As a person who has quickly become a believer in all things Keigo Shinzo, digging more into how the mangaka’s projects like Hirayasumi and Tokyo Alien Bros. come to life was at the top of my current priority list for SKTCHD. That was true both because of my aforementioned affinity for his work, but also because my understanding of how manga comes to life in English is limited. I’m a recent convert, or at least in full, to Japan’s often wondrous take of sequential art, so expanding on that knowledge seemed important. That’s why I wanted to find someone who knew both subjects inside and out.

That’s why I recently hopped on Zoom with Holly Fisher, an Editor at VIZ Media. Fisher’s someone who has done remarkable work at the publisher, efforts that include editing Keigo Shinzo’s Hirayasumi and Tokyo Alien Bros as well as other titles like After God, Heart Gear, and another one of my Comics of 2024 in Marriage Toxin. I had questions. Thankfully, Fisher had answers, as we discussed the world of editing manga, the art of adapting those comics from Japanese to English, her collaborations with translators, letterers, and designers, how projects end up at Viz and with specific editors, the gifts of Keigo Shinzo, and a whole lot more. It’s a delightful conversation, and one I learned a whole lot from.

You can read it below. It’s been edited for length and clarity. It’s also open for non-subscribers. If you enjoy this conversation, consider subscribing to SKTCHD to support the work and read more like it.

Let’s start with the basics, Holly. What does the role of an editor for VIZ entail?

Holly Fisher: That whole role really revolves around the same thing that being an editor at any other publisher revolves around. A lot of it is the unfortunately unglamorous administrative project management side of it.

Lots of email.

Fisher: Yes, lots of email. Sending so many emails. Making sure all the deadlines are correct. Basically, ensuring that the books are getting to the printer as painlessly as possible. When you’re looking at the specific manga side of it and when you’re comparing that to a Western comics editor, what I’m doing is instead of hiring writers and artists, I’m hiring translators and letterers. And then instead of focusing on things like story development, I’m focusing on how to take a story that has already been crafted and then present that for an entirely different audience, one that is English speaking, and how to get that to them in the best way possible.

I was reading an interview with another VIZ editor where they talked about how the job includes adapting and finalizing the translated script. Is that true? Is that something that you do as part of your job?

Fisher: Yes, a lot of work on manga very much revolves around that adaptation. The fact of the matter is, when you’re looking at the literal translation of the work, there are so many little quirks that go into language that just simply don’t translate. Even if you’re looking at English, we have all these different slang words that we use and things like contractions. For example, we say “isn’t” instead of “is not” in casual conversation. Japanese has similar quirks, but they don’t translate into English.

So, what happens is when you take a direct translation of manga, it ends up sounding incredibly stiff and like it’s written poorly, which is something we don’t want. It’s not written poorly. It’s written very well in Japanese. So, we then have to take that and find the English equivalent to make sure that we’re still adding the character and color and flavor and that all of that is coming through and that we’re presenting the work in the same way that it was meant to be presented in Japanese.

So, it’s almost like you are doing the first translation for the actual words and then doing a translation for feeling, in a way.

Fisher: That’s almost exactly what it is. We’re taking that literal translation and then we want to go back and sort of spice it up and say, “This is how it should sound in English.” This is how a character would say this in English. This is how they’re saying it in Japanese, but we want it to come across to where when someone is reading something in English, they’re not stopping and saying, “Oh, that’s a really weird way to phrase things.” We want them to seamlessly be able to absorb the story and for it to sound like any other story they would read in English.

Is part of that…I live in Anchorage, Alaska, so if I said some sort of idiom that’s used by people in Alaska but in Nebraska, they might be like, “This is weird. I’m not familiar with that phrase.” For example, we say “the Lower 48” to describe the contiguous United States. Most people would be like, “This is weird. What are you talking about?” I know you’re not doing a localized version for different regions like the United Kingdom or something like that. You’re just doing it for English. But is part of the job localizing it so things like that translate better?

Fisher: That is exactly right. It’s like you said too where we want to take what’s being said in Japanese and even if you look at it in English, we have phrases like “What’s up?” when you’re not literally asking someone “What is above your head right now?” And there are phrases that are very similar in Japanese where if you were to just take that, you’d be like, what are they even trying to say? You can’t even wrap your head around it because it’s just an idiom. And so, we take that and we find what the equivalent is like, “Oh, this person is just saying hello.” or “They’re just saying how are you?”

