That’s right, FOR THE NEXT 12 WEEKS WE’LL BE WRITING AND ILLUSTRATING A NEW MANGA SERIES FOR SHONEN JUMP, and it will be all about the back story of our beloved character: Kumaman.

Although it’s only a 12 week contract we’re hoping it will turn into a longer term thing, though I guess that just depends on numbers. Ever since I was a kid it was my dream to write my own manga. It’s pretty much all I thought about. With Aya as the illustrator, and with SHONEN JUMP’s publishing power, that dream is finally going to become a reality, so we’ll be focusing most of our time on the manga side of the business, because, frankly, we were given a lot of money to do this.

The manga will be in all Japanese, but I know how you internet pirates work! Guess what? We’ve scanned and translated our own manga into English, and will be making it available to everyone for download (see bottom of the post). So don’t even bother, MangaStream! We just beat you at your own game.

Download “Kumaman: The Bear Bang Theory” Early

The first chapter, “Kumaman: The Bear Bang Theory” is a history of Kumaman and how he got to where he is in the present timeline of the manga. I won’t spoil it for you, but let’s just say Kumaman has had a rough life! Even though the chapter isn’t out in Japan until May 2014, we’re releasing the first chapter early, because we can, and because we love you. The contracts are signed and nothing says we can’t do this (I think! That contract was super long and in these weird Chinese characters), so hopefully it doesn’t get us in trouble. Plus, we’ve already cashed the check. I’m writing this post from Vegas, after all! Hit! Hit! Hit!

If you’d like to download it and read it in it’s full glory, it’s all yours. Note: you will need some kind of PDF viewer like Preview (OSX), Adobe Reader, or even most modern web browsers. Also note that since this is a manga made for Japanese customers first, the panels should be read from right to left. It will be very confusing otherwise. We did translate everything to English though, so at least that part won’t be confusing.

Okay! Get to downloading! Chapter 1 is here! I can “bearly” wait! ha ha.

I’m super excited for this Tofugu business pivot and I hope you are too. Let’s all forget about Japanese language education and all think about manga and the hot tubs full of money that come with manga publishing. Thank you, and please enjoy!

P.S. This was an April Fools joke (sorry!), but maybe someday it will become real. You never know. Thanks everyone for enjoying the comic!

A former English teacher himself, Martinson draws from his own experience to create a fictional account of a young man named Dan Wells. The story is often ambient and introspective, emphasizing the day to day events of life abroad. Our hero, Dan, is a passive character rarely found in American storytelling. Martinson expertly guides Dan through the story and keeps him balanced, so we can easily look down on his passiveness in one scene and sympathize with it in the next. This expertise makes Tonoharu more than a mere parody of teaching English in Japan. It is a purposeful tale of a fully realized character teaching English in Japan, which in itself is rare.

The art, of course, is what draws most people to check out the series in the first place (myself included). Martinson’s style is reminiscent of the Belgian artist, Herge. The intricate backgrounds contrast with the simpler designs of the characters, allowing the reader to inhabit the story’s environments. Of course, there is little I can say that the art itself can’t say better.

Image from Lars Martinson / Media

Lars Martinson studied East Asian Calligraphy for two years in Fukuoka after his initial experience of English teaching. His own personal style, compounded with his knowledge of ancient inking technique, really shows and the art alone is worth a purchase of both volumes.

A paperback edition of Tonoharu Part One is due out this summer. Until then, hardcover editions of both parts are available through most book retailers and Martinson’s own website: http://larsmartinson.com/buy/

For the tech-savvy, Martinson’s more light-hearted e-comics are available digitally: http://larsmartinson.com/e-comics/

I recently had the wonderful opportunity to correspond with Lars for an EXCLUSIVE Tofugu interview! Below are insights into his stories, his art, his process and, most excitingly, the future volumes of Tonoharu!

For those who may not know, who is Lars Martinson?

Image from Lars Martinson / Media

I’m an American cartoonist that has spent half of my adult life in Japan. For the past decade I’ve been working on a graphic novel series entitled Tonoharu.

What is Tonoharu about?

Tonoharu tells the story of a young American who moves to rural Japan to work as an assistant English teacher. It is based (in part) on my own experience doing the same from 2003 to 2006.

Because Tonoharu is fictionalized and not a direct telling of your Japan experience, what inspired you to tell this story? Did you have an “aha” moment?

I’ve always been frustrated by how hard is it to relate my experiences in Japan to friends and family back home. It’s sort of like when you try to describe a dream to someone. It’s fascinating to you because you experienced it firsthand, but it’s almost always tedious for the listener because they don’t have the same frame of reference. My inspiration to create Tonoharu came from a desire to bridge this gap; to describe the experience of living abroad in a visceral way.

