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 Context Is Good: The Gerard Jones Interview
Written by Park Cooper
What neither his Wikipedia page nor his website tells you is that Gerard Jones is an adapter of manga, such as Dragon Ball Z, a lot of Rumiko Takahashi work, and more: Basara, Boys Over Flowers, Crying Freeman, Inuyasha, Maison Ikkoku, One-Pound Gospel, RahXephon, Ranma ½, Rumic Theater, Rurouni Kenshin, Urusei Yatsura... these are just some highlights, not a complete list...
When I was first courting my wife Barbara, back when I was a comics geek and knew far less about manga and even anime aside from Akira, Ghost in the Shell, and a few things like Speed Racer, back at the start of a long-distance geek relationship, one thing I mailed her was Epic’s (an offset of Marvel Comics) The Trouble with Girls, by Gerard Jones and Will Jacobs. I had also found, totally by coincidence, a book at a used bookstore called The Beaver Papers, which was purportedly writers from the 1950s and earlier coming out of retirement to guest-write new episodes of Leave it to Beaver so as to try to prevent its cancellation (and new takes on the theme song, too, by luminaries such as Sinatra)—ALSO by Gerard Jones and Will Jacobs. But since I wasn’t so dumb as to not realize that the guy named Gerard Jones who wrote one comic I liked was probably the same guy who wrote other comics, which, if I tried them, I might like, I started finding more and more of his work, particularly since, in the 1990s, I was not only buying comics from the 1990s, I was doing a lot of going back and finding what was good from the 1980s. I read his work on Green Lantern, Green Lantern Mosaic, Freex. Justice League (JLA, JLI... and JLE I think), Prime, El Diablo, Wonder Man, Elongated Man, The Shadow, and more... He won the Eisner Award for his non-fiction, though. He wrote Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters and the Birth of the Comic Book (2004); Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Superheroes and Make-Believe Violence (2002), and more, including writing, again with Will Jacobs, The Comic Book Heroes (1985, 1996), and the comic book The Trouble with Girls (1987-1993).
I met him at San Diego Con a few years ago, talked to him and told him how I loved Green Lantern Mosaic so much that I worked a little analysis of it into one of my essay-test final exams in one of my literature classes at Texas Tech, but it was barely a 5-minute conversation. Recently, though (after I read through the entire run of Dragon Ball Z), it hit me that I’d never interviewed him, and so I moved to correct that immediately—as soon as the election was over, because he was volunteering all his free time for making calls.
Here’s my interview with him. Enjoy.
Park Cooper: Hello! Sorry I'm late! I hope you forgot too and haven't been (aware that you've been) waiting long
Gerard Jones: No sweat! I've got my computer open anyway. Just got into a fun argument with a conservative gal about Sarah Palin.
PC: Here, you'll understand this-- got into writing my novel
GJ: Good for you. I wish I forgot the rest of my life while writing my book more often...and forgot my book while dealing with the rest of my life LESS often.
PC: Wife Barbara: "I don't mean to be a geek or anything, but wow, you're gonna talk to Gerard Jones"
GJ: Wife Barbara is good.
PC Dictating For Barb: Well you can tell him from me that I'm a female and I don't understand Sarah Palin for nothin’. In fact I'm from Minnesota so the folksy quasi-Minnesotaesque accent really grates on me.
GJ: That's what I was arguing with this other woman about. Did Palin's rhetoric actually increase the likelihood of violence against Obama?
PC: Unfortunately Barbara is now out of earshot so I cannot ask her. What was your answer?
GJ: At first I said "yes." Then she got me to concede that there is no demonstrable cause and effect. But I still think SP's demagoguery hurt our national dialogue.
PC: Yeah... So... how comfortable or not are you with having politics in the actual public interview...? Because on one hand it has clearly played a very large role in your life recently
GJ: I'm fine with politics being in here.
PC: Check. Well, so, how do you feel now? Relieved? Like relief is denied due to Prop 8? Stunned? Barb and I were discussing earlier how we feel like everyone sort of "still can't believe it" (about Obama)
GJ: I'm thrilled about Obama's victory. I have real hope for this to be a turning point in American history at the level of 1932. Or 1980, which was a turning point, although not the direction I liked.
PC: I wrote a short column encouraging people to vote which I posted on Nov. 3rd. And I was a little cagey in that. But at the end I discussed Geek Values. Which means that I feel that diehard geeks have the values they get from sci-fi and fantasy... good over evil (which is easy), good over fascism (except maybe Heinlein), a good bit of Green Party aesthetics mixed in... and on and on...
