It was nearly a year ago that we raved to you about Daniel Pink‘s Wired article on manga, specifically the flourishing fan subculture known as dojinshi. Tonight, in a lecture at New York’s Japan Society, Pink will share what he learned about that nation’s comic book scene in a more intimate setting—we hesitate to call it a lecture—with, we’re told, loads of visual references.
How did Pink get turned on to the subject in the first place? “I saw the manga sections of libraries and bookstores in the U.S. expanding,” he emailed us recently, “and I wanted to get a better sense of what was going on. Why were these Japanese comics so appealing to American young people? Then as I dug a little deeper, I discovered that manga was a huge business in Japan. That combination—a powerful industry that also was beginning to have a grip on the cultural mind—lwas irresistible.”
So irresistible that Pink wrote his latest handbook of career advice, The Adventures of Johnny Bunko, in manga format, with illustrations by Rob Ten Pas (who also drew the headshot of Pink at right). “Writing this book definitely honed my narrative abilities,” Pink says of the experience. “I had no idea how to tell a story with pictures. Rob helped teach me that. And it was powerful. I never realized how much narrative freight pictures could carry. I think the ultimate effect of that is that I’m now slightly better at narrating more succinctly. Alas, my next book is going to be more traditional. It will have sentences and paragraphs and page numbers and all those ancient conventions!”