Kazuhisa Kondo

Born April 2, 1959 (Toyota City, Japan)
Japanese author, illustrator

Japanese manga creator Kazuhisa Kondo rose to fame in the United States in the early 2000s after the publication of an English translation of the manga series Mobile Suit Gundam 0079, but his popularity came far earlier in Japan, where he first published the series in 1994 as an adaptation of the popular anime (animated cartoon) series that showed on Japanese television in 1979. Kondo's works helped to introduce English-speaking audiences to the world of Gundam, a form of story about robots that differed a great deal from the earlier "super" robots that had dominated Japanese anime and manga since the end of World War II (1939–45; war in which Great Britain, France, the Soviet Union, the United States, and their allied forces defeated Germany, Italy, and Japan). Though little is known about Kondo in the United States, American manga fans have generated quite an appetite for various anime and manga forms of Gundam stories, especially his Mobile Suit Gundam 0079.

"I've been influenced by all media: movies, TV dramas, novels, manga, and so on … but I've probably been influenced most by the Star Wars series and Blade Runner."

Kondo's early works

Kazuhisa Kondo was born on April 2, 1959, in Toyota City, an industrial city in the southern half of Japan, midway between Osaka and Tokyo. (Toyota City is the home of the Toyota car company.) As a child, Kondo was fascinated with science fiction robots and liked to draw pictures of Tetsujin 28 (also known as Gigantor), Tetsuwan Atom, and Godzilla. In an interview with Animerica he commented: "My parents used to scold me for doodling everywhere." He liked to build plastic models of mechanized robots and, beginning when he was about fifteen or sixteen years old, he also began to draw manga related to his favorite mecha figures. (In simple terms, manga are Japanese comics. Japanese manga and American comics both tell stories using a combination of drawings and words. However, Japanese manga read from right to left, just the opposite of American comics, and Japanese manga also tend to emphasize mood and characterization more than American comics.) In Japan, mecha means anything mechanical, including robots, cars, computers, or guns; in America, the term mecha is used to refer to giant robots operated by humans. Though Kondo began drawing Japanese mecha, he would make his career drawing American mecha.

It took Kondo some time to break into the competitive world of manga publishing. In Japan, manga are far more popular and respectable than their American counterparts, comic books and graphic novels. There are dozens of manga magazines that publish weekly and monthly. Japanese children and adults carry manga with them everywhere and can even buy them in vending machines. Kondo wanted to break into manga publishing, but it wasn't easy. He trained as an artist, first under Morimi Jurano, then for several years with Shin Morimura. During this apprenticeship, he brought many drafts of his stories to publishers. Finally, after about seven years he caught the attention of an editor at Young magazine, owned by the publishing giant Kodansha. The editor helped place Kondo's first story in a children's magazine called Comic Bom Bom. Kondo told Animerica that the magazine has "a lower status compared to the more legitimate weekly magazines, so my feelings at that time were a little mixed."

Best-Known Works

Manga

Mobile Suit Gundam 0079 9 vols. (2001–02).

Kondo's first published story in Comic Bom Bom was "The Apartment that Drank Blood," but it was a later story called "The Machine" that won an award from the magazine and helped him gain work with other magazines. In 1984, Kondo began writing in the genre (subject area) that would define his career in American when he worked on the MS Senki series from November 1984 through February 1985. MS Senki is a sideline from the Gundam stories that became a huge success in Japan beginning in 1979.

The Mobile Suit Gundam story

In 1979, Japanese animator Yoshiyuki Tomino (1941–) decided to breathe new life into the robot stories that had long dominated Japanese television by inventing a new kind of robot. At the time, super robots dominated anime and manga. Typically, these huge, invincible, mechanized beings battled on the side of good, against evil monsters or other robots. Tomino saw that the stories based on super robots like Gigantor and Mazinger Z did not show much interest in human characters or the negative aspects of violence. He, along with others working at the Japanese animation studio Sunrise Inc., founded in 1972, invented a new story in which human characters fought against each other from inside robots, called mobile suits. Their first series, Mobile Suit Gundam, aired on Japanese television in 1979 for forty-three episodes. Though it was not popular at first, fans flocked to the new genre and bought the many robot toys that were sold. (The anime series was aired in the United States on the Cartoon Network in 2001.)

