Otakon was also host to Frederik L. Schodt (as in “Julia gets shot”), personal friend of Osamu Tezuka and translator of many of Tezuka’s works, including Astro Boy and Phoenix, as well as Naoki Urasawa’s reimagining of a Tezuka story, Pluto. On Saturday, July 20, Schodt held a question and answer session in the recently completed Baltimore Hilton.

Mr. Schodt, a tall, gray-haired man with a gentle, spellbinding voice, started off with some biographical information, revealing how he has hopped back and forth between America and Japan throughout his life. He met Tezuka (for pronunciation, the stress goes on the “teh” syllable—it doesn’t sound like “bazooka” as many people would believe) in the seventies while living in Tokyo. Schodt, along with a few friends, wanted to try translating manga into English. They decided upon Phoenix at Schodt’s suggestion. They took a chance, sent a letter to Tezuka himself, and wound up meeting with him in person.

Tezuka eventually granted them permission, and so the group (called dadakai) got to work. Sadly, these translations sat, unused, for many years before being picked up by any English publishers. Even though the Phoenix project went ignored, it paved the way for many achievements that Schodt would accomplish later in life. All this, he added, was after a school counselor in Japan turned him away from studying Japanese, saying “it probably won’t do you any good in the future.”

Spurred on by questions from the audience, Schodt talked about many aspects of Tezuka, his manga, and the manga industries of the U.S. and Japan. Since Schodt presented an additional panel on Tezuka’s manga on Sunday, I will be focusing on Schodt’s commentary on the manga industry for the remainder of this article. (Further coverage will be part of a separate follow-up article, appropriately titled Grant’s Report, Part 3.)

Schodt identified himself as a pessimist (you are forewarned) before diving into his opinions on the worldwide manga industry. That being said, he spoke freely about what he thought were the weak points of the U.S. and Japanese manga industries. He labeled the Japanese market as “insular”—citing an incident in which he and Wil Eisner traveled to Japan, seeking a company to release Eisner’s works in Japanese. Eisner, at the time a senior citizen, was told he would have to flip the pages, redraw his panels in a more Japanese style, and change the pacing of his stories to better fit a Japanese audience. This attitude towards accepting other styles of sequential art is a prime example of an industry fault. Then again, he also noted that there is a limited demand for American superhero comics in Japan, even to this day.

The U.S. also shares a similar problem, in that most manga printed in Japan will never be marketed here, as many concepts would be lost in translation (manga written to appeal to Japanese salarymen, for instance). U.S. publishers also have a tendency to tamper with original materials, censoring artwork and changing parts to make them more marketable (or perhaps even printable). Although against censorship, Schodt did admit to asking Tezuka to alter one panel in a manga (to remove a humorous moment from an otherwise serious sequence) so he could put it in a U.S.-published book. Many audience members winced at the very thought of this.

Schodt was also asked about the current scanlation issues that are plaguing the industry. He referenced the single most popular scanlation site around (surprising more than a few audience members with this knowledge, I venture to guess) and the impact it was having on his line of work. Calling it “an issue publishers in Japan haven’t woken up to yet” and stating that publishers in the U.S. don’t know how to deal with it, Schodt primarily identified scanlations as a complication for all intellectual properties. If publishers cannot sell a product because it is already available for free, it has tremendous potential to discourage anyone from seeking a career in the field of manga. He added that the issue of scanlating raises the question of how manga authors will be able to continue to make a living creating stories.

As someone who is involved in the process of bringing manga stateside, Schodt is somewhat familiar with the cost and effort required to release a series here. While fully admitting that he is not privy to any actual numbers, Schodt said that in addition to the six months needed to make a manga ready for mass release, he would guess that it costs roughly thirty thousand dollars to release a single volume. You can do the math on how much it would take, in sales, to recoup the upfront cost.

Schodt also talked about his work on two harder-to-find projects he completed, The Four Immigrants manga and the Mobile Suit Gundam novels. For those who have never heard of it, The Four Immigrants was published in 1931 in San Francisco. It has the distinction of being the first American graphic novel written by a Japanese immigrant. The creator, Henry Yoshitaka Kiyama, could not find a newspaper that would run his work, so he wrote it for himself, and penned a bilingual graphic novel targeting fellow Japanese immigrants. Schodt discovered the work in the early 1980s, fell in love with it, and eventually had it released through Stone Bridge Press.

The Gundam novels, originally released by Del Rey in 1990 and 1991, went out of print after only a few years. When the anime market was heating up several years ago, Schodt said he began writing Del Rey, trying to get them to reprint the novels. Del Rey declined, apparently citing their surveys as proof that anime was not popular and was not a growing market. Although the three novels were eventually rereleased through Stone Bridge Press as a single, bound edition, copies are currently fetching upwards of $100 on the internet.

The amazing amount of knowledge Schodt shared with the audience over the course of an hour was mindblowing. Even with the occasional foray into negativity, I still left with a renewed sense of wonder and fandom. Schodt gave straightforward answers and provided a clear window into the workings of the past and present manga industry. Mr. Schodt also answered many questions relating to Tezuka’s manga. This will all be covered in part three of my report, which also focuses on Schodt’s Sunday panel on Astro Boy and how that one title revolutionized the manga and anime industry in Japan.