Undertown Brings the Manga Revolution to Newspapers

Flip through the Sunday comics section of the Los Angeles Times, Denver Sun, or Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and you may notice a new black-and-white adventure series alongside more colorful fare like The Family Circus and For Better or Worse. That newcomer is Undertown, an OEL title by Jim Pascoe and Jake Myler. For the next six months, over fifty American newspapers will be serializing the entire first volume of this best-selling Tokyopop title.

Undertown isn’t the first global manga to appear in American newspapers. In 2006, Tokyopop teamed up with Universal Press Syndicate to publish an abridged version of Peach Fuzz, a shojo comedy aimed at eight-to-twelve year olds.^[1] As Jeremy Ross, Tokyopop’s Director of New Product Development explains, the company was looking to increase awareness of its OEL franchises by reaching out to a mainstream audience through newspapers. “We knew that manga was being serialized in newspapers throughout Asia, and thought we could do the same here,” he noted. Declining circulation rates made syndication editors more receptive to innovation in the funny pages, and several papers, including The LA Times, purchased Peach Fuzz for a new feature called “Tokyopop Presents…”^[2]

Adapting Peach Fuzz for the Sunday papers, however, posed technical challenges. The artwork needed to be re-sized and re-toned to suit newspapers’ lower print resolution, while the story needed condensing to accommodate the series’ twenty-week run. Ultimately, Tokyopop developed a format that resembled a two-page spread from a tankubon, thus preserving the original layout’s vertical orientation. To guide readers through the abridged story, creators Lindsay Cibos and Jared Hodges composed “diary entries” in the voices of the principle characters to narrate scenes left on the cutting room floor.

After Peach Fuzz’s successful run, Tokyopop began experimenting with other OEL properties, adopting a slightly different approach for each series. Van Von Hunter, for example, drew on creators Mike Schwark and Ron Kaulfersch’s experience producing a weekly webcomic.^[3] The two wrote new material that placed more emphasis on comedy than lengthy, action-oriented quests, an emphasis better suited to telling a story in short, regular installments. Tokyopop employed a similar strategy for Princess Ai, creating a new story starring the title character as a high school student. The twist: Princess Ai was in color. To complement the Sunday comic, Tokyopop developed a full-color daily strip for the 26-week run, though it was ultimately shelved.^[4] Given Tokyopop founder Stu Levy’s goal of building Princess Ai into a multi-media franchise—with novels, sticker books, poetry, music albums, and a movie in the works—Ross thought it likely that Tokyopop might collect and print the original newspaper material—including the unpublished daily strips—at some point in the future.

Undertown, which made its newspaper debut on January 6th, is the first Tokyopop title to run uncut. Readers familiar with the first volume will note that the story and layout are identical in both the newspaper and tankubon editions. Each two-page installment will include supplemental material in the form of story recaps, character profiles, and key art. Though the artwork is in black and white, the feature has a colorful border to attract attention.

A sample page from Tokyopop Presents: Undertown.

Time constraints made it difficult for Undertown creators Jim Pascoe and Jake Myler to create fresh material for the newspaper. “I would have loved to have done original strips,” Pascoe said. “It’s difficult to tell an adventure story serialized on a week-to-week basis, especially with today’s attention spans.” Tokyopop editor Paul Morrissey shared Pascoe’s concerns. “I wasn’t sure if [an uncut version] would work,” Morrissey explained. “But that right-facing page ends with you wanting to turn the page to see what happens next.”

Undertown’s basic plot will be familiar to fans of Brave Story: a young boy enters a magical realm to save an ailing parent. In Undertown, that young boy is ten-year-old Sama, whose father is hospitalized. A sketchy-looking man lures Sama into Undertown by promising the boy a cure for his father’s life-threatening illness: the Sugar Stone, a magical object that Undertown’s insect overlords seek for their own wicked purposes. Sama travels in company of Eddy, a teddy bear with the swagger of a Dashiell Hammett hero, and a motley crew of talking animals, some of whom have ulterior motives for aiding Sama in his quest.

Pascoe—whose writing credentials include Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Kim Possible, and two murder mysteries—had spent several years looking for the right medium to tell the Undertown story. Three years ago, Pascoe was working as a consultant at ABC, helping them develop their Jetix programming block. His exposure to shonen anime proved an important catalyst in bringing Undertown to life, suggesting to him a new way to connect with Jetix’s core demographic of tweenager viewers. When Tokyopop invited him to pitch an original manga project, Pascoe jumped at the opportunity, producing a detailed proposal in a matter of weeks.