You’ve mentioned elsewhere that your main character, Dan Wells, is not you but merely a fictionalized character. That being said, how do you as his creator feel about him and his decisions? Was he difficult to write?

I’m certainly more driven than Dan. I made much more of an effort to improve my Japanese abilities when I first arrived in Japan, and have a clearer sense of what I want to do with my life. That said, I share a number of qualities with him, so he wasn’t hard to write. Like Dan I’m introverted, and often struggle to form meaningful connections with people around me.

How much Japanese did you know when you went on JET? How did the language barrier affect your experience?

I knew very little Japanese when I first arrived. Just a little bit of hiragana and katakana, and basic grammar. It improved quickly, but even now I feel like I have a long way to go. I heard somewhere that you can become fluent in three European languages in the same amount of time it takes to learn Japanese, and I believe it. It’s a huge undertaking.

One interesting consequence of my mediocre Japanese abilities is I tend to be more forthright when I speak it. It’s easy to be evasive in English since its my native tongue, but in Japanese I don’t have the language skills to dance around the subject. So I’m forced to distill what I want to say down to its naked essence. There’s a Dostoyevsky quote that goes “Stupidity is brief and artless, while intelligence squirms and hides itself. Intelligence is unprincipled, but stupidity is honest and straightforward.” I feel like this applies to how I use English compared to how I use Japanese.

Your main character, Dan, goes through a difficult bout of negative culture shock in the first volume. Did you have a similar experience?

Image from Lars Martinson / Media

Most people who live abroad experience culture shock to some degree, and I’m certainly no exception. I sometimes worry that I favored those negative moments a little too much in the first volume of Tonoharu, because many people who read it seem to assume I had an unequivocally horrible time in Japan, which certainly wasn’t the case at all.

You went back to Japan to study calligraphy for two years after finishing JET. How did that trip affect your art and your relationship with Japan?

Before I really got into it, I had no idea how deep East Asian calligraphy is, both in terms of history and technique. I’m now convinced that it’s the most sophisticated line art tradition in the world, hands down.

When a cartoonist wants to improve their penciling, they usually study Western art fundamentals such as perspective, anatomy and composition. I would argue that Eastern art fundamentals are just as useful to learn comic inking. Practicing East Asian calligraphy has improved my inking more than anything else I can point to.

Regarding your calligraphy learning experience, was it more of a disciplined practice that enhanced the skill you already had or was there something inherent in East Asian calligraphy that got added to you? Do you have any stories about the learning experience?

The discipline was certainly a huge part of it. Art classes in the US tend to emphasize personal expression over technique, so student critiques can be vague and coddling. The calligraphy classes I took in Japan were the exact opposite. We would be tasked with replicating a piece of classic calligraphy as accurately as possible. We’d show our attempt to the professor, who would point out where we went wrong, and we’d try again. They were technical exercises rather than creative ones, but they helped me learn how to control the brush in a way I never would have if left to my own devices. These skills, in turn, benefited my creative work.

Beyond technique, East Asian calligraphy has a number of qualities that informed my development as a cartoonist. It’d be too lengthy to get into them here, but if anyone’s interested I wrote a few entries about it on my blog:

http://larsmartinson.com/thoughts-about-lines/

What inspires you as an artist in the realms outside of comics? Music, film, visual art, etc.

I’ve always been fond of stories told through pictures, so most of what inspires me has visual and/or narrative elements. Wong Kar-wai movies, Knut Hamsun novels, and Hokusai’s sketchbook collections spring to mind as sources of inspiration. For music I really like Scandinavian folk; Hedningarna and Triakel are particularly good.

Recently I’ve become intrigued by the narrative potential of video games. I played Persona 4 Golden on the Vita last year, and it’s taken a place among my favorite narrative experiences in any medium. It paints a surprisingly subtle and nuanced portrait of a Japanese school life for a game that features demon-summoning and serial murder.

What is your favorite manga or manga artist? What draws you to that manga/artist?

I read tons of translated manga when I was in high school. Favorites at the time included Masamune Shirow, Johji Manabe, and Rumiko Takahashi. Eventually my interests drifted elsewhere, so I have to admit I’m not too familiar with the current manga scene. My favorite manga these days is hardly cutting edge: “Sazae-san” by Machiko Hasegawa. I explain why I admire it in this comic:

http://media.boingboing.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/sazae_930px_1.jpg

http://media.boingboing.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/sazae_930px_2.jpg

http://media.boingboing.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/sazae_930px_3.jpg

What has been the reaction of Japanese people who have read your graphic novel?

Image from Lars Martinson / Media

More than anything Japanese people tend to be surprised by the format. The Tonoharu books are hardcovers with two-color interior pages, which is all but unheard of in the manga world. Manga is usually first serialized in weekly or monthly b&w anthologies, so creative choices such as page sizes and printing methods are out of artists’ hands. Conversely, anything goes for American indie comics, so there’s a lot more diversity in terms of presentation, use of color, and binding.

