| Fumio Iida has had a successful anime career. He worked on Royal Space Force, Roujin Z, Yadamon, and a host of top games. Yet, Iida wanted to strike out on his own. "I wanted to be able to fully express my own thoughts instead of doing it was part of a team," Iida said at Anime Central. Animation is team work, but manga drawing is a solitary venture with the artist usually writing his own scripts. Iida has now branched out into manga work... |  |
| ...with volumes such as Marine Color, a mermaid story that Iida wants to use in bridging the world between humans and fish. "When I put out a comic, I see the characters as my family," he said. To reach his goal, IIda had to create a new persona, that of the illustrator known only as Suezen, a pseudonym that he used when he was drawing magazine illustrations on the side from his animation work. "I couldn't put out anything under may own name since I was already employed." Iida explained. "The illustrations seemed to catch the attention of the readers. working as an illustrator was the catalyst that led to my manga work." |  |
| Now, Iida can openly call himself Suezen, with a book and CD-ROM of his illustrations on the Japanese market. Suezen is a contraction of a Japanese phrase meaning "best of of the best," although Iida said "I'm not really the best. I'm getting by." |  |
| While Iida enjoys his manga work, he keeps his hand in animation and game production to make ends meet, since manga paychecks don't pay all the bills. Part of that work included character designs for the cartoon series known as Thundercats in the U.S., work that Iida enjoyed. He has even worked for the Japanese arm of the Walt Disney Co., which handles some animation for American release. And, Iida admires American comics, saying they "...have a lot of power in them - the contrast between light and dark - and I want to incorporate that into my comics." |  |
| Iida cuts across the critical grain in Japan when it comes to the highly successful Mononoke Hime movie, the biggest motion picture hit in Japan in the last year. "For the masses it was an easy-to-understand story, which is probably why it is still running in Japan," he said. Iida feels that the Miyazaki film is little more than a remake of the earlier Nausicca film, but also notes that people in the anime industry are going to be more critical of those films than the ticket-buying public. |  |
Anime Central Day One |
Anime Central Day Two |
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