So, it turns out I have probably met Takeshi Miyazawa before (I just don't remember). You see, Takeshi, who came to Japan from Canada, and I were both on the Japan Exchange and Teaching Program and were sent to Niigata Prefecture to assist Japanese teachers with their English classes at various levels of the prefecture's public school system. His base school was in the city next to where I currently live (although, unless my time frame is all screwed up, at the time he was there, I was stationed in the prefecture's second largest city). Anyway, we were bound to have run into each other at some point... well, probably anyway. Small world.
I wish I had known him better. We obviously would have had a lot in common to talk about. Regardless, at the Japan Comic Art Expo this past weekend in Kawasaki, we got to do a little bit of "catching up."
Of course, since he has gone on to make a career for himself at Marvel Comics and elsewhere with his eye-pleasing manga-influenced style, I also wanted to get him to add some art to the little red sketchbook. But what to add. He was doing a lot of Ms. Marvel sketches, but of course I wanted to see his take on one of his favorite Japanese characters. He's a big Dragonball fan (both the manga and anime were still going strong when he was living in Niigata), but I already had sketches of Goku and Vegeta (by Sami Basri and Barnaby Bagenda, respectively), so I moved the conversation to other characters he might like and we hit upon Nausicaa.
If you don't know, "Kaze no Tani no Naushika," as it is called in Japanese, was created by the great animation director and manga artist, Hayao Miyazaki. (FYI, recently, a vintage marker sketch of the character by Miyazaki sold at auction here in Japan for about $300,000 -- no, I did not add any extra zeroes.) No more explanations, if you haven't seen the movie or read the epic manga he created (they are both very different entities, much like Otomo Katsuhiro's "Akira"), you really should.
Having done some really nice work on an array of female characters like Mary Jane Watson and Ms. Marvel, I really thought that Takeshi's style would fit the character well. You be the judge, as I may be quite biased, but I think it turned out wonderfully.