Many of our readers have expressed interest in moving to Japan to become mangaka. What advice would you have for them?

I’ve never actually worked in the Japanese comics industry, so I’ll refrain from speculating on that in particular. But in broader terms, I wouldn’t advise pursuing a “career” as an artist unless you can’t imagine being happy doing anything else.

By some measures, Tonoharu has been a massive success; it’s been covered in the Wall Street Journal and Entertainment Weekly, translated into French and Spanish, and has sold out two hardcover printings with a paperback edition coming down the pipeline. But for all that, I’ve never made anything even approaching a living wage off of my work. Granted, I don’t have many books to sell, since I work at a glacial pace (spending more than ten years on three books is pretty ridiculous). But either way, trying to make a living as an artist rarely makes financial sense no matter how productive you are.

That said, I’m certainly not trying to dissuade people from pursuing something they’re passionate about. Obviously I wish I made more money from my comics, but I don’t for a second regret creating them. I guess my advice to someone looking to work in the Japanese comics industry would be the painfully obvious; strive to improve your craft as much as possible, and become proficient in Japanese. And make sure you’re having fun doing it, because there’s a good chance it may not provide as much monetary compensation as you’d like.

Tonoharu Part Two ends with a cliffhanger. What is in store for Dan in the third volume?

With each book, I’ve tried to capture different aspects of the experience of teaching in Japan. Notably absent in the first two books is any sort of meaningful interaction between Dan and his students, so I devote a significant chunk of the third book to that. This makes for some of my favorite scenes in the whole series, so I hope readers enjoy it as well.

What is your opinion of Japanese cake?

Almost always disappointing.

Each and every day billions upon billions of office workers waste away hours looking at funny captioned pictures and crudely drawn comics online. One of the more popular categories of said distractions is that of rage comics. If you’re unfamiliar with them, head on over to Memebase to see how rage comics are classically done.

Reddit user and English teacher Sukosuti has taught a class of Japanese university students about rage comics and asked them to create some original comics of their own to upload on Reddit. Can non-English speakers grasp the delicate concepts behind this fine internet art? Read on to find out.

Some people didn’t fully grasp the concept.

This is a most interesting cultural experiment. Especially for those already familiar with the rage comic characters- to see them used in different situations based solely upon how the Japanese people perceive them yields unexpected and sometimes very confusing results. Crawling through page upon page of these things I rarely found one that made much sense at all.

This is even more true when English is not their first language. They’re unfamiliar with the whole concept of rage comics as it is, and then they are made to craft them in an unfamiliar language. Almost all of the funny comics in this cross culture collection are purely incidental or so silly and nonsensical that they become humorous.

I did learn one very important thing from reading these comics, however. Koichi was right about Doraemon. There is now no doubt in my mind that he deserves to be the number one most evil robot of all time.

Some people really didn’t get it.

The Japanese people do have their own memes though. There’s the legendary 2ch which spawned the infamous 4chan, and then there’s always Golden Eggs. I was first exposed to Golden Eggs when I studied abroad in Japan and some of our Japanese friends shared them with us. At first we thought they were funny enough, but then they just kept showing us more and more of them. And the more we saw, the less we wanted to see.

Our Japanese friends definitely found them to be way more funny than we did. Perhaps it was just a difference in cultural humor. Perhaps that’s why the Japanese people can’t seem to grasp what makes rage comics funny. Either way, out of all the Golden Eggs videos we experienced that day, the video shown below was hands down the best of the bunch.

[yframe url='http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=guqsoBQ8ydE']
It’s not a bra!

Incidentally, these videos also seem to have played a part in what has become known as the “Ima firin’ mah lazer” meme. Strange how these things all come together, eh?

The above video is just a teaser trailer of the full episode which can be found here. Until about a week ago, this episode along with many others was available for viewing on YouTube. It seems that for whatever reason YouTube likes to pull videos as soon as I need them for my Tofugu posts :( As of now the only Golden Egg videos on YouTube are either CMs or teaser trailers like the above.

Do any of you know about any other Japan-only meme like things even more wacky than Golden Eggs and 2ch? If so, share your favorite meme in the comments. I’d love to see what other strange things they’ve got cookin’ up over there.

Y U NO FIND YOUR WALLET?

So what do you think of these Japanese attempts at rage comicry? Will they ever get the hang of it? Should they make their attempts in English like these rage comics for worldwide appeal or continue to forge their own ragey path in Japanese on 2ch? Let us know in the comments!

You can check out the full collection of these little Japanese rage gems here.

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Anyways, seriously cool artist. We definitely enjoyed reading this comic! You can check out what Aerin is doing now by saying hello to her on Twitter (@Inverce), or checking her latest updates on her blog, as well!