INSIDE VERTICAL WITH YANI MENTZAS

[MattBrady]

by Michael Lorah

Somewhere in the history of comics, the superhero came to dominate the genre. For better or worse, the perception of many readers, inside and outside the industry, is that there is nothing more to comics than 4-color adventures of Alpha Males solving problems with their fists (not that there’s anything wrong with such comics). It’s a completely incorrect belief, but it exists nonetheless.

In the last ten years, the manga boom has begun to establish a misplaced prejudice about manga in America. It’s all big eyes, speedlines and silly fantasy shojo (girl’s stories) for teenage girls. Well put your misconceptions in your back pocket, because Vertical, Inc. is out to show the adult side of Japan’s most popular export.

Here to talk with us is Yani Mentzas, Editorial Director and Executive Vice President of Vertical.

NRAMA: Mr. Mentzas, Vertical has been around for about six years now, correct?

Yani Mentzas: Correct. We were founded in 2001. After a two-year incubation period—securing funding, acquiring rights, finding a distributor, hiring Mr. Chip Kidd to be our designer, commissioning translations, etc.—our first book came out in April 2003. That was Koji Suzuki’s Ring. In the fall of 2003, we began bringing out Tezuka’s Buddha. We published a total of ten titles in that debut year.

NRAMA: Hiroki Sakai, Vertical’s founder, had a long history as a book editor in Japan. Was he involved with manga then?

YM: No. He was an editor for the book publishing division of Nikkei, the company that publishes the Japanese counterpart of The Wall Street Journal. He mainly edited business books, including translations of US works. Japanese publishing being the tight community that it is, he was well connected with fiction editors at other houses and novelists. But manga people don’t move in the same circles.

NRAMA: When he emigrated to the US and formed Vertical in 2001, what were his goals for the company?

YM: Actually, Mr. Sakai moved to the US in 1998, and what he set up was a literary agency. It later morphed into a publisher and changed its name to Vertical. My joining the company was the direct reason for that transition. The literary agency’s strategy was to bring over Japanese children’s books, especially picture books. When my presence added an English-editing capacity to the company, we became a publisher with a focus on adult trade fiction.

NRAMA: And how have they evolved since you came aboard?

YM: The goals themselves haven’t really changed since we started anew as a full-fledged publisher. From the beginning, the idea was to publish mainly contemporary fiction, with manga, nonfiction, and miscellanies thrown into the mix. What’s changed is that we’re better funded today than when we started out and can afford to put out more of the titles that we deem worthy of bringing over to the US.

NRAMA: In the last few years, you’ve begun to translate and publish several Osamu Tezuka books, Buddha, Ode to Kirihito and upcoming Apollo’s Song. Are you seeing more fan reaction and sales as a result?

YM: As I noted above, Tezuka was part of our lineup from the get-go. In fact, our plan to publish Buddha was one of the reasons why Mr. Kidd, the design star, agreed to become our Art Director. One of Vertical’s founding ideas was to publish newly translated Tezuka on a regular basis. Tezuka Productions, however, made it very clear to us that we wouldn’t be acquiring any more titles from them until we proved ourselves with Buddha. Thankfully, the series did well, so we were permitted to publish more of the master. In terms of sales, the first volume of Buddha sold roughly the same amount as the first book of the Ring trilogy, the other flagship title of our debut year.

NRAMA: Because of his work in animation and on Astro Boy, Tezuka is frequently called “the Disney of Japan,” but I’ve recently heard him referred to as “the (Will) Eisner of Japan.” Having looked over the range of material that he produced (estimated over 170,000 pages of comics alone), I don’t think that either description truly does his career justice. What are your thoughts on Tezuka’s place in Japanese, and American, culture?

YM: In my opinion, Osamu Tezuka was the most important Japanese artist of the latter half of the twentieth century, regardless of medium. (For the first half, it’s novelist Soseki Natsume, if you ask me.) Of all of Tezuka’s many strengths, I find the most significant to be his ethical sensibility. There’s a Jesuit boast that goes something like, “Give us a child when he’s eight and we’ll have him for the rest of his life.” Well, Tezuka had me when I was a kid, and he still has me (I hope). Sometimes I regret that he’s not around to see how well he’s being received in the US these days.

NRAMA: In addition to Tezuka, can you give us a brief overview of some of the other manga authors you’re publishing?

YM: Let me just tell you about Keiko Takemiya; the rest is still trade-secret territory. Like Tezuka, the manga god, Takemiya isn’t just a great artist but a foundational one. Just as Tezuka invented manga as we know it, Takemiya invented shojo manga as we know it, together with a handful of other talented women. We’ve just started publishing To Terra…, and this fall we’ll follow up with Andromeda Stories. Both are Sci-Fi tales that appeared in an all-star comics ‘zine that was concurrently serializing Tezuka’s Phoenix. I particularly admire these two Takemiya masterpieces because they successfully fuse the shojo manga style with a shonen manga plot. If the word “shemale” didn’t mean something else, you might call me a shemale-manga lover.

NRAMA: With the swelling of Young Adult/Tween manga sales, why did Vertical choose to push into the more challenging adult-oriented manga market?

YM: As a publisher whose main focus is adult trade fiction, our target demographic in general is older. Be it manga or novels, we feel that popular Japanese culture isn’t just for kids. In the long run, the adult market needs to be cracked or we’ll find ourselves in a ghetto, perhaps sizeable, but in the end stunting. Hence our costlier-to-produce flipped editions of Tezuka. The supply and demand issue can sometimes appear to be a chicken-and-egg situation: since adult readers aren’t there, adult works aren’t published, and since adult works aren’t published, there aren’t adult readers. But in the end I’d beg to differ with that characterization. You publish them. That’s where it begins.

NRAMA: Absolutely true, but has it been difficult to overcome some of the stereotypes that have cropped up regarding manga?

YM: Buddha received a lot of attention from the mainstream press. I can’t say this for sure, but I think it’s the all-time No. 1 manga release in terms of the quantity and quality of reviews garnered from general venues. Buddha was also lauded by the comics (as opposed to manga) community. Everywhere, I’ve seen more sophistication than stereotyping, and we’ll continue to try to reach the widest possible audience for our manga authors, especially Teuzka.

NRAMA: Which areas do you hope to see Vertical growing into in the future?

YM: We’ll certainly increase our manga output. We’d like to get in on some of that YA/Tween action without slowing our pace of classic manga releases. The teen manga market is awfully crowded right now, but hopefully, the high production quality and relatively wide reach of our past releases will help persuade some Japanese player to give us a try, like Tezuka Productions did five years ago. We are looking to launch a manga imprint in the summer of 2008—how many of those titles will have Cartoon Network tie-ins? Preferably more than zero.

I’d like to say to all fans: thank you so much for supporting Vertical.

[skaly]

Vertical has been doing some excellent work. Looking forward to more quality manga like Buddha and Ode to Kirihito coming to the U.S.

[Illustr8r]

THIS is the outfit that SHOULD have published "Lupin III" in the US...

If they bring over "The Rose Of Versailles" or "The Chef" I'll love 'em forever.

[Chuy]

When I saw the To Terra (I thought it was Towards the Terra?) manga at the bookstore I almost had a cow ... I never thought that book would ever make it to the states ... give us more Takemiya please ...