy with that too.
M: [Laughs.]
E: I think everybody has both sides to them.
M: Like a mode?
E: Yeah, like a mode. More specifically, I think of it as like having different aspects of the self on different shelves. With IKKI, I wanted to create something that belongs on that very top shelf inside of people. I wanted to make a magazine that stimulates the highest sentiments that a person could feel. It’s not about gender or age group, because everyone has these feelings in them.
M: I hope many readers in the States try to find these “shelves” in themselves. That’s totally the real way to enjoy manga.
E: I’m really curious as to how IKKI will be received by readers in other countries. I am definitely optimistic about it.
M: Considering IKKI’s generosity in providing the content for free online, it better be a fair reception! At least on the American side.
E: IKKI was actually the first manga magazine from Shogakukan to start doing comics in digital format. In the files themselves, the text and art are separated into different layers. So, it’s easier to localize the series into another language. I’m totally counting on the English versions of the IKKI series, because English is now the “universal language.” Many many more people will now be able to read IKKI comics.
M: Would it be too crazy to make a single collective network to adapt IKKI comics into multiple languages?
E: I don’t think that’s crazy at all. If IKKI were to invade Europe next, we would localize it into ten languages for them. It would be really difficult to make that happen on paper, due to be both logistic and cost reasons, but digitally it could be done with minimum risk, and on a single site. Yea, we should do more of this.
M: Make it like Wikipedia and post IKKI in twenty-eight languages.
E: That’s just straight crazy. [Laughs.] But if so, a certain boy in a certain village in a certain continent could stumble onto IKKI comics on the web. He reads it, digests it, and it matures in him. He would have the potential to come up with something IKKI. That will be an original IKKI content from another country. It will be a manga that no one has ever seen before. I’m just dying to come across something that makes me say “Why didn’t I think of that?”
M: Wow, that would be a hugely ambitious plan. Is that what you had in your mind when you said “IKKI Invasion”? Can I really believe this too?
E: Sure. There are a lot of obstacles in reality, but what am I really thinking of is as simple as that.
M: So, any tips on how to make it come true?
E: Well, not too long ago I was watched Shine a Light, and that reminded me of this quote of Keith’s that I read about fifteen years ago. A reporter asked him something like, “What does it take to be like you?” Keith being Keith—that is, a much better talker than Mick —answered, “Stop trying to be like me.” In other words, to be like Keith, you can’t be like Keith. I want people out there to read IKKI in order to get inspired to create something brand new, not to become an IKKI look-alike. Be ready to make an entire genre yourself. Keep on digging underground to a whole new level even if you don’t know what you’ll find there.
M: IKKI invading America is like phase one. I want IKKI to get to people who don’t even know the word “manga.” Manga only means comics anyway.
E: I really hope so too.
Thank you for choosing to ride the IKKI UNDERGROUND.
Hideki Egami
Born in 1958, Hideki Egami is the founding editor in chief of Shogakukan’s Monthly IKKI magazine. Starting with his tenure as an editor at Big Comic Spirits magazine, he has worked with such prominent creators such as Taiyo Matsumoto, Naoki Urasawa, Naoki Yamamoto, and Koji Aihara and Kentaro Takekuma. He established IKKI in 2003 because, in his words, “As weekly magazines are becoming the standard of seinen manga, there are more creators who want to produce their works with the intensity and time that a weekly magazine cannot offer.” In addition to being one of the most influential editors in the field of contemporary manga, he is a die-hard trainspotter.
