Gagging: Attack on Attack on Titan (Patreon)

I just sold this series of gags from the Kodansha-published Attack on Titan USA anthology, and while packaging them up I found the layouts for them. So, I scanned them all and, hey, presto, here's another round of "how the sausage gets made". 

And in this case, it's how the sausage gets made when you don't like sausage. 

When I got the call from Ben Applegate from Kodansha USA about contributing to an anthology based on one of their manga titles I was pretty excited. At the time I was reading a lot of manga and Kodansha published quite a few titles I was a fan of. On top of that, my daughter reads a lot of manga (especially back when the job offer came along) so I thought it would be a fun experience to share with her while I worked on it. 

Then Ben mentioned that the property was Attack on Titan. Of all the manga titles that were out there, of all the possibilities, of all the gin joints in the world, it had to be that one. It was like when they announced DC had a new editor-in-chief, and out of all the millions and billions on this planet Earth, of all people, it was Dan DiDio, who I already disliked after dealing with him for a brief time at Mainframe Entertainment (where we learned how poorly he handled social and business interactions, which I'd get another taste of after he canceled my Metal Men series upon landing at DC and wouldn't return my e-mails, like, you gotta be kidding me, he's the head of a big publishing outfit and still ghosting people --?).

So, yeah, I liked Attack on Titan about as much as Dan DiDio (at least Attack on Titan didn't cost me ten grand while my wife was pregnant!). I suffered through the first nine volumes or so, borrowing them from the library and somehow unable to quit reading them despite it being insane amateur hour. It was partly because of it being a sun-hot mess, and partly out of bewilderment that this thing was mega-popular and not laughed out of existence. I couldn't stop telling my family about it, it was becoming an anti-hobby of some sort. They were torture to get through, unintentionally hilarious and mind-bendingly idiotic in plot, dialog, characterization and execution. I could acknowledge the teenage wasteland bleakness and the effective freakiness of the Titans and the extreme violence. But whatever atmosphere it managed to dredge up with it's high school notebook horror movie scratchiness was buried in some of the stupidest, most inept, ill-conceived stories and characters I've ever seen in a mega-popular franchise. 

Nothing personal if you're a fan. You're fine. We'll agree to disagree. Yes?

Nothing, I mean nothing, made sense in the comic. Not in a Giallo way, not in a Hausu way, not in a Tokusatsu way, not as dream logic or even as a waking nightmare. Whenever it starts coming across as pure gonzo storytelling, the inept world-building, political and religious "intrigue", social "drama" and whining outbursts from the cardboard characters breaks the illusion. It's like reading a badly-translated adaptation of a shitty tabletop RPG system written and drawn by unbalanced grade school kids who based it on a synopsis of Lord of the Flies and several random Greek myths. Which might sound interesting. But it's infuriatingly bad work, horribly written, terribly drawn, with ridiculous character names, mind-numbing dialog and character designs that make it incredibly hard to differentiate everyone in the sprawling cast without constant scrutiny, guessing and checking the guide book on the manga. It's a fifty-car pile-up, albeit one that printed money rather than getting tossed on the garbage heap of WTF pop culture.

So, yeah, I couldn't stand Attack on Titan. Which was a double-bummer, because I needed the work, and assumed there was no chance of it because I had recently lambasted the comic on my Live Journal blog. I felt I had to be up front with Ben and tell him I was not a fan (putting it mildly), but if I could make fun of it, I would be happy to give it a shot.  And he took me up on it, to my surprise. 

So I ended up doing 25 gag strips about Attack on Titan. And the job was a giant pain in the ass. I wasn't a fan of the property, I had to do a ton of research -- hampered by my inability to tell the characters apart half the time --  and I had to get the strips approved first by Kodansha USA, and then Kodansha, and then revised again if anything else tripped an alarm. And translators had to work on everything, back and forth, so sometimes my jokes didn't make sense to the folks in Japan, and sometimes the revision notes didn't make sense to us here in America. So the notes sometimes needed further notes! It was fascinating, but he approval process coked the schedule pretty badly. This was what I got myself into for picking an approach that required 25 different little comics to be approved and worked out. Ha ha on me. 