Once Morrissey had selected an artist, Myler and Pascoe sat down to discuss the Undertown universe in depth. “Instead of just going right into the creation of the book, we spent a good amount of time doing development stuff,” Pascoe explained. In an effort to get the story’s character designs and backgrounds just right, “Jake and I talked a lot about architecture, politics, and environmental issues.” Myler’s first round of “traditional black and white manga illustrations seemed a little restrained. Jake was trying to get it too perfect,” Pascoe noted. Myler then borrowed a storyboarding technique from animators, painting numerous street scenes of Undertown and its denizens, and the story’s look began to gel. “Jake understands the kind of complexity and richness that I want in Undertown better than anyone I know,” Pascoe said.

Since its August 2007 release, Undertown has been a strong performer for Tokyopop. Robust sales, widespread media exposure, and positive reviews attracted the interest of Scholastic, Inc., which ordered copies for its book club. When asked why Undertown had found such a receptive audience among ten-to-fourteen-year-old readers, Ross attributed the book’s appeal to the story itself. “Undertown has the weirdness, the scariness, the edginess that readers associate with manga,” he noted.

Morrissey felt that the richness of the Undertown universe demands a higher level of engagement from its fans. “There’s a life to the characters that exist outside the page,” he explained. “There are so many things that happen in the book that happen very quickly, you can’t really latch on to many of the characters. I think that’s hooking fans. It opens up people’s imagination. You have to explore Undertown in your mind.” As proof, Morrissey cited fan enthusiasm for minor characters such as the Lizard Boys, who appear on just a few pages. Just as an older generation found bit players in the Star Wars movies fascinating, writing fan fiction and swapping facts about them, so, too, are Undertown’s fans embracing characters who might seem tangential to the main story. “Great character designs are a form of storytelling,” Morrissey argued. “That character [Boba Fett], the way he’s designed, i.e. the Wookie pelts he wears, makes you want to know his story. I think Jake’s character designs tell their own separate story.”

Pascoe echoed Morrissey’s comments. “One of the keys to building a great character is that you allow readers to collaborate with you,” he said. “So instead of giving readers too much description and denotative information, you make your characters very gestural.” The result is a story whose setting is quite specific but whose characters are not, forcing readers to ascribe personality quirks, fears and desires to its cast members.

The other key to Undertown’s appeal, Pascoe continued, is that the story, though fantastic, is filled with “moments that kids can relate to.” Although Sama’s father is an important character, Pascoe explains, we don’t spend enough time with him to know why he’s so brusque with Sama in the opening pages of the story. “Everyone can relate to a parent doing something that’s not cool or bad or mean or nonsensical to you from your worldview,” he observed.

Morrissey concedes that Undertown’s newspaper run may not translate directly into sales. Instead, he views the Sunday serialization as a “promotional tool” for “making awareness of the property a little larger.” To that end, Tokyopop has created an Undertown clan on its website; registered site users can join the clan to receive regular updates from Pascoe, discuss the series, and post fan art. While hoping to attract new readers to the property through the strip and the website, Pascoe acknowledged the importance of another demographic: current fans of the series. “A really important audience is people who love the book,” he noted. “Because there are so many layers in the storytelling, something will pop up at you: ‘Wow, that relates to the ending and I missed that the first time around.’”

NOTES
1. Peach Fuzz, like Van Von Hunter, took the grand prize in the Rising Stars of Manga competition.

2. In her article Comics Pages Make Room for Manga, which ran in USA Today on December 29, 2005, reporter Carol Memmott interviewed several newspaper editors about their interest in Peach Fuzz, quoting Sherry Stern of the Los Angeles Times as saying, “Newspapers are always looking for ways to attract younger readers. Nobody knows what the magic solution is, but comics are always one way to reach people. That’s how a lot of people, including myself, first started reading the paper.”

3. Van Von Hunter originally ran as a weekly webcomic until its creators won the 2002 Rising Stars of Manga contest, when it made the jump to print.

4. Ross noted that the daily comic market is considerably harder to break into than the Sunday pages, a sentiment echoed by Morrissey during our interview.