Sunday March 8, 2009
Veteran otaku
By ELIZABETH TAI
How did an English lady get hooked on a Japanese phenomenon some three decades ago?
HELEN McCarthy doesn’t look like your typical otaku. But the 57-year-old Londoner is an expert on all things anime and manga, having spent 30 years reading, watching and writing about them.
“I like prowling around conventions (where she’s often a special guest) because I’m still a fan. The cosplayers would wonder, ‘Is this old lady looking for her child? What is she doing here?’ And then they’ll attend my talk and look visibly surprised when I take the stage ... I think the generation gap exists only if we make it,” she quipped.
It was manga that changed Helen McCarthy’s stereotypical Western perception of Japan. – CHAN TAK KONG / The Star (Top) Books by McCarthy. “And besides, stereotypes are fine for advertising purposes but it doesn’t work for people. You don’t cease to be interested in something because of your age,” she added, beaming.
McCarthy was in Malaysia last month to give a talk on Osamu Tezuka at the Japan Foundation. When we met at its headquarters in Kuala Lumpur, the British lady waxed lyrical about the legendary mangaka who died in 1989 aged 60.
Noting that Tezuka became a comic superstar at 18 and produced great manga while going through a medical degree, McCarthy, however, lamented how his works are almost completely unknown in the English-speaking West.
“He’s like this huge iceberg. And above the water, the English-speaking world sees Astro Boy and Kimba the White Lion and one or two manga. But below the line are the rest of Tezuka’s works which are enormous and wonderful,” she said. (Tezuka produced around 700 manga in his life time.)
McCarthy’s favourite Tezuka manga is MW (pronounced moo), a manga about betrayal and corruption in the modern world and how actions by politicians have terrible consequences on ordinary people.
“It’s a very powerful, very dark and angry work but also wildly entertaining. I think anyone with any sense in Hollywood should pick it up.”
Accidental expert
McCarthy was bitten by the anime/manga bug in 1980 when her then-boyfriend (now husband), who was an artist and illustrator, brought back Japanese comic magazines and toys and showed them to her.
“It was fascinating because they were so different from my image of Japan – of giant robot TV series,” she recalled. Back then, McCarthy’s idea of Japan was also the “tourist Japan”: tea ceremonies, cherry blossoms, samurai and ninja.
Then manga opened her mind as she became intrigued with its diversity in art and stories.
“There’s a story for everyone. Women my age in Japan read manga. There are manga magazines for them. Everyone can read manga; it doesn’t matter what their age, faith, culture, sexual orientation or job is, they can find a manga that speaks to them. There’s no comic culture as diverse,” she pointed out.
But never in a million years would she imagine that she could turn her passion into a career! McCarthy, who was a British civil servant for 15 years, started on her road to becoming an anime/manga expert purely by accident.
It all began in 1988 at the National Science Fiction Convention in Britain. McCarthy helped put together 36 hours of anime screening, the first time Japanese animation was presented at a British convention.
Chuffed with the enthusiastic response to the event, she created a fan newsletter to link the attendees and hopefully create new ones. But when one of her contributors, a graphic designer at a publishing firm, showed the little newsletter to his employer, McCarthy received an unexpected offer from the boss.
“He offered to finance the magazine! So by the end of 1990 I was the founding editor of Britain’s first anime magazine, Anime UK,” she said, chuckling.
Back at a time when fanzines contained mostly anime synopses, Anime UK was the first magazine to have in-depth articles related to the scene.
“Economically, it was a disaster – we just could not fund it to produce it to a level we wanted. But we still kept it going for six years and it was sold in Japan,” she said, acknowledging that she was “terribly proud of it”.
Write, teach, stitch
“My husband jokes that I used to have two full-time jobs: to write and to work for the government,” she said.
Being a “first generation” anime fan in Britain, McCarthy was frustrated that besides difficult-to-obtain fanzines, there were no English-language books on anime. (There were several on manga in English and French, however.)
“That annoyed me so much that I decided a book had to be written.”
But it took her 13 years to see it published, said McCarthy. Back then, anime was considered “cheap Saturday morning children’s TV fare” in Britain and no publisher wanted to take a risk on her book. And then Akira premiered in Britain in 1991 and became a sensation.
Suddenly, the publishers who had turned her away became interested.
Thus, her first book, Anime: A Beginner’s Guide to Japanese Animation, was released in 1993. Since then she has published eight books (with two more coming this year).
Which is why when she was made redundant two years ago, McCarthy viewed it as an opportunity because her writing had developed enough for her to indulge in it full-time.
She also started to conduct workshops for schools to use anime and manga to help improve literacy and co-operation among children. McCarthy would teach students to write and draw their own manga, and this often helps them see the point of team work and using correct spelling.
Her newest book, Manga in Stitches, which will be out in June, combines her two passions – embroidery and anime/manga. She has created embroidery designs inspired by anime and manga.
“I hope that’s going to bring two sets of people who love art and admire craft, and help them forget their external differences and talk about what brings them together and what they both love,” she said.
It’s no wonder that she was accorded the International Manga and Anime Foundation Award by Japan in 2006 in recognition of her contributions to Japanese pop culture.
“Awards are always nice,” said McCarthy modestly. “I love writing and I love writing about anime and manga ... that’s the best thing there is.”
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