Hideki Egami is the editor-in-chief of Shogakukan’s Ikki magazine, a manga anthology (and related trade paperback collections) that provide the source material for Viz Media’s new SigIkki.com Website (see “Viz Launches Webcomics Site”) and Viz Signature collections. The Website is serializing Ikki series a chapter at a time, with ten series currently active. We talked to Egami about what differentiates Ikki, the impact of anime based on Ikki properties, and comparisons to American comics.
Ikki is classified as a seinen manga magazine. How is it different from other manga anthologies that target that older, male reader and what do you see as your magazine’s market niche?
Ikki originated from Weekly Big Comics Spirits magazine where I spent many years, much of my career. That is also a seinen magazine and the trend for seinen magazines is to capitalize on readers’ needs. So whatever readers are interested in, they will make a story out of it. For example,
At the time I founded Ikki, my boss said, ‘For Spirits, you have to see the ocean to see the audience and readers, and so capture the needs of the audience, but for Ikki you have to see the spring where the river originates,’ meaning that you have to look at the creators and then capture the creators’ passion. You know, don’t look at readers, but start from the creators. So that’s probably the key point, the focal point of Ikki and that’s really the uniqueness of Ikki: it focuses on the passion of the creators.
Ikki also has a timeless quality, and can go beyond geographic regions.
That’s probably why we could adapt it to the States.
The subject matter is very diverse, but from the few examples we have seen it seems like it’s a more realistic art style. Is this correct or have we just not seen the full range of work from the magazine yet?
Lots of seinen manga is very realistic, and even shonen manga is adopting realistic or gekiga type styles, so compared to all that I don’t think Ikki especially has that style,
We haven’t seen that much so that’s the reason we were asking. We look forward to seeing more.
Ikki has lots of very great artists in terms of drawing style, very strong, very appealing, and very unique. That is one of the things Ikki is proud of.
Bokurano and Ride Back have both been adapted into anime. How important is it for the prestige and sales of Ikki to have its stories adapted into anime and does that influence the sales of the magazine or the tankoubon after the anime is shown on TV?
It definitely has a big influence. A typical example is Bokurano. Bokurano’s tankoubon sales were probably five times larger after the anime adaptation. It didn’t affect magazine sales as much, but for tanko it multiplied five times.
Are there any other anime based on properties that were introduced in Ikki anticipated?
There are a couple of other series which also went to anime. Noramimi recently got adapted to anime. And Tetsuko no Tabi, which is a train manga, also got adapted to anime.
This is not an official statement; we’re considering this. I can only tease (we can’t really announce it yet), but one of the series Sigikki.com is running, House of Five Leaves, might get adapted to anime too.
Ikki is akin to American alternative comics in that your stories often have a serious side as well as literary or poetic content. From what you know about the American alternative comics do you feel that’s a good comparison, or are there differences?
I’m not too familiar with American alternative comics. What similarities do you see between Ikki and American alternative comics?
The most popular American alternative comics tend to be very personal. For example, some have been stories where teenagers are growing up into adults, the stories are just about their real lives and their relationships.
That's actually very similar to Ikki; that’s one of the topics that we focus on. I want to also study American alternative comics and if eventually someone in the States who is an alternative comics creator can work on Ikki, that would be great.