PC: Do you believe in Geek Values? And if so do you believe, as I do, that it pushes young minds to the left more than the alternative? Or does all that go out the window when you hear the dumb things people say in the audiences of panels at cons sometimes
GJ: I would advocate a more process-based, rather than idea-based, sense of Geek Values.
PC: Do tell
GJ: There's a book, "The Coming Democratic Majority," published in 2002 I think, that laid out the political shift we're seeing now in largely demographic and generational terms. It used the word "Ideopolis" to describe the new type of American city and suburb based largely on the information and tech industries, although often with academia thrown in. Coastal California from Eureka south is becoming one big
"ideopolis." Parts of North Carolina and Virginia are too, enough to tip those states "blue."
GJ: Centers of media and culture would go in there too--New York, Chicago, even parts of Florida. And areas with huge numbers of government bureaucrats too, as I.T. takes over our bureaucracies.
PC: Hm. I'm having a thought about works of yours in the past that touch on the political...
GJ: Anyway...I’m overexplaining...
PC: No, no, you're fine
GJ: Short version is, people who have been shaped by computers, media, info tech have a different world view from the older generations.
PC: Yesssss
GJ: Which INCLUDES a greater interest in fantasy, science fiction, other geek interests.
Includes a more complete and passionate engagement in media in general.
GJ: So geek entertainment is a living and valid part of that whole. Many ways that shows up, but here are two:
1. The Star-Trek style model of different kinds of people getting along, people being educated out of old oppositions and suppositions.
You can toss X-Men in there too. Buffy. A whole bunch of stuff.
2. A channeling of our fantasies of combat and power into fantastical arenas, a la superheroes.
PC: right, like in Killing Monsters...
GJ: So we still have those visceral, My Symbol Will Beat Your Symbol fantasies, but no longer in any racial, nationalistic, religious context. And usually what you find is that bad guys are shown as forces that set people against each other, destroy the new web of cooperation. Joker in the Dark Knight movie, for instance. Or they're selfish and exclusionary. So...to loop us back around... The life-philosophy of the new generations, the social models of geek entertainment, the economic logic of the information age, all become part of the same pattern. *whew*
PC: Let's shiftjump over to El Diablo. And Green Lantern. A certain incident where J.S. stacks cars in South Africa comes to my mind... Gerard Jones past comics works and politics intersecting... and I also mentioned J.S. stacking the cars (limos perhaps I think) in South Africa
GJ: It all kind of comes from the same place. Plus my book about sitcoms, Honey I'm Home, etc. I keep thinking the same thoughts, they just show up in different places. All my John Stewart stuff was working on those thoughts. Still kind of inchoate at that point.
PC: Yeah wheee, back to the past. I already thanked you, the one time I met you, for The Beaver Papers and The Trouble With Girls...Which was one of the first comics I sent to Barbara early in our (initially long-distance) relationship. Talk about setting a tone...
GJ: That makes me so happy! I love writing humor with Will Jacobs. We're working on two humor books that we're posting on-line. And glad to know Barbara didn't immediately dump you.
PC: That is very interesting to me because I am working on the research for how to make a novel Barbara has written work that way... so will you make money from doing so, and if so, how
GJ: No, this is just to get reader reaction, get some comments that might help us with the revision... Build interest for when we finally try to get them published...
PC: Ahhh. Okay. Do you have an agent these days? Er, for fiction?
GJ: My agent is always open to reading fiction. Right now she's saying that neither of the new Jacobs and Jones projects are ready for the big publishers. Which is part of why we're revising. But she never says, "No fiction please." Fiction's just really hard to sell right now.
PC: Why is fiction hard to sell right now?
GJ: Because millions of people are doing it. Kind of the hip new thing to write a novel.
And non-fiction sells better, so it's hard for publishers to increase their fiction lists enough to keep up with the increased product available. Fiction's actually selling pretty steadily, but...it's a buyers' market. The stuff that seems easiest to place now is genre stuff that can be easily niched. So agents know exactly which editors to hit, marketing departments know exactly which other books to link it to... It's a hard time for oddball stuff.
PC: Hence one reason why I'm gearing up to get a readership excited about mine, online, first. But let's shift this subtly away from me... how did you feel about winning your first Eisner for a work of prose?
