I'm two columns into
Uncharted Territory, and I've already strayed into territory that's charted (mea culpa): Adam Warren's superhero/manga mashup,
Empowered Vol. 1, made its debut at #21 on the Diamond's March 2007 Top 100 Graphic Novel chart. Rendered in luxurious pencils,
Empowered is the story of the titular superheroine (Emp for short) who, due to her skin-tight, body-issue-aggravating and fragile supersuit, ends up bound and gagged after every dustup with a villain: to make matters worse, her supergroup bullies her. In the course of the first volume, she hooks up with a supportive beau, Thugboy, befriends the boozy Ninjette and babysits an opinionated alien demonlord who resides in a containment unit (i. e. alien bondage wear) on her coffee table.
Of course, Warren's overnight Direct Market success was years in the making: the cartoonist can be considered one of the first practitioners of OEL (Original English Language) manga, which the New Englander began experimenting with while he was still attending the Joe Kubert School of Cartoon and Graphic Art in the mid-'80s. Besides lessons in figure drawing, Warren explained "the most important thing I acquired during my time in [.. school] was a serious work ethic ... albeit a work ethic acquired in a rather goofy manner. For most of the time I was there, I burned through my classwork and art assignments as quickly as I possibly could (though "hacked" might be a more accurate description than "burned"), so that I could work on early versions of
Dirty Pair comics in my free time. I must've done at least 60 or 70 pages of original art outside my classes, including the portfolio of
Dirty Pair work that would eventually be part of the Studio Proteus proposal to license an original English-language DP comic."
The Dirty Pair is a manga created by Haruka Takachiho: it concerns the sci-fi adventures of two babelicious, genetically modified, well-armed "trouble consultants," Kei and Yuri. Although the anime production studio was initially resistant, Toren Smith of Studio Proteus used his connections, his writing skills and Warren's art to convince Takachiho himself to license DP and allow them to create new English-language stories: To my knowledge, they're still some of the only U. S. creators to effectively franchise a manga property. Smith left the project after the first three miniseries, and so Warren went solo for the four-part
The Dirty Pair: Sim Hell. Left to Warren's devices, the U. S. version of DP began to shift in style and tone: in the first issue of
Sim, the art is still very much beholden to Takachiho, and action and the sci-fi milieu is emphasized. By #4, the cartooning has loosened up: the figure-work becomes more central than the backgrounds, and the comedic element comes to the fore. By the time Warren completed the trade
The Dirty Pair: Run from the Future in 2001, he had basically developed the super-slick, pouty-lipped, luscious-bootied character designs, cinematic layouts, bff banter, throwaway sight-gags and pop-culture savvy references that survived, pretty much intact, into
Empowered.
As a pioneer of OEL manga, Warren has become something of a mentor: he's been cited as an influence by Chynna Clugston, creator of
Blue Monday, and wrote the introduction for the 2006 book
Mangaka America. Warren is both impressed and shows concern for newcomers to the form: "Becky Cloonan, Svetlana Chmakova, Corey Lewis and all the other artists [...] are producing some damn fine work. Only one thing dismays me about them: the fact that they're emerging into a situation that's effectively the 'worst of both worlds,' meaning worse than either conventional Japanese or American comics. I'm referring to [...] having to be produced as 'straight-to-trade' OGNs, or original graphic novels. Not only is this situation considerably worse than the world of 'real' manga, almost all of which run in anthologies (and are then collected in potentially lucrative
tankoubon), but it's even far less financially viable than doing a serialized American comic ... especially a
mainstream comic, which often can boast handsome page-rates that beggar the relatively small advances one usually sees on an OGN. Also, don't forget that, in the OGN system, you must produce 160+ pages (
200+, in my case) before you actually earn all of this relatively small advance... Ouch.
"Not that I see any easy way out of the current 'OEL/ OGN' paradigm ... Still, I'd like to hope that the next wave of manga-influenced artists might find themselves in a more advantageous production environment. Fingers crossed, here."
Warren speaks from experience: he struggled, freelancing, between DP and
Empowered: these experiences figure largely into the "comedy of failure" that informs the latter.
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Esther Pearl Watson
Next article:
On Empowered and the Comedy of Failure
The Dirty Pair: Sim Hell #1 [©1993 Haruka Takachiho, English language version ©1993 Adam Warren and Studio Proteus]
Kristy Valenti currently works for The Comics Journal and Fantagraphics Books, Inc.
Uncharted Territory is © Kristy Valenti, 2008
