Interviews Interview With Iain Gill By LJ Douresseau November 1, 2004 - 10:27 Continuing our series of interviews with winners of TOKYOPOP's The Rising Stars of Manga 3 contest, we offer a question and answer session with Iain Gill. Iain won $500 and an honorary plaque for his story tale, "Dorothy Needs Needles and Knives." Iain's highly-informative answers and witty asides make for a rousing Mr. Charlie #39: Would you mind introducing yourself to the readers? IAIN: I am Iain Gill, aka Zombieboy aka Organism of Profane Arcana Studios / Consumeordie.com. A 26 year old classically trained artist, writer and dance teacher, I received my BA from Chapman University in Orange CA. I live in Anaheim with my wife and our four dogs... spend much of my time now trying to remodel our new home, schedule time to write and of course the occasional second or two to paint or draw. In another universe where I would have more time I would spend it on good video games, my mates and watching more of my sickeningly vast (and blob-like growing) DVD library. Would you mind also introducing the readers to the characters and concept of your winning entry? IAIN: The story itself is really a simple update or re-imagining of the traditional legend regarding the river Styx. I decided to update the tale when I was traveling through a tube in Moscow, Russia, where to my surprise many of the cars where still built largely of wood, many more of them seeming to be of their original construction almost a hundred years before. So much of it was sparked by that fact. As for the characters themselves they simply came out of some weird recess of my mind and found their way onto my keyboard as most my characters do. There was no underlying reason or design behind their creation, they simply emerged in the story and made the world their own-and so it has stayed. The characters are a young girl (Dorothy) and the other three are the brogue spewing Ferrymen of the Styx Rail System. The format of the story itself was far too short to delve deeper into the world in which they live (so to speak) and my envisioning of Purgatory and the rest of the Dead Realms-but they have tapped an opening into that place for me and I have continued to work on bringing that world to a better more thorough light in the near future. In the meantime I am still learning about these characters and noting their adventures into my humble computer. At what point were you first exposed to manga and anime, and what were your initial reactions to it? IAIN: I was, oddly enough, raised on it. In the area in which I grew up a lot of my classmates where Korean or Japanese and usually had some toy or manga it was based on handy in the schoolyard. I also grew up in a time when the original "Voltron," "Robotech" ("Macross" for those too young to know what that was) and "Battle of the Planets." In those days, the Castle of Caglistro, AKIRA, Robot Carnival and the extraordinarily limited amount of VHS translations available to us (usually highly edited) were coveted materials. Since this was long before the advent of SunCoast Video or anime sections in video store period, it was basically an underground thing, something that you had to know someone to get hold of fan-sub copies of shows that would not surface here for more than a decade if at all-which left a lot of us to join or organize fan groups, groups that were later led into evolutional extinction by the re-emergence of anime and manga into the mainstream. So as far as my impressions, the medium has always been around me, it is the direction in which it has grown and transformed that actually fills me with as mix of sadness and ease. I am selfishly satisfied that manga and anime are so readily available for me now especially since DVD has long destroyed the once sacred argument of Sub-vs-Dub (trust me a long time ago this was far more important than which loser our two partisan system had skimmed from the steaming top of their greasy political parties to throw into the presidential race) and very glad to see the advent of the tankobon in Western society gaining acceptance as a medium of storytelling... on the other hand I am saddened by the death of many of the anime clubs I knew (mine being one to of them), A New Motion and You May Yume!, but times change and I guess the really distressing thing is that the new generation really could give a shit about the history of the medium and therefore are somewhat shortsighted (definitely spoiled) and ignorant as to why a lot of the conventions of the medium are used or what they mean-or why much of the medium and its sub-genres emerged into what they did. I find this lack of interest in any and all things before [the] Fox network and the like picked up shows in the 90's very distressing. What was it about the form that attracted you to manga, and what were the particular titles and creators who appealed to you? IAIN: I think the cinematic quality, the real ability to control pacing (use of pantomime being a perfect example, how many American comics do you see spending nine plus pages to show a specific set of actions strictly by showing it and not verbally describing it?) coupled with my own love for pen and ink (I hated color until I was forced into it at university-where years after it still is a precarious beast to court sometimes) and black and white design and the aesthetics of the designs themselves have always been on a very basic level, quite pleasing