GJ: That was really gratifying. Writing that book made me feel very close to the comic book community, made me realize how much that community had meant to me for 20 years--and how much the medium had meant to me since I was 13 years old-- So hearing from the comics community that they thought my book was a valuable contribution meant a lot to me. It was bittersweet, though, as that was the first Eisner Awards held after Will died. Anne Eisner was sitting front and center at the awards. I found myself directing my comments mainly to her. It was quite powerful to see her smiling back when I talked about Will's help on the book. It was also fun to be there with Michael Chabon, who won for The Escapist. He and I knew each other before Men of Tomorrow, but that book really kind of kicked our friendship into gear.
PC: And now a question that to some may sound odd on my part: So do you read many comics these days?
GJ: I was afraid you were going to ask that... No, I'm sorry that I don't. I kind of stopped reading comics during the years I was writing too many of them. My comics-writing burnout spread to the enjoyment of reading them too. And although the writing burnout is long past, I just never seemed to get the comics-reading rhythm back. I'll still go through flurries of reading really old stuff. Usually right after San Diego Con, when I've picked up some new things.
PC: Ah, yeah, old stuff. I'm a fan of that.
GJ: I recently read Wimbledon Green. Otherwise, I have a stack of recent comics that have been recommended to me that I'm sure I'll get to one of these days. Will Jacobs keeps telling me I MUST read Alan Moore's Supreme. Which is "recent" in my world...
PC: Mm. I feel that Supreme is Alan gearing up to do A.B.C. and Tom Strong and Promethea... "If only D.C. was out of the way, one could do this... hm and this... la la la, wouldn't this be entertaining"
GJ: So I'll add ABC and all to my list.
PC: Okay, so let us now speak of manga. And not just because I recently read the entire run of Dragon Ball Z
GJ: Yes, manga. I've been doing stuff on and off for Viz for something like 19 years.
Did you like DBZ?
PC: I did like DBZ. It was amazing to see the author deliberately challenge himself with increasing difficulties of topping himself as far as the insanely god-like amounts of power the heroes and the threats possessed/gained each time... and without cheating by, you know, solving any problem with anything other than sheer brute force. And he managed it every time...
GJ: DBZ was fun to adapt to the American market. Although my favorite manga rewrites have mostly been of Takahashi's work. Ranma 1/2 and Maison Ikkoku were the top.
PC: Barb wants to know: "How much would you say you ADAPT and how much do you REWRITE?" In which adaptation is tinkering with sentence structure and rewriting is more like adding a whole new gag in (lawn chairs? veritable smorgasbord?)
GJ: Barb asks a good question. My official title is "rewriter." But...I try to be more of an adapter. My ideal is to convey the original author's intent and style. I want to contribute that and get out of the way. But: there are times that I just couldn't do that without leaving the original incomprehensible. Or adding explanatory footnotes, which Viz very much tries to avoid. It depends more on the specific reference or gag in question.
Barb: Yeah, a joke you really appreciate, but you know the audience won't get it the way it is at the moment...
PC: Well it also depends on the manga in question...
GJ: Puns are almost never possible just to "adapt," not if the original humor is to continue. And Takahashi liked puns, at least in her more overtly comedic work.
So one story might be 95% adaptation, trying to stay as close to Rumiko Takahashi's intent as possible...but then there'd be some gag based on a double meaning that just wouldn't work in English. So I'd usually make up a whole new gag.
Barb: Oh yeah the kanji-puns are a pain...
PC: Stuff like "You see, the symbol for 'mango' is made up the strokes for 'monkey', 'brain,' and 'explosion...'” and so forth...
GJ: I always felt that NOT including a joke there, just sticking to the literal information, would be a failure to follow the author's intent. Rumiko meant this as a laugh-beat, so I'll come up with another laugh.
Barb: Yes.
PC: Yes.
GJ: I guess that still qualifies as "adapting." Just choosing the overall narrative intent over the literal content.
Barb: Yes, it does. And then there are rich cultural references that you want in there, but you just don't know how to explain them to the causal reader who isn't an otaku...
PC: Yes, our tradition doesn't even understand that horniness makes your nose bleed
GJ: Yeah, there's often a tough choice to be made between otaku-sense and general-reader sense. I'm glad that Viz, in recent years, has trusted more in the manga-awareness of its readership. Early on we were all asked to err too much on the side of the hypothetical reader-who-knows-nothing-about-manga-or-Japan. Which made sense when the manga market was still being tested and there was no huge otaku population in the US.
