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Q & A: Philip Brophy on calligraphy, manga and the graphic novel

Friday, September 29th, 2006

I had the pleasure of interviewing latter day Renaissance Man Philip Brophy, recently, about all-things Japanese. Now, not only would Brophy talk under wet cement, he’d probably manage to blow a few claymation think bubbles while he was down there.

Inevitably, there were many digressions from the main topic of our conversation — his part in the Rapt! project — and when I say digressions, I mean quick, dangerous, twanging ricochets. Here’s a couple of the more literary of those digressions.

[CHRIS BOYD:] DOES JAPANESE ART GO THROUGH THE SAME CYCLES THAT ART IN THE WEST GOES THROUGH? A KEY FIGURE OR GROUP OR STYLE IS IMPERSONATED TO DEATH FOR TEN OR TWENTY YEARS UNTIL THE NEXT REVOLUTIONARY?

[Philip Brophy:] Possibly. But they do in a faster, speedier manner. You never know if you are in sync or out of sync with anything that’s happening there. As a foreigner it’s impossible to gauge, because the momentum at which they cycle can be so fast that it appears to be standing still. And the subtleties and differences and complexities and inflections are visible to the Japanese eye but not to the Western eye.

A LITTLE LIKE CALLIGRAPHY.

Yes. We can look at a sentence that’s been written with a brush and think, wow, that looks beautiful. And like every other Japanese person in the room will just piss themselves laughing. It’s like: you’ve got to be kidding, that’s the ugliest brushwork we’ve ever seen.

I’VE GOTTA ASK. YOU’RE LEGENDARY OBSESSION WITH MANGA, HOW IS THAT REGARDED IN JAPAN? IS IT REGARDED AS SOMETHING QUAINT?

Manga is very broad in Japan. Really, it’s like saying “contemporary fiction” here. There is a certain stigma attached to parts of it. Lots of people read manga in Japan. Probably more people, proportionally, read manga in Japan than there are people anywhere else in the world that read literature.
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