Here it is, folks, the VIZ invite-only, press-only event revolving around Stan Lee and his project with Shaman King’s Hiroyuki Takei: ULTIMO.
Introductions all around (like Stan Lee needs an intro). Talking about Jump Sq. II, the new issue that has a 32-page prologue to ULTIMO.
Ultimo is apparently the name of the hero, and Lee can’t tell us much about him because they want it to “descend on the world at the same time,” alas. We’ve been told we’ll be bombarded by it– sounds right so far. This room is packed with reporters, and not just the usual manga bloggers like About.com Manga’s Deb Aoki (sitting next to me) and MangaBlog’s Brigid who is sitting in the front of the class, and probably a dozen others.
After Stan Lee comes Takanori Asada, the editor of Jump Sq., who says he’s honored to work with a creator of Lee’s calibre. He also lauds the not-present Takei and expresses confidence that ULTIMO, as the product of such great creators, will be really excellent.
And here’s VIZ’s big news: ULTIMO will be published in Shonen Jump in the U.S.! Not surprised, but still pretty excited. Joel Enos, a VIZ editor who works on Naruto, Shaman King, and Yu-Gi-Oh GX, and who was also in charge of Naruto’s rapid release from last year– poor guy still looks tired.
Open for Q&As. First question, lobbed by ANN: What’s Japan’s reaction to this announcement been like? The answer: It’s natural in Japan that new manga gets good word of mouth, so it’s a big release in Japan fo today.
Next up: How is this project different from writing for, say, Marvel? Lee says he’d write it and have a pretty good idea how it would look, but with manga it looks different from how he writes, which he says is one of the great things about manga– the artists puts his own imprimateur or style into the story; it’s simply based on what Lee writes rather than a panel-by-panel iteration. And the English version will feature Lee’s words, different slightly from the Japanese version.
I’m trying to get my hand up to ask about the release timings, but we all just got preempted in favor of Asada-san talking about a difference between manga and western comics: the little boxes that tell us what’s going on or where we are in the comic’s world. Working on ULTIMO it was important to Lee, Takei, and Asada to create something that would be approachable to both American and Japanese readers, so they’re trying to find the middle ground.
Someone else just asked about the frequency of releases, a question which has been passed to Takei, interestingly– they are serializing it monthly, at least in Jump Sq.. But what about the English version? Lee talks about how this is different than anything he’s done in the past; the collaboration goes back and forth between Lee and Takei/the Jump Sq. people a bunch of times, becoming a solid combination between them all.
VIZ gave away copies of Jump Sq. signed. I didn’t win one though. Booo!
There will be a bit of a delay between the Japanese and the American releases, but they’ll keep it as short as possible. It’ll be even closer than their previous shortest delay, Yu-Gi-Oh GX’s.
Someone’s asking about what Lee hopes this will do for comics in the long run. Lee hopes that the series will attract both audiences and he thinks it will turn into a sort of new art form, this collaboration. The guy suggests that he call it “Pacific Comics” to avoid the manga/OEL/comics confusion, and Lee says he can come up with something way cooler because, after all, he came up with Marvel.
Some guy just got up and gave a loud shout-out to Lee for being awesome, which we have just been informed is similar to the response Lee gets in Japan, which I thought was interesting.
A Manga Cafe magazine writer just asked how Lee and Asada-san feel about how their historic pairing will change comics, which she says will be remembered for ages to come. Asada-san says that even for him, this is a new challenge. Manga has so much possibility to expand, and he doesn’t have an answer at this moment, but manga is a media to bring something new to readers around the world, and he thinks that it should be aggressive all the time (presumably aggressively forward-thinking, that is).
A Tribune Company reporter just asked if Lee looked at other manga when he came up with this project, and Lee says no, because he wanted to create a new original art form rather than simply copying anything; he wants to do something different.
Asada-san is going to tell us a bit about the story of ULTIMO: it’s about two humanoid androids, and in Japan they believe that there is a soul in everything, so based on that idea, human-like beings have a soul inside too. Takei developed the story based on Lee’s idea and the two created more and more, and the two beings may go through more difficulties or it may be more battle/action, and that’s still being discussed, so please keep an eye out.
Also, it would be a spoiler if he talked about it much!
Someone just asked Lee if he planned to be involved if/when ULTIMO got made into an anime; Lee says he plans to be involved when it’s an anime, a movie as big as Spiderman, a TV series, etc.
I’m going to try and ask a bit about Hero Man, Lee’s anime project with BONES, but I have to present it in a way that keeps us on-topic, I think. Deb just asked how Takei-sensei got chosen to become the artist on the project, and he was not chosen by Stan Lee, he was chosen by his Japanese partners– but Lee was very happy when he saw Takei’s artwork.
Someone just asked about the timeline of the series– will it be like a manga series, where they tend to be finite in length while American comics tend to last…well, as long as buyers can stand. The story will have an end eventually, and then it’s up to the publisher, so I guess the answer is he doesn’t know…but Lee hopes it’s popular enough to keep going. Asada-san says that it’s not the creator or reader who decides when a story ends, it’s up to the characters. If the characters get through everything they want and need to do, that’s the end, so he has no idea when it will end.
We only have five minutes left. And lots of questions to go. Eep! Someone just asked if any American artists were going to do any iterations on ULTIMO, which Lee hadn’t thought of, but he thinks not, because the fun of it is the manga art with the American story.
And that’s the end! Whew. Next up: Bandai Entertainment.