to me. My fav works have been (and of course the artist who create them) GREY, Horobi, Jo Jo's Bizarre Adventure (all time favorite), Hell's Angles, Black and White and anything Katsura Terrada basically wipes his ass on. When did you first become aware that there were U.S. based publishers of manga (like Eclipse, Dark Horse, TOKYOPOP, etc.) and what titles did you like? IAIN: I was aware back in the early nineties when Viz started emerging and Toren Smith and his crew at Studio Prometheus were throwing out translations to an unsuspecting comic public... back in those days, Rob Zombie had written an introduction for 3X3 Eyes(!) it was part of what I grew up with. TOKYOPOP didn't honestly exist for me and frankly I had fallen away from the formal fan-ship around the time my own club had died, and I went off to discover, covet and study other things in the world (primarily film and Horror-and some other dark things better left undisclosed ^_^)... but back in the hey-day I loved MAISON IKKOKU, and the Mermaid Saga (still I think Takahashi-sama's best work), I really loved Masamune Shirows's ORION, and of course the aforementioned Yuzo Takada's 3x3eyes which I still don't think has caught up in its translated form to the last original volume I purchased. When did you become aware of TOKYOPOP and the Rising Stars of Manga contest and was this your first entry? IAN: I was actually told about it over the phone as an aside by a friend of mine (Rikki Simons of Shutterbox, Ranklecheck, Reality Check, Invader Zim etc) back I think, in January... it was the first I had heard of it and he said I basically had I think, about four months or so (?) to finish an entry and ship it on in. This was my first entry. Was your entry something you'd been working on for a long time, or was it something new for RSOM? Did you have to rework the concept to make it fit the preconceived notions of what manga is? IAIN: Nope it was an original for the contest, I was having a hard time dealing with the limited page count while trying to introduce brand new characters a new world, give them justifiable motivations and then let them actually do something within the twenty pages allotted. I didn't have to rework anything because it was all original for the contest... How does your work fit in with the "manga style," and I'm asking this knowing that manga encompasses an incredibly broad base of genres and storytelling techniques? IAIN: Basically with the attributes that I described earlier as being the things what appealed to me personally about the medium itself. I've tried (not always successfully) to emulate those same qualities and to bring a cinematic style to my sequential narrative. Is it your goal or dream to be a cartoonist, and how are you working towards that goal in terms of educating yourself about the history, form, and content of comics? IAIN: I actually wish to simply be a story teller, whether it be, sequential narratives (comics), novels, film, tele, I really don't care and I am working towards that goal. Recently I have joined the Horror Writer's Guild, even acquired a very kind agent and am working to start making my mark. As for the history, I spent my time researching it already, and am basically playing catch-up with my mates when they talk about some of the new shit that's coming out (I just don't have the time it seems to keep track of all the new stuff)... Did winning change your long range plans in terms of your work and/or budding career as a cartoonist? IAIN: It certainly helped, I was also something of a propaganda-ist for the new creator cause at the recent conventions in CA speaking at the TOKYOPOP panels, trying to get artists to send their work in because it is basically the only contest of its kind going right now-but to be honest, do what you love, even in the dark of your room or wherever it is you make your drawings or your stories, paint your characters or envision your worlds... make them real, more contests like this will find their way into the world soon enough, practice your skills now, and make your stories for the love of making them-because the industry itself, is like an ignorant spoiled child with a loaded gun, it will cause more harm and destruction than good for budding new creators coming up, so be careful and make sure to where your body armor (read Felipe Smith's piece in RSOM#3, where my story is:::plug::: to get an inside look at the world I'm describing). Do it because you love it, because at the end of the day there is no other reason to put up with the bullshit involved, trust me. ^_^ Spooky-heartfelt wishes and all the best to those out there ready to take the plunge and show us their mettle. Good luck! THANK YOU, Iain. You can visit Mr. Gill at www.profanearcanastudios.com, which is apparently still on the building blocks. Iain's winning entry the rest of the RSoM3 winners can be found in THE RISING STARS OF MANGA 3 book, available at comic specialty shops, at local bookstores, at book chains such as Books-a-Million, or online at places like Amazon.com. In the meantime, talk to me, comic book pros. Hit the clickable name link to holla at me, and visit my movie review website negromancer.com. Praise! If you're a publisher or creator, contact me by hitting the clickable link. You can also read my movie reviews at www.negromancer.com. Holla! © Copyright 2002-2026 by Toon Doctor Inc. - All rights Reserved. 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