Barb: Yeah that's always the 7-10 split... each should be respected... but they're in the minority, really...
GJ: The one that still makes me squirm is the "Kyoko" issue in Maison Ikkoku......
PC: Is this the kitten named Kyoko?
GJ: Yup. My stomach still clenches at the thought of it.
PC: I still remember that... I think about it whenever I hear the name Kyoko... and since we just watched two Asian Horror movies in as many nights, I have heard it recently... So how would you have fixed the Kitten Story if you could?
GJ: The thing was...when we started Maison Ikkoku, my editor and I agreed that it would feel weird to an American reader to hear the characters calling their building manager "Manager." Or "Ms. Manager." Or however one might translate it. We went for the American style, which is first names. So everyone called her "Kyoko."
Barb: I’ve had a similar problem with my Korean manhwa assignments sometimes...
GJ: Unfortunately NO ONE involved had read ahead to see that there would be actual story points based on the fact that using a first name in Japan is a big deal, with all kinds of status and role implications. Toren Smith warned me there was trouble coming, but that was only after some issues had been published and we didn't know how to turn back.
PC: Yes, Del Rey always makes a big deal out of what a big deal no suffix means...
GJ: It's good to think this stuff through. Sometimes it IS a big deal. In this case, there was a story in which one of the guys brought in a kitten named Kyoko. And the kitten gets lost, so the characters are going around yelling "Kyoko! Kyoko!" And the human Kyoko gets insulted because they're supposed to be calling her "Manager." She takes this as an offensive intimacy. With sexual implications. So I had to figure out how to give the kitten a name based on "Kyoko" that she would find insulting. The results were...highly unsatisfying to everyone involved.
PC: Oh yes... I just was thinking "it's probably exactly that sort of experience that led to them putting that boilerplate explanation in the front of every one of their manga."
GJ: Yes, introductions can be helpful. Context is good.
PC: Even Barb remembers that story now. All of us adapters and even translators are terrified that doing something one way will come back around to bite us later... since we can't read ahead, and no one else ever seems to do so for us
GJ: I argued hard for it to be changed in the most recent reprint. But the budget didn't have room. So it will sit there humiliating me forever.
PC: So I feel like, in the factory that has a huge sign on the wall that says "NO OPEN-TOED SHOES!!!", you're the guy who got a forklift on his toe back in the day, which led to the sign... it's the Gerard Jones Memorial Boilerplate Explanation of Japanese Relationship Suffixes. We salute you.
GJ: Except with credited work it's like, "No Open-Toed Shoes Because Gerard Jones Got His Stupid Foot Broken."
PC: Soooo... One time Barb interviewed Grant Morrison, who, talking about the growing dominance of video games in the entertainment industry, closed the interview with something like, "In 5 years everything will be games. Everything."
PC: Setting aside whether everything is now video games or not...Where would you say we're headed? Us comic-manga-anime-novel-entertainment type folks? In your opinion...
GJ: I think Grant's overestimating the power of games. I just went to a video game conference in England and everybody was complaining about how the game market is so subservient to movies and TV. Too many games based on characters from other media. I think it's natural for die-hards in every medium to fear and resent every other medium. This "synergy" business makes everyone adjust to everyone else. Also...people will always like to play games, but they'll also always like to surrender to a storyteller's control. There will always be non-interactive media where you don't GET to take matters into your own hands. That's most of the fun.
PC: Yeah, well, but setting that part aside...
GJ: I think the "graphic novel" as a form has carved out a turf that isn't going away anytime soon. But it also may become less hip. Don't know if we'll keep seeing things that get the attention of Persepolis, for instance. But it's more than a fad: it will survive. And there will still be superheroes in some graphic, readable form. But...will the 32 page monthly comic survive? There I'll pull an "I don't know."
PC: Ooh not that we're quite closing yet-- barb wants to talk about Killing Monsters a bit more because we really respect them prose things you did...
Barb: The two things I got out of Killing Monsters are: one, that fascinating kind of connection to 9-11 about how comics and pop culture helped some kids through that trauma...which shows that comics can be more than just escapist fare... and two, how he said that both the male and female audience identify with the active character, not the passive one, which has been the industry's problem when writing female characters.
GJ: I like Barb's comments. And yeah, that's been a problem with female characters. The reader must IDENTIFY. Male readers will objective a female character to an extent, but they also have to be willing to become her. I think I mentioned the 8th grade boy who said he liked Buffy because "Sarah Michelle Gellar is hot." But in further conversation it became clear that he was really fused with the character, too. If you take that "she's hot" too literally and think that's all you need to give male readers...they lose interest fast.
