MangaVurt

Me colouring up some old linework (2003? 2003?) from my sketchbook. Yeah, it's more Vurt stuff. I once read in an interview that Jeff Noon gave - about his novel being translated into Japansese - "...The Japanese one's great," says Jeff, "but what I'd really like to see is the manga version. I'd love to see Scribble [the main character] with those big eyes..." And so this kind of happened.

The thing is, it was manga that got me drawings comics seriously in the first place... The work of people like Masamune Shirow, Yoshiyuki Sadamoto and Katsuhiro Otomo were like pure, distilled ideas and outlandism compared to any 'Western' comics about... In the mid-nineties the small U.K. monthly mag Manga Mania was the bible, as far as I was concerned... The slightly ironic thing was that from the mid-nineties to the turn of the millennium, even though I was was rabid for it, larger circles weren't bothered with manga at all really. It was a level point between Manga Video's initial 'violent cartoons for teenagers' explosion, and Tokyopop's current dominance of bookstores.

If I can sound even more self-involved, think the linear aspect of my style - although flavoured later on by European comics - definately came from Manga's concise nature. My natural sense of pacing in graphic storytelling is also much, much slower, 'glacial', even - compared to the frame breakdowns in the scripts I artwork...

Not that I'm complaining or owt. The bottom line is though, it's all comics, no matter which way you hold or read 'em. Yay.