Furuya Usumaru
X Inio Asano

In my absence, a great blog sprung up called Mangabrog, the proprietor of which has been translating Japanese-language interviews with manga into English for us poor non-Japanese-reading fans. Truly, God’s Work.

I’ve now availed myself of all of the site’s treasures, but I gotta say I loved this just-posted interview between Furuya Usamaru (Lychee Light Club, Genkaku Picasso) and Inio Asano (Solanin, Nijigahara Holograph) from Erotics F magazine volume 79.  Here’s a great bit:

Asano: If you were to ask me what my aim has been with the manga I’ve made up until now, I’d say that I’ve inevitably been making stuff that I myself like — but since I imagine there are a lot of people like me, I figured I could count on there being a decent number of people out there who’ll be able to “get” my manga. The problem, though, is if my readers are people are like me, and I don’t really like people who are similar to me, then that means that I dislike my readers.

Furuya: They do say that people tend to dislike people similar to themselves.

Asano: That’s what it is—it’s hard to like someone when you can see through them like that. I understand the reason people read my manga, what they like about it and what they’re going to eventually dislike about it, so I just can’t fully accept my readers. Hence my urge to mess with them.

The whole interview is fantastic–it’s very honest, and goes into great detail on the creative side of things too.

As for the rest of the site, I’m absolutely loving the two Taiyo Matsumoto interviews that are there, two more interviews with Asano, Daisuke Igarashi, Hiroki Samura, the dude who does Gantz… haha. It’s an awesome site that seems to exist solely for me to enjoy, so I hope you’ll make it more-real by sharing it with me.

http://mangabrog.wordpress.com/

– Chris

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