The strips ended up being a parody in nature rather than satirical, as I would have preferred. But it's not like I expected them to let me rake the IP over the coals, and get paid for it, too. Even if DC or Marvel or whoever let me goof on their characters once in a while, it's always blunted, never really cutting Unless I can sneak it in somewhere). And I expected cultural differences to impact some of my ideas.  I had a few strip ideas rejected outright because they were seen as too mean or insulting (including one I liked about the characters not being able to tell one another apart). I didn't know Titans don't defecate (even though they eat people), so a giant turd gag became a river of vomit gag (which was more than fine, actually, I don't really like toilet humor. But vomit! Heavens to Al Jaffee, I love drawing streams of bone-filled vomit!). I wasn't allowed to include a punchline cameo by manga creator Kazuo Umezu (The Drifting Classroom, Cat Boy etc) because it wouldn't be "proper", even though there was talk at one point of seeking permission (Bob Ross replaced him for the panel. Don't ask). I wasn't allowed to have a Hatsune Miku Titan because "fans might be upset" (I put her in there for my daughter, a huge fan), but I could have a Robin, The Boy Wonder Titan and a Minecraft Titan. Instead of Miku I drew a J-idol schoolgirl Titan who was based on a character from the Love Live anime/game that Alice was a big fan of. I just didn't call her "Nico Yazawa Titan". Problem solved, daughter happy. 

By the time I got 15 or 20 strips going I was becoming desperate for material, and castigating myself for signing up to do so many of the damned things. I ended up drawing one strip with my left hand to simulate an illiterate comic done by a Titan about eating people. Drawing with my left hand is a desperation ploy of mine going back to an issue of Bill and Ted where Death got a job drawing superhero comics. If you see me drawing stick figures with my left hand, that means I was losing my mind trying to come up with ideas.  And I was losing my mind on these Titan strips. Just because I didn't like the manga didn't mean I was going to phone in the job. I wanted this stuff to be funny, or at least be fun, and I worked on them as hard as any Fun Strips going into an issue of Dork. Harder, actually, because I was working against the material and my attitude towards it.

This is without taking into account the controversy that welled up concerning the creator's possible fascist and imperialist leanings, which I'm still not able to grasp completely because I didn't want any more Attack on Titan in my life by the time I heard of it. Working on the anthology didn't make me like the comic any more, or find hidden things to appreciate or mull over. Usually I find something attractive about a licensed property to grasp onto while I'm working on it even if it generally leaves me cold -- a character design, an opportunity to loosen up my artwork or exaggerate the storytelling. Bill and Ted eventually won me over while I was working with the characters (the reaction from the fans helped, as well). The only kicks I really got out of the Titan gig was dealing with the crazy scientist character, Hange (iirc), who is in the extended sequence above. Mad scientists are always fun to work with, and she's plenty mad. And she has a distinctive look, which helped. I got to draw some funny Titans, and some vomit, some oddball cartoon gore, and I think some of the gags worked pretty well. And the paycheck was decent, although I spread the dough thin because of the amount of work I put in. That's the self-sabotaging bug in my freelancing program.  

Anyway, I'm making myself tired just thinking about this one, so I better curtail the typing. The book came out with a lot of fanfare and then kind of nosedived, for whatever reason. I don't see people worked up about Attack on Titan as much as you used to, Convention halls were full of cosplayers for a few years, and there's been multiple spin-offs. But everything dies down eventually, except Pokemon, Sailor Moon, Dragonball Z and One Piece, I think (and others, I'm sure). I know a lot of manga kids jumped over to Tokyo Ghoul as the next hot horror thing a few years back...but don't get me started on that one. I only made it through three volumes before quitting. 

Anyway (again), you can't be a fan of everything, and you can't lose sleep over fans liking something you don't. Or not liking your own work, for that matter. I'm just thankful to have had the work, and glad that someone liked it enough to want the art. The whole point of that kind of job was to do right by the subject and the readers, even if I wasn't into it myself. Fortunately, most of us in comics tend to work on stuff we care deeply about, even when it's work for hire. 

That's how they get us.  

(BTW, for the process folks out there, I scanned the inked gags so you can see the pasted-down panels that are there. I had a hard time of drawing some of this stuff, largely because I put a lot of pressure on myself, so I got mad at a bunch of panels and reworked them on separate pieces of paper as patches. Sarah dropped them in digitally, but I pasted them all on because I hate seeing the art with the "guts exposed". And of course it helps if you want to sell a page that has first aid done to it.)