A particular phrase in Japanese that we see a lot is “I’m in your care,” which usually just means, “I’m looking forward to working with you” or “I’m looking forward to spending time with you,” that sort of a thing. But if you say “I’m in your care” in English, it has this sort of weird connotation, like you’re entrusting your life to them, or I need you to take care of me. Which is not the exact intention in Japanese. So those are the sort of phrases and idioms that we really want to help people understand, this is what they’re actually trying to say and how we would say that in English.

It’s interesting because while it is similar to the job of a Western comics editor, there are unique little flavors to it that make it slightly different. Almost a bit more active. I don’t want to say actively creative. I know that Western comics editors have to do that too. But you do have a very active role in bringing it to life in English.

Fisher: It’s true. I used to work on Western indie comics for a little bit, and so when I compare those jobs, what I used to do with that is I was really focused on big picture things. I worked with some great writers, so I just sort of let them do their dialogue and was more focused on, “Does this story make sense?” “Does this particular line make sense for this character?”

But then when you take that to manga editing, it’s similar in a way that you want to make sure everything flows and everything makes sense, but you’re much more focused on, “How should this sound?” It’s almost like a preservation of what has been created, so you have that puzzle of not wanting to stray too far from the text. We don’t want to put words in the creator’s mouth. We don’t want to change the story that they have already written. But we do want to make sure it comes across and that we’re still sharing the same implications and intent that they meant to get across in their story.

Is there any interaction with the creator themselves in this process? Or are you just working in isolation?

Fisher: VIZ editors have little to no interaction with the creators at all. There are exceptions. Sometimes creators will come over for conventions and things like that and we get to chat and spend some time with them. But we have a wonderful licensing team at VIZ who, whenever we have questions about things that absolutely need an answer, they will go back to the publishers in Japan.

Publishers in Japan are very protective of their creators, and I think rightfully so. These people are working very hard, they’re creating incredible stories, so we kind of have that in-between that helps us when we need something, when we’re really not sure what something is supposed to be or when we have a name of a character that could be spelled multiple different ways or when we have a particular term that we want to nail down. And it’s the same thing as when there’s a creator that says, “I want this to be this way in English,” the publisher will communicate that through our licensing team and then that is about the closest that we get into contact with the creators.

Was Hirayasumi assigned to you? Did you ask for it? How does it end up with you?

Fisher: That was definitely something that I asked to edit. As an editor, we get together as an editorial team and we’ll read a bunch of titles that we’re looking at acquiring, and Hirayasumi was one of those that came up and I gave my review of it. I said, “This is great. I really think we should publish this, and if nobody else has volunteered for it, I would absolutely love to throw my hat in the ring for this.” Then through whatever process our editorial director does, I ended up with the assignment for it. I was really happy to get that one. Then, when we took on another one of Keigo Shinzo’s series, Tokyo Alien Bros., I became the editor for that as well.

So, you having some experience with the creator’s work makes it more likely that any follow-ups would go to you as well?

Fisher: Yeah, we tend to keep creators with the same editor because that editor has developed a sort of feel for their work. They’ve developed a sort of tone, and it helps us keep it consistent. Since we don’t have the creator’s actual words in English because it is being filtered through a translation, we want to keep things as close as we can throughout their line of work, whether it’s the same editors or the same translators or the same letterers for the visual style, things like that. We do try to keep things as tight as we can when we can.

I mean, you speak his language, so to speak. I imagine your job is in part trying to understand the person and their intent and then putting that onto the page.

Fisher: It very much is. Especially when you’re looking at a creator like Keigo Shinzo. It feels like it’s a very intimate work, as though he draws a lot from his personal life and throws that into the page. So, it’s something that’s really rewarding to see in his stories and get experience with as I’ve been working on his series.

I know this is a terrible question, of course you’ve read this, but did you read About the Time I was Hospitalized with Malignant Lymphoma? 1

Fisher: I did read About the Time I was Hospitalized with Malignant Lymphoma. It was sort of a requirement for working on Hirayasumi because it was how he thought of the series. I think it’s so apt that you have this story of Hirayasumi, a story about human connection, being something that he developed the idea for while being hospitalized in the middle of a pandemic when everyone was incredibly isolated—that what was born of that experience is something that’s all about people staying together, their interactions, and the dynamics of the relationships that we have in our life.

