ANDREW FARAGO: It is May 3, 2007, and I am talking to Jason Thompson, author of the forthcoming Manga: The Complete Guide, published by Del Rey. Let's start by discussing your day job with Viz Media...

JASON THOMPSON: It'd probably be easier to think about Viz in terms of the job that I had. I still do some freelance work for them as a manga editor. But I worked for them [as a full-time staff editor] from 1996 to 2006. I'm just one of the folks who does the behind-the-scenes labor — not actually translating, but supervising the translations of manga, and occasionally seeking out new licenses. But mostly just double-checking translations, editing sound effects, writing cover copy, and all the kind of stuff that's necessary second-hand work when you're bringing over someone else's creative property.

FARAGO: What are some of the titles that you've overseen in your capacity as a Viz editor?

THOMPSON: The first manga I edited was, I'm embarrassed to say, the video-game adaptation manga Nightwarriors: Darkstalker's Revenge. I then moved up to the heights, I believe, of the Silent Mobius manga, the No Need for Tenchi! manga, and finally on to the dizzying peaks of Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z, which [former Viz editor] Trish Ledoux gave to me. I was very proud of that, because those were titles that, of course, I and every other fanboy of the time knew about. It was a real honor that Trish was willing to give them to me.

It was a great deal of fun. At the time, Viz, like Dark Horse and even Tokyopop for a while, published manga in monthly comics format before republishing it as graphic novels. I had the idea that manga could compete with American comics in terms of monthly comic books, so I tried my best to make every issue worth buying, with lots of bonus features and letter columns and fan art. No Need for Tenchi! had some made-up nonsense where I had the characters narrate the letter column in character, using clip art from the manga.

Of course, ultimately it turned out that there was no point to having manga come out in monthly comics issues, because it's already all there waiting to be translated, and the faster you get it into people's hands, the better. And it does generally read pretty quickly, so it's not a great value [in monthly format] compared to some insanely detailed comic by, I dunno, Mark Oakley or... name me an American indy comic artist.

FARAGO: You grew up in Northern California...

THOMPSON: Yeah. It's kind of funny that I ended up moving back to the city where I was born, San Francisco. I spent all of my childhood and teenage years in Healdsburg, which is about an hour north. It's pretty rural. Me and my brother and sister weren't close enough to visit anyone else, or else we were too lazy, so we were pretty much isolated, with just our books and our videotapes and our comic books and our D&D; supplements all day.

FARAGO: And that planted the seeds for you to go into comics?

THOMPSON: Yeah. I wanted to do comics when I was growing up, but I wasn't really aware of manga at the time. This was in the early '80s. Even when I was a little kid, I was into giant monsters and stuff like that, and I could name the Japanese giant monsters from UHF television. But when I was in high school, I was really into horror novels and other fiction, mostly genre fiction, and I wanted to be a novelist. It wasn't until I got to college that I really discovered anime and manga. At the same time, I had a friend who was really into indy comics, and who made me read Grant Morrison and Neil Gaiman and Rick Veitch and Scott McCloud and Joe Matt and other folk like that.

FARAGO: What were the first manga that you read?

THOMPSON: The first manga that I actually read was probably Battle Angel Alita or Here is Greenwood. These were both titles I was familiar with from the anime club at UC San Diego. I watched anime before I read manga. I had seen Ninja High School when I was in high school, so I was aware of Ben Dunn's OEL manga before I was aware of regular manga and all the things he was parodying. All I knew about Ninja High School when I first saw it was that it had a lot of sexual humor, which I was sort of fascinated and repelled by — just because of the way I was, not because of Ben Dunn.

I have a lot of sympathy for people who have negative first impressions of manga, because I was kind of a snob about what I read in those days, and my first impression of manga was that, you know, the eyes were big! And it was sexist! And furthermore, there were a lot of giant robots, which I wasn't into either. Giant robots are probably the part of Japanese pop culture I'm least interested in.

But over the years, in college, I became more interested in manga. Of course, I was already into comics and animation. But I didn't discover manga, per se, until a little later, after my comic brain had already been wired with Carl Barks and Uncle Scrooge and Tintin and Asterix and so forth. The manga came later.

FARAGO: What did you study in college?

THOMPSON: I studied English and creative writing. I had a very impractical scheme that I was going to become a writer at age 16, like Ramsey Campbell, a British horror novelist who I was a huge fan of. But if I failed that, I could always console myself that H.P. Lovecraft didn't get anything published worth talking about until he was 27. So if I totally messed up, I could always wait until I was unthinkably old, because that was good enough for H.P. Lovecraft.

FARAGO: What led you from UC San Diego to Viz? You actually graduated high school at a young age.

THOMPSON: I skipped a grade, so I graduated high school at age 16. I got out of college in '95, when I was 20. I didn't really have much idea of what I wanted to do with my life. I knew that I wanted to self-publish comics. In fact, my first idea was to start self-publishing The Stiff, but I ended up holding off on that for a long time, thankfully.

I was at a friend's house, the friend who first introduced me to manga via Ninja High School, actually. He was a fan of Animerica Magazine, and he'd also started buying some of the first anime that was available commercially. I didn't even know there was a commercial market for anime; it was just some stuff that existed in fansubs. At the time I was very into anime, because I'd gotten into it in college, but I wasn't really aware of the existence of an American market for it.