And girls certainly have no interest in reading a female character who is hard to inhabit imaginatively.
Barb: Exactly, amen.
PC: Who is your favorite female character you've ever written?
GJ: No immediate answer jumps to mind. I liked Margo Lane in The Shadow Strikes.
PC: That's a good answer
GJ: But, as bizarre as they were, I think my favorites were a couple of the women in The Trouble with Girls. Especially Brett Ashley, the nice simple girl from Lester's home town who turns out to be a CIA agent. But Maxi Scoops was fun too, after she evolved out of the usual pesky-female-reporter shtick.
PC: We liked Willy and Gerry and their cutting-through-the-crap ways...
GJ: Yeah, the boys were great characters.
PC: Barb liked Maxi.
GJ: Yay! Maxi actually came to life for us after a few issues. Her impatience with Lester was very heartfelt. A lot us in there.
PC: For a second I thought you meant came to life like how Alan claims he actually met John Constantine in a bar one time
GJ: I'm afraid I don't have Alan's imagination. ...I wish...
PC: Now, to get back to what you were saying about the way we're all heading... I have some thoughts
GJ: Please share. I'll comment as we go.
PC: 1. I used to say "comics will never die, because too many of us want to make them." but that was because I thought that all such people would keep reading comics. Lots of creators I could name these days actually don't read any comics any more.
GJ: I guess that's where the internet can come in. Comics as blogs. They'll never die because people want to make them...but who reads other people's blogs?
PC: 2. Marvel's earnings recently were higher than they predicted, because, they say, because of the Iron Man movie (you notice no one mentions the latest Hulk movie). But that Marvel expects that their next quarter will dive more than one might think... because there's no new Marvel movie coming out in that time. Sony is hurting now that it's been a while since Spider-Man 3, too, I hear. And I feel like... wow, I knew the flimsies (single-issues) weren't enough, but even the underwear and t-shirts and toys and things aren't enough...?
PC: And yeah, well, most people don't read most other people's blogs, to answer your question. So...it feels like we're coming to a huge change-or-die moment in comics.
GJ: I think superheroes are good for several more years as movie fodder. Maybe longer. But...will people necessarily want comics about the same characters?
PC: Right.
GJ: There were no Titanic comics or Forrest Gump comics. Superhero movies can exist in the absence of the medium that created the genre. So how do comics change? ...I wonder if the sense of "comics" as a unified whole has to go away.
PC: Ooooh
GJ: There's the superhero biz, which may struggle on as an aspect of movie-licensing. And there's the whole arty-graphic-novel niche. And manga, which most comics people even now see as something other.
PC: Other? Oh, you mean they see it as Not Comics. Yeah.
GJ: And of course comic STRIPS, which few people in comic books have laid claim to for a long time. So...the medium, the use of sequential drawings, usually with words injected into them, probably isn't going anywhere. But the subcultural definition...this increasingly tenuous definition of Persepolis and Spider-Man as somehow part of the same world... Why keep that going? It will be interesting to see what bookstores do with comics in the future. It makes sense to me that Persepolis would be in Literature or Memoir... Road to Perdition would be in Mystery... And then there'd be a separate section for Superheroes. Or maybe that's what the Comics and Graphic Novel sections would become.
PC: Yes, certain people I could name complain that their works have not done well recently because bookstores "didn't know where to put them"
GJ: You could add me to that list. Borders and B&N put Men of Tomorrow in Graphic Novels. But people in that section are usually not looking for books that are 400 pages of text with hardly any pictures. And people who might have been intrigued had they found it in Media Studies, American History, General Non-Fiction, whatever...never saw it.
PC: Yeah.
GJ: I have to say, though...I don't yet see any desire to rethink this on the part of bookstore managers.
PC: Yeah again
GJ: But it would be an interesting change.
PC: You notice we aren't talking about comic shop retailers at all. Which I think speaks for itself...
GJ: Would comics flourish as "another way to tell that kind of story"? Or would they fade quickly because they'd lost that core "I'm into Comics so I'm going to the Graphic Novel section" audience? I'll just say that I HOPE comics find a way to survive. They've been a huge part of my life and I think there's still a vital community centered on them. Maybe the secret is to find what we really like about them and keep THAT alive...and be willing to let go of much of what we've meant by "comics" for the last few decades.
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