Nobuhiko Horie: What Makes Manga Great Is That the Pictures Speak Without Dialogue

He edited the manga artists Tetsuo Hara and Tsukasa Hojo.

Nobuhiko Horie, the manga businessman who founded Coamix and runs it as CEO, created the Silent Manga Audition (SMA). But he is still best known for Weekly Shōnen Jump: during his run as the magazine's fifth editor-in-chief, from 1993 to 1996, the weekly sold 6.53 million copies, the highest figure in its history, and he was nicknamed "the six-million man."

He edited the manga artists Tetsuo Hara and Tsukasa Hojo. Without him, Fist of the North Star would never have existed, City Hunter would have stopped forever at a hurried ending, and readers would never have seen its sequel, Angel Heart.

Next to the famous artists he found and raised, Horie the editor is far less known to readers — one of the people who work quietly behind the classics. But watch him at SMA's opening ceremony, at its panels and interviews, talking about what a drawing can express, how an artist and an editor should work together, and what ails the Japanese manga market, hands moving in earnest as he goes, and you see a man who is responsible, dedicated, in love with the trade, and entirely certain of what he is doing. It also explains why Japanese publishing holds him in such regard.

Horie was born in 1955 and joined Jump as an editor in 1979: "entering this trade felt like marrying manga." His way of working took shape after that. He also arrived in time for Japanese manga's golden age in the 1980s — or rather, he was one of the people who drove it.

By Horie's rules, an editor carries a heavy load and many jobs, and has to work with the artist rather than merely chase and collect pages. He held himself to it. He read and watched widely, following entertainment far beyond manga so he could spot what was catching on and hand his artists an idea whenever they needed one. He had an unusually sharp nose for the market and a knack for guessing what readers wanted, and he defended the reader questionnaire that the magazine's first editor-in-chief, Tadasu Nagano, had introduced, because "it brought us closer to our readers" — and because Jump had come to the market late, after the pie had been cut up, so the questionnaire was the fastest way to find good work.

He was just as clear about the limits of letting reader votes decide which series lived. "Popularity takes time to build. We usually decided whether to cancel a series after 10 weeks. But there are always series that only catch on in week 7 or 8. I kept a few of those. The questionnaire decided everything, so slow burners were always at a disadvantage."

As far as an editor could, Horie tried to give new talent room. Even artists with only "partial" talent deserved a chance, he thought, because covering a weakness with someone else's strength is part of an editor's job. Tetsuo Hara, for instance, was not good at stories, so Horie brought in Buronson to write them, and that produced Fist of the North Star. One of the series' central ideas came from Horie too. He said in an interview that he was leafing through a book on Chinese medicine in a secondhand bookshop one day and read that "if you press the wrong point, the internal organs are destroyed and the person dies." He phoned Hara, still a newcomer, and told him to put it in at once.

"An editor should be putting all kinds of proposals to the artist, and reading widely to get them," Horie said. He is no arts-and-letters type, he says, but he loves film scripts, especially Akira Kurosawa's and Yoji Yamada's. That reading is one of the sources of an editor's power.

With his artists he kept work and friendship apart, and stayed professional about the manga itself. By the time Hara was drawing Hana no Keiji everyone treated him as a master, and Horie still pushed him hard and sent pages back to be redrawn. When Horie was promoted to editor-in-chief, another editor took over the series. "Unlike Mr. Horie, the other editors often took me out drinking and were very warm," Hara recalled, "but that was all it was. There was no sense of building the work together — they just picked up the pages and left." The decline of Hana no Keiji in its later stretch is generally put down to Horie's departure.

6.53 million is a number this editor-in-chief can never get away from, even though he says he remembers nothing special about that 1995 issue. He was also sensible enough not to print a big run of the next one. "Returns on that issue were 2%, so we sold 98%. The magazine business today thinks selling 70% is an achievement; 98% back then was a sellout. But 2% returned is still 130,000 copies, and a bigger print run would easily have pushed that past 200,000. Say we printed 7 million and sold 90% — that's 700,000 copies coming back. Those extra hundreds of thousands take more than a thousand trucks, going out and coming back. In those days we had to think about where returned magazines went, too."

The crisis came soon. In 1996, as Dragon Ball, Yu Yu Hakusho and Slam Dunk ended one after another, circulation dropped from 6 million to 5 million. It was not Horie's doing, but he resigned as editor-in-chief anyway. His successor, Kazuhiko Torishima, could not stop the slide either; by 2001 the weekly was selling 3.4 million.

Besides having no big hit to hold the magazine up, Jump had also fallen out with many gifted artists over its hard-driving policies — it squeezed them from every direction — and the gap between artists and the editorial department kept widening. Horie stayed friends with Tsukasa Hojo, Tetsuo Hara and the rest. When he walked out of Jump in 2000, he took those two friends with him, founded the manga company Coamix and launched his own Weekly Comic Bunch, where Hojo's City Hunter sequel Angel Heart was serialized.

Running his own business gave Horie something close to complete freedom. Since 2012 the SMA has been more or less a collection of his ideals: pushing dialogue-free manga to bring the form back to what it is really made of, expression through movement; finding gifted newcomers and raising them into masters; and building a place where artists from around the world can trade ideas and strike new original work off one another. As a judge he seems to have gone back to being an editor — serving the artist, steering the artist toward something better, and giving readers purer manga.

