A long time ago, we all learned Shueisha would be launching the Shonen Jump Manga Competition. 1,400 entered. Only 6 lasted until the final round, where people around the world could vote on their work. While the competition was going on, I thought it’d be prudent to see if I could get in touch with the US representative, Nick Kanoza, and thanks to a stroke of luck, I found his contact information and sent an email. I didn’t get a response. So needless to say, the competition passed by, The Team Before Daybreak was the winner, and life went on since January.
…And then Nick checked his account a few weeks ago and saw I sent him an email. So he got back to me, I was still excited to talk with him, and so we chatted on drawing, the Golden Rabbit process, and Hunter x Hunter.
So talk a little about yourself and at what point did you realize art would become a serious passion for you?
I’ve kind of always been pretty much into art, drawing in classes, stuff like that, but I guess the beginning of high school, teachers and adults are always asking what you’re gonna be, what direction you’re gonna go to, and I was always taking art courses and those were always fun to me, and I decided that unless I’m going to go to a general education through college and stuff like that, art would be my main point, and I was definitely having a lot of fun doing that.
Do you have a general routine when it comes to working on a piece, or does it depend on what you draw?
Simple illustrations are really sketched on paper, but after I scan them for digital stuff I’ll have them colored through Photoshop or Paint Tool SAI – I have a tablet here and I kind of used that for cleaning up a lot of messy stuff with the one shot I worked on.
Can you share any artists (manga, American, etc) that inspired you, or influenced your style?
I know a lot of Takeshi Obata, from Hikaru no Go, Death Note, those were definitely one of the first manga series I’ve gotten my hands on before I realized that manga was kind of where anime came from, or anime gets its adaptations a lot from manga, and I was like, “Wow, this is perfect because I don’t like coloring that much!” So when they actually get into drawing manga I look forward to seeing pieces from Shonen Jump artists and sometimes the occasional artists outside of SJ like Hiromu Arakawa who does Full Metal Alchemist, so those artists really inspire me.
How did you feel when you found out you were selected as one of the six finalists in the Shonen Jump Manga Award Competition? If you knew of it ahead of when they posted the competition, how hard was it to not share that with everybody until you could?
*laughs* Well I didn’t believe it at first. I got the email from I think SJ’s North American branch, and it was a couple of weeks before they were actually announcing it on the 21st of December and I really did like freak out I was like, “Oh my gosh I gotta tell all my family members!” But I gotta make sure I also keep this a secret for like public stuff, so I can’t write any blog posts or anything online regarding it, but yeah I was definitely really excited.
Let’s talk about the Golden Rabbit. Can you share just in general the process of working on it: like why you came up with the idea to use the leprechaun folklore and incorporate it into your work, using a rabbit, hours you had to devote to it each day, etc?
From when they first announced the competition I immediately started brainstorming ideas from like really simple stuff, like what do I really want to make and stuff. When I decided I’m really suited to unconventional battles, or kind of fights where they don’t have to beat each other’s bones to the ground until one’s down into submission and the other one stands victorious, I tried to think of challenges like that. I came up with weird, bizarre ideas, and I hit a wall, and around late June I decided, “Ok, what don’t I have?” And I thought, “I don’t have a mascot.” I never do mascots. And when I started brainstorming ideas like that, I had the idea of, it revolved around gold and I tried to have a mascot implement that kind of idea, and leprechauns came natural, but the second I came up with the leprechaun, I discarded all my other ideas and I wanted to focus on the story regarding that.
So I had a lot of different ideas storming in after I said, “Ok, this is what I want, this is what I don’t want,” and originally I had the leprechaun be an actual leprechaun, but it wasn’t really charming to have a leprechaun be something to chase, where it’s kind of unconventional, you want that kind of action to be there, and having a weird old fart, with overalls and green top hats and stuff—
That sounds so shounen right? *laughs*
Definitely! Everyone knows that you gotta stick to the cliché formula when you’re thinking of ideas – ninjas with orange jumpsuits, grim reapers who are samurai or something, pirates with straw hats, all that kind of stuff was kind of made after they decided Soul Reaper, Ninja, or Pirate. So I decided to make it as charming and, not believable, but to make it work, to create a character that can be super fast and make that like part of the story, I started thinking animal type characters, and the rabbit was the first idea I came up with and it worked for me. So I decided to create a rabbit leprechaun for that.
What was the biggest challenge in telling this type of story with the page limit? I assume you have to cut some stuff out?
