Before Senno Knife set out on his own as a manga artist,
he studied at the best manga "school" in Japan, working as an assistant
to Leiji Matsumoto. At the time, the working magnum opus in the "Leijiverse"
was "Space Cruiser Yamato," and Knife said he spent a lot of time drawing
those familiar forced-perspective images of the reborn battleship. "Then
I got to draw manga myself," said Knife when he appeared at Sugoi Con with
Steve Bennett of IC Entertainment (left) and wife Nekoi Rutoto (right).
Knife's favorite works turned out to be horror manga, a genre that died
out in U.S. comics but stays strong in Japan. "I never was a fan of straight
horror manga so I got to draw in a mix of genres, including horror and
science fiction, but my best genre was horror. I feel that from Studio
Ironcat I'm getting a chance to publish what i do best which is science
fiction horror manga. `Dark Dimension' (an earlier Knife work which Ironcat
will publish in English) was written for a girls manga, which was no surprise
because the biggest audience for horror manga is girls. This series isn't
so scary as much as it is a story about the world of the dead."
Japanese horror stories - like Japanese serious fiction of many kinds
- are known for their unhappy endings where it seems that everyone dies.
Knife wants to scare people with his stories, but not depress them - so
he tries not to be sadistically cruel to his protagonists. "I don't think
I've ever killed off the main character. I avoid endings where the readers
are depressed. It's just horrific during the story, but I can't guarantee
happy endings. That would be a little bit of a spoiler for the reader.
I call them `fantastic endings.'" And just to show how unusual Knife's
career has become; he's going to take time off from his manga career to
draw storyboards for a 2003 anime production which he says "...will be
a lot like Digimon."
Knife's wife, Nekoi Rutoto, performs with the independent
synth-techno band Psy-Doll, a group that tries to avoid both the worlds
of peppy J-pop and the beautiful males of visual kei and J-rock. "I think
there are two types of bands," she said. "One type is synthesized by a
producer and the second type forms by itself. I think this is the same
in the United States. Bands like the Spice Girls (which was a British group)
are well thought out through market research, where the producers decide
if they're salable.
These synthetic bands have become popular as they're intended to become,
but if you want the real thing you have to get away from the produced bands."
While Nekoi thrives on the independent Japanese rock scene, she notes that
those independent bands stay unknown because their members make no effort
to promote them.
