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Behind the Scenes of 1 World Manga:
An Interview With Author Annette Roman of VIZ Media
Youthink!: What's the best part of writing 1 World Manga?
Annette Roman: Being surprised by what my characters do or say. Who knew that Rei was a good student!? I'm grateful to Paquita for naming Rei's animal spirit guide "Fluffy" for me. And I can't wait to find out what it means that Fluffy was dreaming of a prince dancing with a princess in Passage 5. Is he an enchanted fairy tale prince under some kind of curse that forces him to help others to atone for some crime he committed, perhaps …?
Collaborating with the artist, Leandro Ng, is also wonderful—when he takes something I wrote with my detailed instructions for how to draw a panel, and comes up with a better idea that brings out the story or characters even more and we toss it back and forth and together come up with an even better idea. It's great when Leandro understands what I'm going for and finds a way to bring it out using his talents with perspective and panel placement and storyboard structure.
Sometimes I give him an impossible sequence of scenes and he tells me he was cursing me and pounding the table as he worked, but he manages to give me a page where it all comes together beautifully anyway. By the third issue, I understood what kind of pages he liked to draw, and he understood what effects I wanted and why I wrote impossible pages and how to adjust them so they were possible and to create the effect I was going for.
YT!: What's the worst part?
AR: Working weekends and evenings because there isn't enough time during my work week! Trying to find time for creative percolation under deadline pressure.
The sheer terror when I start a new script thinking that maybe I will have no ideas whatsoever and have lost the ability to write creatively and perhaps never had it anyway. (The cure for this is to START TYPING! That, and chocolate rewards …)
YT!: Is there any character or episode that you especially like above the others, and why?
AR: I like several of the young women characters: Ayeesha, Somalee and Rajani. They're so spunky and tough and no-nonsense, yet warm and caring. I wish I were like that!
I like the way the plot works in Passage 4: Child Soldiers. We're always trying to fit so much into such a tiny space, but that issue really feels like it has a beginning, middle, and end, and the character of Devante is complex and changes a lot. I like the role reversal here, too, between Rei and Fluffy. And the poignant ending. Leandro got the effect of the firefly lighting the way for Rei nicely, even better than I pictured it in my mind.
YT!: Have you always been interested in development? If not, how did your interest form?
AR: I've always felt an obligation to share my good fortune with others. I'm lucky to even exist, after all. My father is a Holocaust survivor, and my mother is a German Protestant who became a refugee at the end of World War II. In other words, the German Nazi government tried to kill my father and other Jews during the war, but after the war, my mother, a German, married my father and they had me.
For as long as I can remember, I was always aware of the hardships my parents and their families had been through, and how bad governments and illegitimate authority can harm a nation and its people. My mother's brother was killed and my father's cousin and uncle were murdered in the war. And those are just the close family members. My mother married my father with the hope of healing some of the hatred between Jews and Germans. I grew up wanting to help heal people and the world too.
Nowadays, it's developing countries that are ravaged by wars and weak economies and deserve help from more fortunate nations and people. The rest of us are doing better just out of luck—because of where we were born—or at the expense of poorer nations, by taking their resources and not paying them fairly and turning the other way and not sacrificing a little to offer a helping hand. That's not fair.
YT!: Is it hard to present such serious topics in a fun way?
AR: It seems odd to have humor in a book about such serious topics as AIDS and poverty, doesn't it? The way I handle that is to keep the humor separate from the details of the tragic themes. The humor is in the characters' personalities and the way they relate to each other. My intention is to have the humor be part of the warmth of the book, in the relationships between the characters and their personal foibles.
So, for example, it's funny (I hope!) in Passage 1 when Rei tries to sell his master in his rooster form to Ayeesha to lay eggs for her, because:
- Roosters don't lay eggs.
- He doesn't have the right to sell his master.
- His master could change into something else at any moment (and threatens to change into an animal that will beat Rei up to punish him).
So this makes fun of Rei's ignorance and arrogance and his competitive relationship with his master (a typical manga relationship) but not of Ayeesha's poverty. Hmm … why is it jokes aren't funny once you explain them? But mostly people think it's funny that the rooster gets drunk in that issue. Especially my mother. In fact, that's the main thing they remember about it … Sigh …
YT!: What kind of feedback would you like from your readers?
AR: Any! All! What made you laugh? What did you learn that you didn't know? Which characters do you like or dislike? Why? What was boring? What made you really want to turn the page to find out what happens next? How would you like to see the characters change? If you reread the comic, how did your opinion of it change on multiple readings? What did you notice that you didn't notice the first time? What issues would you like to see explored in the future? What characters and settings would you like to see in the future?
(Note: Readers can email Annette with their feedback at annette.roman@viz.com.)
YT!: What's the best feedback you've received?
AR: When I was at the International Communication for Development conference, I met some young people from Nairobi who had been street kids themselves for a while. And one of them was saying he found the first passage really inspiring. He liked to see that the heroine found her own solution to her situation to make her life improve. So that was inspiring, to see that someone who's had a really rough life, and has moved up from a really rough life, found the comics inspiring.
YT!: Anything else you'd like to mention?
AR: No animals, real or magical, were harmed in the making of this manga. But sometimes my African peach-faced lovebird (Dutch blue mutation) sits on my keyboard and I type on his toes and he nips me, then dips his head to have his neck feathers petted.
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