[The following special feature appears in Shards #6, New Blood #25, and Blood of Ten Chiefs #14. Note that the 2 photographs (and corresponding captions) originally printed with this feature are not included in this archive. --MK]
As I promised (threatened?) in the editorial to last months comics, here's the first installment of my stream of semi-consciousness recollections of the trip that Wendy, Will and Ann Eisner, Brian Stelfreeze, Christine Walsh (who, by the way, answers to "Stine") and I made to Japan the last week of October 1994. Hope you enjoy! - RP
Up to and including Tuesday,
October 25.
I've got one thing to say about a ten-and-a-half hour trip to Japan, and that is: Thank heaven for business class. But I am getting ahead of myself...
Around the beginning of October, I got a phone call from Wendy. In and of itself, this is no biggie; we speak to each other frequently when she is in California working on the Elfquest animated film. This call was not of the everyday flavor.
"Hi! I just got a call from Fred Schodt and it looks like I'm going to Japan."
Oh, I thought. Well, that's different.
Seems Fred, who authored "Manga! Manga!", the definitive book on Japanese comics, had been approached by representatives of Osamu Tezuka Productions (the Japanese analog of Walt Disney Studios here in the U.S.) and asked to suggest the names of American comic artists to participate in a multi-cultural comic book conference - actually, a sort of feasibility study - to be held in Tokyo. In less than a month. The Tezuka Productions people wanted artists from as many of the American comic book "disciplines" as possible; at the same time, budgetary constraints limited the actual number of warm bodies to be invited.
So Fred pondered and picked and chose and suggested, and when the short list was compiled, it included Will Eisner, who is as close to an elder statesman of American comics as we have; Brian Stelfreeze, of Gaijin Studios, who produces a wide spectrum of mainstream and alternative comic work; and Wendy Pini, who would represent both women cartoonists as well as the longest running American alternative comic series.
"So... you're going to Japan, huh? Have a great time, and don't forget to bring me back something!" If I appear to have been less than heartbroken that she alone was going, the truth of the matter was that Wendy and I had talked about making the trip to the Far East for some years. She, being a true Japanophile, looked forward to the prospect with great enthusiasm. I, on the other hand, having seen the movie "Black Rain" once too often, and identifying all too well with Andy Garcia's unfortunate character, had my reservations. Tokyo was, in my "Blade Runner" soaked imagination, far too alien a world for me to be comfortable. That Wendy would fulfill a dream, in the company of her peers, was a wonderful gift from the fates. That I would hold the fort back home in Poughkeepsie was just fine with me.
Two days after the first call, she phoned again.
"Hi. Will Eisner said yes, but he wants to bring his wife Ann, so Tezuka Productions is going to spring for spouses as well. You wanna go to Japan?"
Well, honestly now, how - in spite of everything I've just said - could I not? I'm a comic book publisher, for crying out loud! Whatever qualms I may have had, Japan is the place where they publish comics the size of telephone directories. On a weekly basis. That cost a couple of dollars to buy. That sell millions of copies. I had to see this stuff live and in person.
So thank heaven for business class. It has all the amenities of first class travel: free drinks, real mixed nuts instead of teeny astronaut baggies of peanuts, great food. Oh, perhaps the champagne in first class is a year or two older, but after the second one, who cares? And it has LEG ROOM! I don't care what the airline commercials suggest; folding my six-foot-two-inch frame into a coach seat for more than about four hours is not travel, it's torture.
Thus, a little after noon on October 25, 1994, we lifted off out of Los Angeles International Airport, chasing the setting sun westward to the Land of the Rising Sun.
To be continued...