It’s interesting to think about Hirayasumi and Tokyo Alien Bros., because Tokyo Alien Bros. was originally published in 2016 in Japan and then here Hirayasumi was 2021, and so you had the literal experience of being hospitalized with a malignant lymphoma and that comic in-between the two of them. It’s interesting because you’re almost dealing with two different versions of Keigo Shinzo with that line of demarcation being available to you in the form of that comic.

Fisher: It’s true. He does have that. There are a lot of similarities that you see between Tokyo Alien Bros. and Hirayasumi. You can tell that Keigo Shinzo very much likes to have a specific commentary on the human condition and the human experience. There is a strong shift between Tokyo Alien Bros. and Hirayasumi in the way that he kind of views relationships and in the way that you feel like he wants to see people come together too. That’s such an interesting thing to see, especially when we have something like a global pandemic that definitely changes people’s opinions and worldviews on things like that.

So, you got Hirayasumi as a project. It’s yours. You called dibs. It’s your baby. What’s the process for you for bringing that to life?

Fisher: When I’m starting to work on any manga project, the first step is to get the files, the original Japanese book, and see what we’re working with. From there, I go on to hire the translator and the letterer. Then, once the translator sends the script back to me for that first volume, we have a very detailed discussion where we’ll go back and forth on a few things. I’ll say, “I kind of got this impression from the translation, is this what you would say this character is like? Do you think this characterization would fit for this?” Or “What about this tone here for Tokyo Alien Bros.?” For Tokyo Alien Bros. in particular, we had a little bit of a discussion on terminology that we wanted to fit into more conventional science fiction terms, things like that.

So, it’s all these different levels of making sure, “Are we hitting the right beats? Does this feel like what the creator is trying to get across?” And then setting that tone for the series going forward. So going back to Hirayasumi, Jan Cash is the translator on that, and she is absolutely lovely. She has this amazing button on the natural flow of English dialogue in her translations, and I’ve so enjoyed working with her on this process.

Then, once we’ve finished that discussion, I send the final script that we have to the letterer. The letterer on both Tokyo Alien Bros. and Hirayasumi is Elena Diaz, and they have been phenomenal in capturing the sort of sketchy look of the original Japanese. We have a lot of handwritten sound effects and a style to the dialogue that they have been able to capture absolutely brilliantly. So we go through the lettered pages, we make sure all the fonts are what we want it to be, we make sure that the sound effects are positioned in the same way that the Japanese is, and we’re conveying a similar style in English as the Japanese is. And then from there we tidy everything up and we send the book to our production team who gets it off to the printer until it eventually goes to shelves.

And I know Elena does touch-up art and Jimmy Presler does design work on it as well.

Fisher: Yes. Elena is mainly working on the body pages of the book, so they’re very focused on the meat of the book itself. Jimmy is one of our in-house designers who is also fantastic. He creates the covers for these books, the design for our intro pages, our title pages, our credits pages, things like that. So, while the cover art itself is drawn by Keigo Shinzo, everything else you see on the outside of the book is his work, his style, and the fun things that he’s managed to do with that.

I wanted to ask about the translators in specific. You mentioned Jan Cash did Hirayasumi. Tokyo Alien Bros. was translated by Casey Loe, and then you go back to Jan Cash on Marriage Toxin. How do you find the right translators for specific projects like those? Do you find that different translators often offer dramatically different reads on works, so certain ones fit certain projects better?

Fisher: Just like writers, translators have their own tone of voice that they will put on things. Their goal, of course, is to stay as true to the original Japanese as possible, but they have their own mark and their own subtle spin that will go into the works. In this case in particular, it’s good that you mentioned Marriage Toxin because Jan Cash was someone who I’d been working with for a little while and absolutely loved the rhythm that we had gotten into. She was incredibly easy to work with. She’s a fantastic translator. We were working on Hirayasumi and Marriage Toxin, and when Tokyo Alien Bros. came up, there was a bit of a scheduling conflict between Marriage Toxin and Tokyo Alien Bros.

I had worked with Casey Loe on the Spy x Family novel Family Portrait, and I loved the humor that he has in Spy x Family in general. He has such a way of being able to capture that, and it was the same thing that he had brought through in the Spy x Family novel. So, I saw Tokyo Alien Bros., which is basically this comedy about these two aliens getting into all these shenanigans in Tokyo. There are some deeper moments to it too, but his tone was something that I felt would be particularly strong for this book. I am really happy with how that ended up turning out.

