MacDirectory magazine is the premiere creative lifestyle magazine for Apple enthusiasts featuring interviews, in-depth tech reviews, Apple news, insights, latest Apple patents, apps, market analysis, entertainment and more.
Issue link: https://digital.macdirectory.com/i/1234839
Q: How did you discover Japanese manga and decide it was what you wanted to do? Growing up, I started off watching animated series like Pokemon, Digimon, and Rurouni Kenshin. I only got into manga after my friends introduced me to the popular series Bleach. Even when you've caught up with the episodes, then you have the manga that's already ahead with the canon storyline. After that, I started reading other manga series like One Piece and Naruto; all the popular shonen manga stories (manga aimed at boys). Those were my springboard to other things. Prior to that, I was very into western comics like X-Men and Spider-Man. But I found that I really liked how Japanese comics were produced and how they usually have one linear storyline, as compared to western series that can be hard to follow with their branching stories. I also like the idea of the story and the art being spearheaded by one person, along with the rate at which content is produced. It inspired me to create something similar and explore that. Q: Are you mostly self-taught? How did you start drawing and telling stories? Thankfully we live in the digital age so you can learn a lot on your own with the Internet. Back when I started, I used sites like DeviantArt and YouTube, with channels like Mark Crilley. That gave me the idea of wanting to build my own audience, becoming independent, and eventually breaking into the industry. I learned most of my skills through YouTube and other online resources, joining art communities, and talking to other artists with similar goals. The process of doing this helped me build my own audience and grew my network, which is how I met people like Frederick Jones and Raymond Brown to join them in founding Saturday AM. Q: How has working with Saturday AM impacted your life? Our mission at Saturday AM is to bring more diversity to the world of comics and manga, which really resonated with me and helped me evolve both as a person and within my work. I grew up in Nigeria, but the Japanese content I consumed showed mostly characters that were either Japanese or European. There were characters of color here and there, but they were never as prominent. At that time, I still thought of manga and comics as two very different things, even though they are essentially the same. My understanding was that in Japanese manga, everything had to be Japanese; the characters had to be Japanese; the reading direction had to be right-to-left as in Japan. Now I know that if you want to be published in the West, you should probably write your book left-to-right, but these things went over my head back then. The same is true for my views on diversity in comics. It never felt important to me and, it influenced my work without me knowing. When I joined Saturday AM and started to really look at diversity