Ryoichi Ikegami, the Artist

Immediately below is a profile of Ryoichi Ikegami (by Kaya Oakes) taken from Manga Vizion Vol.1,No.6. I apologize for reprinting it without permission, but I sincerely hope that it attracts more interest in Ryoichi's works currently being published by Viz.

MANGA VIZION IN FOCUS:
Superstar Manga Artist Ryoichi Ikegami! by Kaya Oakes

In an interesting moment in Seijin Suzuki's 1965 classic yakuza/camp film One Generation of Tattoos, a young gambler realizes that he has unwittingly drawn his sensitive younger brother into the shady underworld. Looking intently at his baby brother, the yakuza admonishes him, "This is no place for you. Go back to school!" Suddenly the angle of the camera swings underneath the older brother's face until his tortured visage looms painfully close to the viewer. Surprisingly, his face looks hauntingly like the face in a Ryoichi Ikegami illustration for SANCTUARY. This particular drawing depicts the expression on the face of teenage gangster Akira Hojo as he bids his companion Chiaki Asami farewell. They are parting company to pursue their dreams. Just as Suzuki uses unusual editing and camera techniques to make an otherwise drab gangster story visually punchy and dynamic, so Ikegami manages with inks and brushes to pull all the emotions inside his characters right out into their faces.

Ikegami's first hit, drawn in 1974, was about a high school gang, tough punks who attended a school replete with guns, gangsters, terrorists, and even some very cute girls. GALLANT GANG may appear somewhat crudely drawn when compared to Ikegami's later work, but even its over-the-top story becomes believable when the artist breathes such vivid life into his creations. The hero of the story, emerging from a fight covered with blood and flexing his muscles despite razor blades stuck in his arms and face, still manages to look tough. In an interview printed in ANIMERICA, Anime & Manga Monthly Vol. 1, No. 7, Ikegami said that when GALLANT GANG first appeared in a weekly manga magazine, it "really stood out... All the other manga were so stylized and cartoony." While the comic's premise is rather farfetched, it nonetheless doesn't look corny. Characters are variously handsome or grotesque, but they look like real people.

Ikegami's next big hit starred a young girl gifted with shocking psychic powers. MAI, THE PSYCHIC GIRL , published in English by Viz Comics in 1987, was unique at the time because it was one of the first mainstream comics for boys to feature a female protagonist. Mai is a pretty Japanese teenager forced to battle evil organizations that seek to exploit her powers. One of her greatest nemeses is a young German psychic named Turm. Ikegami's illustration of icy Turm is chilling; her eyes are drawn in such a way that she looks vastly more threatening than innocent Mai.

MAI, THE PSYCHIC GIRL was a success with both young and older readers, but Ikegami next ventured into drawing comics definitely oriented towards adults. WOUNDED SOUL was an action-adventure series which put its female heroine into some very uncomfortable situations involving a large insect and a tree trunk.... Then came CRYING FREEMAN , an enormously successful, long-running series which masterfully depicted both extreme violence and sex. [This month the graphic novel CRYING FREEMAN PERFECT COLLECTION: PORTRAIT OF A KILLER (re-releasing the first two volumes of the CRYING FREEMAN series) goes on sale!-AR] While many of the sexual encounters in the FREEMAN series are rooted in violence, the relationship between the central character, Crying Freeman, and his wife, Emu, is always very tenderly portrayed. In context, their consensual sexual encounters look perfectly natural. But, as Ikegami points out: "If you only concentrate on bits and pieces, it's going to look lurid." Attempts to censor FREEMAN were made in both Japan and the United States, where, in spite of the "For mature readers only" warning on all the covers, it has stirred up quite a bit of controversy.

In Ikegami's next major work, he took a 360-degree turn from the fantasy world of FREEMAN. SANCTUARY is a series about two young men who attempt to change a relatively realistic, contemporary Japan. One joins the yakuza, the Japanese crime syndicate, and the other runs for political office. Ikegami's readers expect handsome men in his manga, and he comes through with dashing Akira Hojo, a rising Mafia don, and the bookish, yet hunky, Chiaki Asami, a political up-and-comer. Ikegami is a genius at depicting the unique faces of the old men who control the Japanese government. Isaoka, the nemesis of our young heroes, has a face straight out of the Tokyo daily papers: a mass of heavy eyebrows, artful wrinkles, sneaky eyes, and poker-faced expressions which explode into fierce anger. Ikegami's ideal as an artist is to draw a manga that "makes it seem as though [the story] could happen in 'real life' ".

Ikegami is currently illustrating an even more shocking, semi-realistic story, one that may be a little too much for some audiences to stomach. THE ACCIDENT is the story of Kyoko, a young Japanese woman who is raped by a group of American soldiers. A young African-American soldier rescues her, and as their relationship evolves, she falls in love with him. When he is killed, she begins a quest to avenge his murder.

What makes THE ACCIDENT so gripping is Ikegami's ability to portray the faces of the American G.I.'s and the young Japanese woman with equal accuracy. One has to imagine that Ikegami has spent tremendous amounts of time sketching the vast variety of American faces to so accurately depict them on paper. Even in SAMURAI CRUSADER (currently appearing right here in MANGA VIZION!) the face of legendary writer Ernest Hemingway is drawn with close attention to his outrageous public persona.

