When its comes to music and books 'OK' is not good enough. We need creative work that floors us! That we can't believe the beauty and brains and style and cool of. 'OK' can kiss my arse.
My personality has become one that tends to focus and move forward, yes. But I was not like that when I was 16 or 23, I think. I was much more uncertain, unconfident and inwards looking. Then via certain techniques I learned from psychotherapy, magick and just life in general I become more focused, confident and happy within myself.
Most comic book creators consider about making characters that people recognize and that can carry across many books. Something that becomes a trademark. For me I have always just followed IDEAS, and that takes me into a whole range of things.
Writing about a place is, of course, one good way of feeling close to it, feeling you have made something out of your interaction with that place. It's like a marker of your own experience, of that time in your life.
Me being from a Celtic culture that tends to emphasize directness, conflict, openness has a big effect on my living in Japan, which tends to focus on indirectness, avoidance of conflict and keeping things close to your chest. So that has led to quite a lot of cultural misunderstandings in dealing with this East Asian culture I live in.
An aspect of 'post-modern' approach to history is to include the mistakes and the prejudices of the era, without modernizing them or 'correcting' them according to our modern ideals.
Despite the variety my books reflect my, perhaps foolish, tendency to place artistic above financial concerns; of enjoying the more mature themes in whatever creative form; of being on a mission to show that comics are not just for kids; and on a wider level of standing up for individuality against conformity.
Who are we to be so arrogant as to say 'now WE know what's best, THAT era was full of daft ideas' etc. There will be plenty things we take as normal and good now that future generations will look back at in horror or amusement.
Comics can do any kind of story. It's words and pictures, the only things it can't do are sing and dance.
The thing is that I don't normally think in terms of manga when I'm writing. Sounds odd from someone who has is getting a reputation for doing manga related work. But I would say that my scripts are NOT manga at the stage of my writing process, they are just comic book stories in a more general sense.
There are many things I still don't know or don't do well in comic books. It's more a question of having the will to do something creative on a subject that seems interesting. Then just giving it a bloody good bash - that's the main thing.
Mistakes and prejudices are as interesting as anything else. They reveal a lot about the mind set and culture of the time under consideration.