Oh yeah, though I think the page limit really helped like crop out all the bad ideas that I didn’t want, all the story elements I would’ve added into it would have probably drawn it out more, but I did really keep it separated between the drama and the action because I really wanted to have an action segment where it wasn’t like three pages of something and then, finale, because it doesn’t really take the challenge seriously unless there’s a lot going on in it. So I kind of described the rules as the drama was unfolding for the first half of the story, and for the last half I just did as much as I could with the ideas I wanted, the traps I wanted to use, the failing and getting back up kind of ideas, all the way up to the ending, and I think the page limit actually gave me support for that.
Finally, in regards to the Golden Rabbit, what’s the one thing you hope readers took away from it?
I know what they did take away from it that I didn’t expect: a lot of people called it heartwarming, very nice, good mood type of story, and really, I really wanted to have some kind of heartlessness into it, but not where it wasn’t gonna be – well, it’d still be heartwarming – but I wanted that dark, kind of overhang of ‘if this doesn’t work, then a lot of things can go wrong’ for all the characters and I guess what I really wanted people to take away from it was not the idea, not the concept, I’m trying to word this the best way I can, I wanted the feeling to be expressed like typical SJ genre but introducing something new and something they’ve not seen before I think. I wanted to introduce something you can take from that genre and show what you can do with it.
…If that makes sense! *laughs*
Well, since the competition’s been over for a while, what has it done for you in terms of your confidence and what you’re currently doing right now?
Well when I made the one shot, I knew what I was getting into, I knew how long it was gonna take to make, but actually working on it was…it WAS hell *laughs* because I started actually seriously putting work into it in July, everything was storyboarded and sketched in August, and from halfway though August to September I was always dedicating every time I could get into it, and when school came back I had to bring my work to school and whenever I had free time, so I did get like an understanding of how the process works, the endurance it takes, I do remember I set myself deadlines for each day: need at least two pages finished per day, or this many per week. My sleep schedule was really messed up but I think the experience itself really did it for me about actually creating manga and that was probably one of the most fun things I’ve ever done.
I’m currently working with my friends actually to get like con stuff – like sometimes we’ll sell artwork at cons, not really big ones yet – but we try and make sure we’re getting all our stuff ready and creating more artwork that we can sell and just fun stuff like that in the meantime, unless something else comes up – if SJ would like to make another international competition I’ll definitely be up for it!
There was a point of contention with the rules where SJ would take ownership of the work, and as the artist, you wouldn’t have rights over it. Did you have a big problem with that, or did just being able to compete in the competition override that?
Actually, if any rule messed me up it wouldn’t be that one. I totally understood company policy, they don’t want copyright to be a problem. Taking ownership, as soon I hit submit and sent all my pages, I pretty much knew it was going to be theirs, I wouldn’t have many rights to it other than just being the artist and author for it. So I just had to be completely happy and content with it and I was, I didn’t have any…”Oh no, it’s gone forever!” kind of feeling.
I guess, I dunno if this is in the realm of the question, but the rule that really messed me up was the page size and stuff. I specifically got manuscript paper online to fit with the format and as soon as I scanned it and everything, none of the lines from the borders came up. So I created a really thin red line that would stretch across the crop mark, if that makes sense, at the edges of the page where the page has to stop, and they emailed me back saying, “Congratulations for making it into the finals! There is ONE slight problem – we don’t want to have the red lines in there.” So I was like “sure sure sure, let me try and get that off, let me erase all the lines from a layer on my file,” and I re-submitted it. I didn’t expect them to actually keep the unfinished parts outside the line, so they kind of literally showed the entire page, and it…shows where my lines stopped, where the inking stops, where the toning stops, included in the page. I didn’t see that anywhere else in the finals, so I saw that in the main page and I was like, “Oops!”
So after all that work they still went with the original basically? *laughs*
Yep they took the entire page, didn’t crop out any of the mista—well, not really mistakes, but all the lines that were supposed to bleed and stuff, and that was shown in the competition and mine’s was the only one and I was like, “This is really embarrassing, I really should’ve cropped that out for them! I didn’t know they were gonna actually post the entire thing on all the pages!”
Um. Wow. Yeah, that…that sucks. I’m sorry, that’s pretty bad of them. You’d think they’d at least, especially after they told you to re-submit it to change it so…
Well they had time to look at it and they probably thought, “You know what, it’s fine!” And after a couple of weeks while voting was going on I looked at it too and went, “I think people will understand what’s going on here looking at those lines, I think I’ll be okay” *laughs*
What current anime and manga series have you been keeping up with?