I have to say kudos to how well everyone executed the translation of the scene where the brothers run into each other for the first time. My comic shop bags things that have adult elements to it, and when I got it, I wondered what would be deemed adult in it. I did not see that scene coming. But it works thanks to you all.

Fisher: Yeah, the adult elements in Tokyo Alien Bros. are a little shocking because it’s something that is otherwise a fairly wholesome story in a lot of places. But I do appreciate that Keigo Shinzo isn’t afraid to dip his toes into the dark side of it and the more serious side of the stories that he’s trying to tell. The dichotomy of it actually balances itself out in a lot of good ways. There’s a nice range to his storytelling.

Elena Diaz lettered both books. It seems to me to my naked eye that Hirayasumi and Tokyo Alien Bros. use the same font. How tailored are the lettering choices to each project you take on? Is there a VIZ standard font or do you have different solutions for different projects?

Fisher: VIZ does have general lettering standards. There are general fonts that we like to use across all our projects. But every once in a while, we’ll end up with a project like Hirayasumi or Tokyo Alien Bros. that is a bit more niche. It feels a bit more indie, and that’s where we can stray away from those design choices a little bit. So that’s what we did with Hirayasumi and Tokyo Alien Bros. We picked a font style that had a little bit more of a handwriting vibe. It was the same with the sound effect fonts. We wanted to match the tone and style that we were seeing in the Japanese books as closely as possible and convey those design elements as well as we could in the English versions of it.

It feels more personal, and I think that that’s important for the books.

Fisher: I agree. I really like the touch that Elena put on these. I think Elena is a fantastic letterer and the way that they’ve been able to take the tone and the layouts of all the different sound effects and just make it come across so seamlessly in the English version, I so appreciate it. I think we ended up with something that’s very cohesive and very cohesive visually across both books.

Do you mind if I ask you a few questions on just your read on Keigo Shinzo?

Fisher: Yeah, of course.

You mentioned before that this is a little bit more “indie.” It’s more like slice of life in a lot of ways. Even Tokyo Alien Bros., which has a sci-fi bent to its slice of life story. What is it about his work that stands out even relative to the rest of the manga that’s out there?

Fisher: I think Keigo Shinzo stands out to me in the way that he really has a talent for putting a magnifying glass on the human experience and then conveying that on the page in a way that is so relatable and so resonant with what we go through on a day-to-day basis. And for me, it struck a chord that I thought was really powerful. He deals with a lot of themes of things like social awkwardness, self-confidence, and depression, but the way he does it is so nuanced. You have these characters who are by no means simple characters.

Even in Tokyo Alien Bros., when you look at Fuyunosuke and Natsutaro, 2 you think you know who these characters are. You say, “Oh, Fuyunosuke is the character who is outgoing and he’s confident and he’s charming, and Natsutaro is the serious awkward guy who doesn’t know what he’s doing.” But by the time you get to the end of the series, he’s managed to subvert those, adding such depth and so many layers to the characters in a way that I think is rare in a lot of storytelling these days. So, I think being able to go into those and experience the lives of these characters in the way that he portrays them is really powerful.

That’s something that I think is special.

What an artist, too. It’s just absolutely staggering work. The character work in particular. I love that part of it. And then on top of that…it’s funny, I’ve seen some people describe Hirayasumi as sad, and yeah, there is kind of a sadness to it. But I love Hiroto 3 because he has such a healthy view on the world, and he has this unflappability to him. His happiness is not defined by traditional standards. There’s something to that that just felt so powerful to me when I was reading it the first time.

It’s amazing that it’s so open to interpretation where for one person, it’s a sad book, and for me, it makes me feel amazing.

Fisher: I’m in the same boat as you on Hirayasumi. It also makes me feel incredibly warm and uplifted every time I read it. I think it’s like you said. It’s incredibly powerful that you have Hiroto who had this career in acting, and he decided, “Well, this is not making me happy. This is not going the way I want it to, so I’m just not going to do that. I’m just not going to do that, and I’m going to do what makes me happy. I’m going to walk down the sidewalk, and I’m going to stop and look at the pretty leaves that I think are cool and take in the scenery around me.”