Anyway, he showed me an ad in Animerica with Sailor Moon saying, "Come apply for a job at Viz if you're a fan of video games, anime, and manga!" This turned out to be an application for the job of editor of Game On! USA.

[Game On! USA was a short-lived magazine from Viz, edited by Thompson, aimed at video game and anime fandom. —Ed.]

FARAGO: And that describes you? You're a fan of video games, anime, and manga?

Cover from the short-lived magazine Game On! USA.

THOMPSON: Actually, my friend had to encourage me to go for the job. I wasn't certain that I knew enough about video games. And if you look at the magazine that we ended up producing, you can probably tell, unfortunately. But I was game for it. I had been into video games as a kid, but when I was in college I sort of let myself slip. So I did a little crash course in video games, and I got an interview with Viz. I managed to give a good enough impression that I was called back for a second interview. Really, though, I was pretty ignorant about video games, and I think the only reason I got the job was that I was sick on the second interview and had a very sore throat. I could hardly say anything. I sounded very deep and commanding, but I couldn't really speak very much. So my guess is that first off I had a very cool voice, and secondly I couldn't talk much and make a fool of myself, and thirdly, look, I care about this job so much I came even though I'm sick! That's my theory about how I got a job at Viz.

FARAGO: Do you think you were up against people who didn't have your level of education?

THOMPSON: They said that they had lots of applications from anime otaku, but no applications from anyone who had an English major. So, yeah, I counted my blessings, and I sort of jumped into this. In college, most of my friends were nerds, but most of the people in the anime club were engineering and cognitive science majors. I was the only English major in my group of friends. So I was sort of surprised that I ended up getting a job. [Laughs.]

FARAGO: Viz in 1996 was much a different company than it is today in 2007.

THOMPSON: I'm sure that if I came to Viz now, with the credentials I had then, I wouldn't even get an interview. Manga and anime were so much less well known. I'd taken a comics class in my senior year of college, and I'd written a paper on manga. My teacher was French; he knew about Eurocomics. He was into Schuiten and Peeters and people like that, who I'm into, too, but he didn't know anything about manga. So I was able to slip by with my paper on manga, the mysterious art form I knew about from talking to people at the anime club.

But, yeah, Viz was different back then. There were only about 20 people when I started working there. It was a very small company. Seiji Horibuchi and Satoru Fuji [the co-founders of Viz, and the company's first president and vice president] were involved in the day-to-day operations. My immediate superiors were [former Viz editors] Toshi Yoshida and Trish Ledoux. They were the people who interviewed me, and I worked very closely with all of them. Carl Horn [former Viz editor, now employed at Dark Horse], at that point, was not working at the office. I believe he was studying for a law degree. He ended up dropping out of school, basically, to pursue a full-time career in the anime and manga business.

I said I'd come to Viz with some knowledge of anime and manga, but it was a continual education talking to these people, and talking to Julie Davis [editor of Animerica] and people like that. Patrick Macias [former Viz editor] wasn't working there yet. He was actually my roommate when I moved to San Francisco. Through me, he got a job at the warehouse at Viz and moved his way up.

FARAGO: And Patrick Macias is in Japan now, writing about manga and anime full-time, right?

THOMPSON: He's editing Otaku USA, which I guess he's positioning as a spiritual successor to Animerica magazine and PULP. In the interest of full disclosure, I'm writing for Otaku USA, too. PULP folded due to low sales, and Animerica became a sort of advertising circular — at least, it's not the same magazine it was when Julie and Trish were editing it.

FARAGO: Was Matt Thorn [manga scholar and pioneering authority on shoujo manga] part of Viz at that point?

THOMPSON: Matt Thorn never actually worked in the Viz office. I only saw him a couple of times. I was aware of the shoujo manga he edited, and he had a column on manga in the early Animerica, but I only saw him in real life once or twice. Everyone's comment on him was that he looked like a shoujo manga character, because he was blond and sort of looked like a young Mark Hamill. I didn't really get to know him personally, although I did exchange a lot of emails with him later.

Cover to Mai the Psychic Girl #1, one of the first comic books published by Viz, in partnership with Eclipse.

FARAGO: Do you know how much product Viz would put out in a typical month in the mid-'90s?

THOMPSON: Viz put out about one to three graphic novels a month, and about ten-to-fifteen monthly comics. It'd take between five and seven issues of a monthly comic to collect enough material for a graphic novel. Monthly comics were considered, at that point, the loss leaders for Viz. They would either break even or make a slim profit, but then the work would be done so that Viz could release the same material as a graphic novel. Of course, eventually people wised up and stopped buying the monthly comics.

They had already stopped doing this by the time I worked there, but in the '80s, there was a time when Viz was releasing weekly comics. That's how they initially released their launch titles: Kamui, Area 88, and Mai the Psychic Girl. They were all originally released weekly, because they were trying to replicate the Japanese magazine reading experience of one chapter a week. You'd have to talk to Satoru Fuji to make sure, but I believe this was their attempt to counteract the inevitable slowness that set in when you got one chapter every month, when they started doing regular monthly comics.