I’m actually trying my hardest to keep up with every WSJ series that’s coming out and what not. I do follow up on what SJ, like the WSJ in America, all the new pieces that they’re bringing out. They are hiding some, and I read a lot of the more interesting things that they’re not posting in America, like Assassination Classroom, which is very similar to the concept I was introducing in my series, where all the classmates have to deal with the impossible task of assassinating their teacher who cannot be stopped. He is so fast and all he’s doing is teaching everybody and it’s really nuts, and I really like that series because I like battle series where you don’t have to actually fight someone to beat them, you just have to do some kind of other task to gain what you’re looking for. And series like Hunter x Hunter, it’s probably one of my favorite series that I’ve discovered these past several years, and I love everything about it. I know the hiatus just came off and they’re restarting the new weekly chapters and it’s really fun to read.
Speaking of HxH, I learned you’ve been watching it so – I assume you’ve watched the current version (2011) correct?
I’ve seen the 1999 version but I haven’t finished it. But I do remember that as soon as I heard people saying ‘you gotta read it, watch it’ and I was trying to work my way through it, and marathoning as much as I can.
Can you talk briefly about any differences then, between the 1999 version and the current version?
The 1999 version, it’s not a problem because the animation company does do as much as they can with it, when it catches up to the manga, each chapter being released on the magazine in contrast to the anime releasing episodes per week, eventually the anime catches up to the manga so they add things into it to draw it out, and there’s a lot of comedic stuff that doesn’t happen in the manga that you see being plentiful in the 1999 version. In the 2011 version, nothing is added in, everything is played out straight in the manga, but the animation and the music and all these other qualities from Madhouse is just…I think that’s what makes it my favorite, but there’s a lot of quirks from the 1999 version that doesn’t show up in the manga or the newer anime that’s really fun to watch as well.
What is it about Hunter x Hunter that’s made it stand out from other shounen series?
I think the biggest thing I took from understanding it is, they don’t have the battles that most other shounen series do — they will have battles, characters are strong enough to fight in combat, there’s a tournament arc – but most challenges are just walls they have to overcome, and there’s games, rules, instead of, “beat this person until they’re defeated or whatever”, they’ll have a rock-paper-scissors contest or capture this character’s badge and return it to the proctor and you pass to the next segment. Even characters are walking rulebooks: they don’t have to fight, they’re just really interesting and – aw man, I don’t like spoiling certain information about stuff but late in the series they do get a character in that has all these rules to them and all these characters want to know more about these rules that these characters have, like their powers and stuff, and instead of it ending in this climatic showdown between two opposing sides it’s exploiting those kinds of rules that makes the character go through. It does get frustrating though because instead of, “Oh yeah, these two characters are finally gonna fight each other,” an entire arc can end in just, “there’s no fighting, we both got out of it unscathed,” and it’s just really different from what’d you see from other series.
What’s been your favorite arc so far?
Oh…I wanna say Chimera Ant but—
Why not? *laughs*
Well I mean, it’s too typical! There’s so much character development, so many elements and plots and villains that you care about! I guess that would be my favorite but if I had to pick a different one, maybe Greed Island because that is also just a rulebook arc. You get cards! You get books! Games! All these fun things! A training arc inside it, it’s all the fun shounen stuff everyone loves and it even ends in a fight, but Chimera Ant arc is probably my favorite. There’s just way too much emotion and it breaks your heart.
What advice would you give to any aspiring artists on how to get their work out there so people can see it and stuff like that?
I guess the best thing that helped me sort of is that there is always this wall that as a creator, or as an author pretty much, where you want to draw what you want to draw to make you happy or stuff like that, but when you’re creating a series for other people to read you have to convey it better. You want to write it in a way that helps the reader understand it instead of understanding it yourself because you already know certain things about it, you already have all these ideas that you want to add to your story, but you want to convey those thoughts better to the reader. So you want to have the reader in mind when you write a story.
You can check in with Nick at DeviantArt, follow him on Twitter (@oKanokawa), or keep up with him on Tumblr.
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Justin
Justin is the founder of Organization Anti-Social Geniuses. Anime & manga fan that likes to blog about anime and manga, is addicted to sports, and weak to crossovers. You can follow Justin on Twitter @Kami_nomi.
Latest posts by Justin (see all)
- Summer Anime 2014: Anti-Social Genius Compendium - June 25, 2014
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- Spring Anime 2014: A List of All Who Made Their Anime Industry Debuts - June 24, 2014
- K: Missing Kings is Getting Screened in 45 US Theaters, Prepare For More Filters - June 23, 2014
- Shonen Jump Manga Competition’s Nick Kanoza On The Golden Rabbit, Creating Rules, & Hunter x Hunter - June 23, 2014