It’s very much a stop and smell the roses attitude that we don’t get a lot in life. We’re so busy trying to climb the corporate ladder or do what we’re supposed to do, settle down and have kids and have the perfect career. And at the end of the day, if you don’t stop to smell the roses, you really are missing out. I think Hiroto has it made. There are sad moments in the story for sure. But I think it’s a really positive and uplifting story.

You’re making me feel inspired by describing the comic, so good job by you.

I wanted to go back to the order of operations of it all, with Tokyo Alien Bros. following Hirayasumi. How did that work out that way?

Fisher: Hirayasumi and Tokyo Alien Bros. basically came about at the time that Keigo Shinzo ended up on our radar. So, by the time we started seeing Keigo Shinzo, Hirayasumi was his current series. That’s what we were looking at and we thought, “This is a great series. We would like to publish this.” So we reached out to the licensor because we wanted to put an offer in on this series. And at that time, the licensor came back to us, and they said, “What about his other series, Tokyo Alien Bros.?”

Tokyo Alien Bros. was something that our editors had also read and had a lot of love for. So, as soon as the publisher came back with that as well, we were like, “Absolutely, we would love to do Tokyo Alien Bros.” So, for us, Hirayasumi was the one that ended up on our radar first and Tokyo Alien Bros. quickly followed. And thankfully it did, because I think it’s a wonderful story. I’m so glad that we’re publishing that one too.

Let’s say Marriage Toxin connects. Do you start looking at other things that the creators have done just in case you think something else they already did could be a fit?

Fisher: When something becomes really popular, we definitely start looking at other things that they’ve done. We have several series from the creator of Spy x Family. 4 Same with the creator of Chainsaw Man 5 and things like that. So, when we’re looking at something like Marriage Toxin and if all of a sudden that starts taking off, we definitely start looking at that. We also just like establishing a good relationship with these creators. There are so many creators out there where we start seeing what they’re doing in Japan and it’s really promising work.

Especially someone like Keigo Shinzo, who is clearly incredibly talented. We just want to publish their stories. We want to make sure that people who speak English have access to these stories because they’re so incredible and they deserve to be shared with the world. So when we see creators like that, we definitely put a little button on them and try to follow what they’re doing. And when they do new things, we try to reach out and say, “Hey, we would also like to do this.”

I really like both projects, but they underline how there are different flavors of a creator like Keigo Shinzo. Somebody who reads Hirayasumi would really like Tokyo Alien Bros. but you also don’t know. I’m curious…when you are kind of the resident expert on the creator, do you work with VIZ marketing at all to help position these because you know the project as well as anyone, or is that outside your role entirely?

Fisher: Editors don’t work with marketing very often. A lot of times our marketing team will just sort of take what they need, because they are also very fluent in these projects. They read all of our books, they know what to share on social media, they know what events to set up and that sort of a thing. So we have a really fantastic marketing team on that side.

I’ll get some marketing people who will come up to me every once in a while, and say, “Hey, I read the new volume of Hirayasumi and I can’t believe X, Y, Z.” That kind of a thing. It’s really cool just to have a bunch of fans of certain series in the office. We’re all kind of talking with each other on that. So, we will collaborate on certain things, but for the most part, our marketing team is very skilled, and they know what they’re doing. So, we let them do their job and we stick to the books and that’s how it goes.

You know your role far better than I do. I’ve asked questions about it throughout, just from my perspective as someone who is relatively new to manga. Is there anything you wished manga fans knew about the role of an editor and what you do in bringing these books to life that we haven’t covered? I’m just curious because it’s such a big world and you do a lot of things that we don’t necessarily know.

Fisher: I think if there was anything I wanted people to know more about, it’s a little bit about what we’ve already talked about, in that editing manga is not simply just editing a translation. It really is formulating an adaptation and bringing it to an English-speaking audience in a way that does justice to the original work. I know that’s what I get questions on all the time when I tell people I work in manga. They’re like, “Oh, so you’re just translating.” There’s nothing just translating about it. We really want to make sure that these stories are coming across in a way that is fun and enjoyable in the way that they’re meant to be. It’s something that I find incredibly rewarding, and I’m so glad that VIZ has an army of fans and readers out there who also find the stories we publish very enjoyable, because I know that I certainly have fun working on them.

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