What follows is a Q&A with Nobuhiko Horie at the SMA event

Q: Why judge on manga without dialogue?

A: At Jump, working with a lot of colleagues, we found plenty of newcomers and gave them room to show what they could do. The aim is the same here: I want young people to enter the SMA. Japanese manga technique has movement built into it — a manga needs continuity and a lot of action, and the pictures need to move. So when we look at SMA entries we don't pay that much attention to the whole; we look at whether a given stretch of story reads as movement, and we pick on that basis. A lot of artists give up because they think their story isn't good enough, and we want to encourage the part of the talent they do have. Jump used to find people that way as well. The point of this competition in China isn't to collect everyone's work either — it's to find talent, train it, and turn those people into masters.

Q: Jump ran silent manga for a period. How did the company agree to it?

A: I talked about it at the time with Inoue — Takehiko Inoue. He badly wanted to convey feeling without dialogue. I agree with what Zhu Deyong said: dialogue sometimes limits what you can express, and some things dialogue can't make clear at all.

Q: What is the relationship between an artist and an editor? How is the work divided?

A: From our experience: first, when we find a talented artist, we take money out of the picture, so that they can throw themselves into the work with no financial pressure. That's the environment we guarantee. Concentrated training while they are young, to bring them up, is the crucial thing, so we put a lot into that early investment.

Once an artist has debuted, published, and had one or two popular series, another critical period begins: they get lost about what to draw next. That's where an editor's ability really counts, and that's when we back them hard. When an artist hits a wall, the editor badly needs a feel for the market. Jump used to run a great many surveys — each weekly survey brought back more than 60,000 replies from readers, and a lot of data with them. We would share the findings with the artist, and use them to judge what might work in the market.

Beyond that, personally, an editor has to read novels, watch films, take in as much work as possible and get ideas from it. When something is a hit, or looks like it could be, you pass it on to your artists right away. Before Fist of the North Star was serialized, for instance, Bruce Lee was huge and Mad Max was huge — so what happens if you drop Bruce Lee into Mad Max's world? Fist of the North Star came out of that. Or take Dragon Ball: its premise started as "what if Jackie Chan turned up in Fist of the North Star?"

That's the form an editor's proposals take — throw ideas at the artist and let their heads open up. Then the artist's imagination goes to work, and out of that come a lot of classic original works. During the making of a manga, the editor's role is to set off the spark.

Once the work exists, the editor also has to think about selling it and about the commercial side — how to develop it fully. These days that means not just print but digital editions, plus games, films, live-action adaptations and so on, growing the property from every angle until it becomes a big hit.

An editor's work is in fact extremely varied; I could keep listing it. That doesn't make editors impressive or especially capable. It's just that they have to build the artist a good place to work, so the artist can think about nothing but the work and doesn't have to worry about selling it. That's the division of labor.

Q: What qualities does an ideal manga artist need? What do you look for most in a newcomer?

A: The same standard as the SMA's. With no dialogue, what matters most is what the picture can express. That kind of expression makes readers imagine for themselves, and adding lines afterward is easy. In Japan we call it enshutsuryoku, the power to stage a scene.

Q: What is today's Japanese manga market like? What pleases you and what worries you?

A: I worry more than I feel optimistic. The Japanese market follows the herd. One good work comes out and a crowd of similar ones appears, and nobody says no to them. That worries me. Japan also has a great deal of digital manga, and in digital there are many platforms where anyone can publish. The quality varies wildly, and after readers have waded through that much bad work they end up confused.

Q: Is there a solution to that sameness?

A: You know what the Japanese market is like — it is fixed at that small size. In a market that small, of course everyone looks for a work that has already succeeded and copies it. So let's make the market bigger and look further out: not just Japan, but China and elsewhere. Once the market grows, the problem goes away. I'd like to see more chances for Japanese artists to meet artists from other countries. An idea that doesn't work in Japan may work in China or the United States, and a platform for that exchange matters enormously for breaking the sameness. Only by sharing ideas around the world will more good work appear. And the Chinese market is very big — it will never get as saturated as Japan's.

Q: What is the biggest difference between manga on paper and manga on a screen?

A: The brain doesn't enjoy them the same way.

Q: Can you say more?

A: We studied pleasure in the brain together with Japan's top universities, the University of Tokyo and Kyoto University. We found that when you compare reading a book with looking at a screen, reflected light does more than projected light to raise the brain's activity and excitement. With projected light, you are simply receiving — there is no reflected light — whereas a paper book reflects. Having studied the difference between the two, we found the brain gets more pleasure out of a book. For lighter material, though, a screen is perfectly fine.

Q: What role do you want to play in today's manga industry?

A: I started as a manga editor, so I know that side very well. And I know how close manga is to games and to animation. I want to take what is good in manga and what is bad, put it together with the entertainment media around it, and give the good parts more room. I hope to be the one who adjusts the mix.

Cover image from Fist of the North Star and Angel Heart; photograph taken by the reporter