Bruce Lewis makes his living from ball games and sports art instead
of American manga, but the former artist of the U.S. version of the Star
Blazers comics hasn't forgotten his roots. His Cheap Disposable Entertainment
group plans to issue a self-published series later in the year, and Lewis
encourages other aspiring artists to publish their own books rather than
wait to be discovered by a big company. "That is how almost everyone gets
started, Lewis said on Friday afternoon at Ushicon. "No one sprung out
of their fathers' head a full-blown comic artist. I think that anyone of
us could do a better job [in self publishing] than what's out there selling."
At previous conventions, Lewis has explained the differences between
the American comic drawing style and the Japanese manga style. At Ushicon,
Lewis looked closely at storytelling, noting that the story carries a comic
and gets readers to return for more. Lewis recommends that budding storytellers
develop their skills by experimenting with what he called "stories with
the numbers filed off," tales that are inspired by popular fictional series
but change names and exact situations so they don't read like fan fiction.
"Come up with an unique story with your own stamp on it," Lewis said. What
kind of stories? Lewis likes the idea of tales that are told from real-life
experience. "Because it really happened it didn't have to do a lot of research,"
he said about one self-published book based on a teenaged crush.
Fan fiction writers have said that the worst things they can do is
to make their protagonists too powerful, and Lewis agrees about comics
characters. "If your hero characters have no bad qualities, they won't
appeal to the readers. You have to give them feet of clay," he said, pointing
to Spider-Man as a character who has remained appealingly imperfect. And
Lewis likes the idea, common in manga, of ordinary people thrust into extraordinary
circumstances. "You don't need to have a guy with a big sword riding a
dragon to make a great story," said Lewis. His original story ideas come
from odd places: while talking on the telephone, when he's nearly asleep,
or from the many notes that Lewis scribbles when an idea comes to mind.
