Timothy Lehmann

This book contains a great series of interviews with various manga-ka, including in-depth conversations about their inspiration, processes, views on current manga, etc. There are also great pictures of their work spaces, and notes on what kind of tools they use, and even how many pages they usually produce a month/week/whatever. What I liked both most and least, though, were the reprints of example pages from each of the artists. They were reprinted beautifully, some in full page spreads, and drawn from the beginning, middle, and current phases of each manga-ka's career, but all but one of them were in the original Japanese. For the pages shown within the interviews, this wasn't such a problem, because the author included contextualizing captions with each page or set of pages, but there is a stunning 10 page one-shot at the end of the book, which unfortunately many readers will completely not understand, because it was left in the original, without any indication of what's being said. For those of us obsessed with Japan enough to have learned the language, this isn't a problem, per se, but since this book is manifestly an attempt to introduce manga to a wider English-speaking audience, and since the author takes the time to explain several Japanese customs and terms elsewhere in the book, a translation would have been nice. That being said, the book does cover a wide range of manga-ka, men and women, older and younger, of a variety of styles, and does a good job of giving each artist their own space within the book, even though many of the questions are similar for each one of them. I heartily recommend it, especially if you're looking to break out of your manga-reading rut~… (meer)