In Shonen Sunday Manga College, a Shogakukan, Inc. publication about Manga artists at work, I saw a photograph of Ikegami's workplace and drawing tools. The image that lingers in my mind is a close-up of Ikegami's drawing hand. The calluses on his fingers are enormous, thickened and hardened from the years he has spent creating characters for his fans all over the world. Imagining the sheer number of hours he's spent coming up with such a bevy of images is absolutely humbling to any aspiring manga artist or writer. When it comes to depicting characters and scenes that are both photorealistic and vividly imaginative, nobody has a more natural gift the Ryoichi Ikegami. With SANCTUARY having ended in Japan, we say "domo arigato," and look forward to Ikegami's next gripping work.

Below is the Ryoichi Ikegami Animerica interview in Animerica Vol.1,No.7 (Introduction by Trish Ledoux and interview by Satoru Fujii). I apologize for reprinting it without permission, but I sincerely hope that it attracts more interest in Ryoichi's works currently being published by Viz. If you get the chance, pick it up. I don't think that Viz has this currently in backstock, but it is worth checking if not for the 8x10 reproduction of the cover of Mai #2 on the cover.

Rodgers and Hammerstein. Lerner and Lowe. Gilbert and Sullivan. When it comes to composing one-of-a-kind works of art, there's nothing like two creators joining their talents to create one unforgettable masterpiece. That's why some of the best writers in the industry these days are lining up for a chance to work with Japanese manga artist Ryoichi Ikegami.

Born in 1944 in Fukui, Japan, Ikegami began drawing his first comic series at the tender age of seventeen. Even then, Ikegami had the magic touch, and his first two collaborative efforts - AIUEO Boy with Kazuo Koike in 1973 and Gallant Gang ("Otoko Gumi") in 1974 with Tetsu Kariya - proved so popular they set the pattern for what would turn out to be one of the manga world's biggest success stories. Although many of his earlier works were written and drawn solo, nowadays Ikegami works almost exclusively with collaborators and shows no signs of stopping.

Viz Comics publication of Ikegami and writer Kazuya Kudo's Mai the Psychic Girl back in May, 1987 helped to establish what would become an important new genre in the American comics scene - Japanese comics printed in English. As one of the first "manga" titles to be imported into the U.S. (Lone Wolf and Cub, Legend of Kamui and Area 88 were the other three), Mai was an important milestone in the English manga scene even though Ikegami says it "wasn't much of a hit" in its native Japan.

Two years later, English-speaking comic fans would have the chance to enjoy the AIUEO Boy reunion of Ikegami and Koike when Viz Comics published Crying Freeman in October, 1989. An intricate tale of international intrigue, the frankly depicted erotica of Crying Freeman dramatically underscored the point that not all comics are for children.

"Crying Freeman is not my cup of tea," says series translator Matt Thorn. "Why can't I stop reading it?" Thorn, whose translation credits include Ranma 1/2, Mermaid Forest, Maison Ikkoku as well as Ikegami's more recent series Sanctuary, describes Crying Freeman as a combination of "beauty and ugliness, violence and tenderness, passionate love and equally passionate hate, innocence and decadence, reality and fantasy, wakeness and dream."

"Together," Thorn says, "(Ikegami and Koike) create a self-contained aesthetic, a yin and yang balance of oppositions that is appealing not because it is all beautiful or all violent, but because beauty and violence complement each other so exquisitely, like the angel and a demon dancing a waltz in perfect form."

Sanctuary, written by Sho Fumimura (AKA "Buronson," author of Fist of the North Star, is one of Ikegami's most critically acclaimed series. Published by Viz in March, 1992, the socio-political thriller frequently (some say uncannily) mirrors real-world political scandals in the Japanese government and recently laid bare the links between the most powerful politicians and the leaders of organized crime that most Japanese have long assumed to exist, the resulting furor of which has led the now-total collapse of the most powerful faction of the Liberal Democratic Party.

In the American comic world, it's nothing new to have an entire team (writer, letterer, and inker) working on a single series. In Japan, where manga is thought to be a "one-man universe," an artist such as Ikegami who routinely works with a collaborating writer is unusual, to say the least. More than a mere illustrator, Ikegami has very definite ideas about how his stories should be told and likes to have a firm story idea in mind before looking for a series writer.

"The relationship between the writer and myself is similar to that between a screenwriter and a film director," says Ikegami. "Like a director, I decide upon the cast - in manga terms we call that 'character designs' - as well as the cuts or panel layouts in the series.

"Back when my style wasn't really established," Ikegami continues, "there were times when a writer was able to bring out certain talents of mine which I hadn't even know that I'd had. I have learned quite a lot from writers...I think that as a creator of manga I would have disappeared by now if not for them."

Ryoichi Ikegami is more than one-half of a creative team. Ikegami is a phenomenally talented artist whose dreams - and consequently, the dreams of his readers - are brought to life through his work. One half of nothing is still nothing, but in the case of Ryoichi Ikegami, the half definitely exceeds the whole.