A manga on Darwin and his theory of evolution
It was a wonderful turn of events that Otsuka-san from Kodansha Scientific had contacted me, because that allowed for a very natural transition to manga. I had already resigned myself to having an awkward and bumpy transition, because my background is very academic and in a totally unrelated field (I went to Harvard for college and MIT for a Ph. D. in physics). But it ended up that my science background would be what would make Otsuka-san give me a try after reading about me in the paper. On the surface it might seem like he’s crazy for picking up a person with no experience, but I’m grateful that he took that risk.
So when Otsuka-san gave me the reins to the project, I suggested that we make a manga about Darwin and his theory of evolution. I chose this because I remembered a conversation I had decades ago with my grandfather (a chemistry professor) who said that there are four great classic works in science. There’s the Traité Elémentaire de Chimie by Lavoisier, the Principia by Newton, The Origin of Species by Darwin, and...I forgot what the fourth is. Oh well, anyway, I love biology and thought that’d be a cool topic.
And so we began that project.
I was already OK at drawing, but when you actually sit down and try to make manga as a beginner, you realize how little you know and get stuck on pretty much everything. How do you organize the manga frames, and how does the choice of their contents change the reader’s experience? What kind of style do I want to draw this in? What about the tone of speech of the various characters? What about the period costumes? How do I draw this and that? What kind of character designs would be appropriate? Etc., etc. Lots of considerations.
There were some subtle but practical considerations too. If you’ve ever read manga or comics, you’ve probably noticed that in some long running series, the mangaka’s drawing style may evolve due to changes in his habits or taste. Sometimes you see characters getting shorter, probably because it allows the mangaka to more easily fit them in the frames and fully articulate expressions using the entire body (this happened in Dr. Slump and Orewa Teppei). Well, in my case, I knew I’d improve over the course of 220 pages, so I decided to start working from somewhere in the middle of the book. That way, people don’t have to get shocked with my worst work on the first page.
In any case, this first project took a bit over four years to complete. One of the reasons was that I had never written anything in Japanese other than letters to my relatives when I was a kid. The book was also about Darwin’s biography mixed in with some history and modern scientific concepts and facts, so researching the content and deciding what to use from the sea of material took extra time.
But my manga skills did improve a lot because of these struggles. At the beginning, character designs took weeks until I came up with something satisfactory, but near the end, I could look at a portrait and caricaturize it on the spot. The first page I sent to my editor took an entire week to complete, but by the end of the project, I remember once finishing 8 pages in 6 days (and that's with a regular day job).
Someday, I hope to be able to make images appear by willing them into existence. I think I still have a ways to go...
In later posts, I’ll talk about how I went about creating this manga book and how my editor and I managed to work together despite being on opposite sides of the earth.
So when Otsuka-san gave me the reins to the project, I suggested that we make a manga about Darwin and his theory of evolution. I chose this because I remembered a conversation I had decades ago with my grandfather (a chemistry professor) who said that there are four great classic works in science. There’s the Traité Elémentaire de Chimie by Lavoisier, the Principia by Newton, The Origin of Species by Darwin, and...I forgot what the fourth is. Oh well, anyway, I love biology and thought that’d be a cool topic.
And so we began that project.
I was already OK at drawing, but when you actually sit down and try to make manga as a beginner, you realize how little you know and get stuck on pretty much everything. How do you organize the manga frames, and how does the choice of their contents change the reader’s experience? What kind of style do I want to draw this in? What about the tone of speech of the various characters? What about the period costumes? How do I draw this and that? What kind of character designs would be appropriate? Etc., etc. Lots of considerations.
There were some subtle but practical considerations too. If you’ve ever read manga or comics, you’ve probably noticed that in some long running series, the mangaka’s drawing style may evolve due to changes in his habits or taste. Sometimes you see characters getting shorter, probably because it allows the mangaka to more easily fit them in the frames and fully articulate expressions using the entire body (this happened in Dr. Slump and Orewa Teppei). Well, in my case, I knew I’d improve over the course of 220 pages, so I decided to start working from somewhere in the middle of the book. That way, people don’t have to get shocked with my worst work on the first page.
In any case, this first project took a bit over four years to complete. One of the reasons was that I had never written anything in Japanese other than letters to my relatives when I was a kid. The book was also about Darwin’s biography mixed in with some history and modern scientific concepts and facts, so researching the content and deciding what to use from the sea of material took extra time.
But my manga skills did improve a lot because of these struggles. At the beginning, character designs took weeks until I came up with something satisfactory, but near the end, I could look at a portrait and caricaturize it on the spot. The first page I sent to my editor took an entire week to complete, but by the end of the project, I remember once finishing 8 pages in 6 days (and that's with a regular day job).
Someday, I hope to be able to make images appear by willing them into existence. I think I still have a ways to go...
In later posts, I’ll talk about how I went about creating this manga book and how my editor and I managed to work together despite being on opposite sides of the earth.
posted by Kaz at 12:00 AM
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