The Mobile Suit Gundam saga takes place in an alternate world in which the expanding population of Earth moves off the planet into a variety of huge orbiting space colonies. These space colonies all develop independently, and in the original series one colony, Side 3, takes the name "Principality of Zeon" and wages a war of independence against the Earth Federation government. This war—and the story—begins in the year 0079 of the Universal Century, a fictional calendar that begins on the date that the first of Earth's people form space colonies. (Fans have attempted to correlate that Universal Century calendar to the real calendar, but no argument for such a link has proven persuasive.) Most of the battles in the war are waged by humans operating a variety of mobile suits, fighting machines introduced by the Zeon forces but soon developed by both sides in the war. As the action in the story begins, a fifteen-year-old boy named Amuro Ray from the colony of Side 7 takes command of a powerful mobile suit called the Gundam, which was invented by his father. He leads others aboard a giant spaceship and mobile suit carrier called White Base as they battle against the forces of Zeon, led by Char Aznable and Garma Zabi.

The original Mobile Suit Gundam anime series was an important innovation in robot stories. It featured a wide range of mobile suits, each with a variety of weapons and abilities. Amuro's RX-78 Gundam, for example, carried both a beam rifle and beam sabers; other mobile suits have different powers. Fans thus had a constant supply of interesting robots to study and collect. The series also had a variety of characters, both male and female, and the competition and romance between these characters became an important part of the story. Because the series took viewers to many different space colonies and back to Earth itself, there were many opportunities to explore new settings and to explore science fiction scenarios. Most important, however, were the human aspects of the story: the victories and defeats in battle came as a result of human actions, not those of invincible robots, and it was human ingenuity and compassion that tipped the scales for one side or another, not just superior firepower. This human element kept the story compelling.

Cross-marketing Mobile Suit Gundam

American consumers are all too familiar with the saturation marketing that accompanies the release of new superhero movies, as with Spider-Man (2002) and Spider-Man 2 (2004): the movie was introduced alongside comic books, graphic novels, video games, action figures, and posters. But when it comes to the cross-marketing of characters from comic book series, the Japanese excel. Mobile Suit Gundam the animated series became Gundam the movie became Mobile Suit Gundam 0079 the manga series—but it hasn't stopped there. In fact, Bandai—the Japanese company that is the world's third-largest toy maker as well as the owner of the studio that created the original Mobile Suit Gundam—manufactures a complete line of Mobile Suit Gundam action figures, plastic models, card games, and video games. The Gundam War Collectible Card Game claimed more than one million players in Japan and was expected to be introduced in the United States sometime after 2005. With this range of activities surrounding the series, fans could read, watch, and play with Gundam-based characters to their heart's content. Critics of such cross-marketing charge that toymakers and publishers are more interested in making money than in creating good stories for young people, but such complaints haven't halted young consumers from buying multiple products to complete their Gundam experience.

The Gundam craze

The Mobile Suit Gundam anime story was so popular that it was edited together into three two-hour-long movies, called Gundam I, II, and III, released in Japan in 1981 and 1982. From that point, the entire Gundam story moved off into many different directions over the years. Anime remained the most popular form for the many Gundam stories, and there were numerous Mobile Suit Gundamanime series, including ZZ, 0080, and others. Mobile Suit Gundam Wing and SEED series also became popular, and several of these crossed over the seas to U.S. television, especially on the Cartoon Network. But anime was not the only expression: many of the Gundam stories were told in manga form, either as a manga adaptation of the anime or as a side story, which is a departure from the anime series that goes in different directions. Toy companies—especially Bandai—marketed dozens of mobile suit robots and Gundam toys and models, and several video games were also based on the series.

The Gundam universe was incredibly flexible: with the multiple space colonies circling Earth, storytellers could invent any number of variations on tales of conquest, revolt, and reconciliation. Soon, anime and manga creators devised entire alternate stories, based in different eras, universes, and even different calendars. By the mid-1990s, the Gundam phenomenon had become a genre in itself, with multiple publishers, writers, illustrators, and game makers devising new ways to tell about humans and the robots they created. Kondo played an important part in encouraging the growing Gundam craze. He returned to the original television series as the basis for his adaptation, and his nine volumes of Mobile Suit Gundam 0079 were largely faithful to the first story.

Mobile Suit Gundam comes to America

By the late 1990s, Japanese manga was beginning to get very popular in the United States. Several publishers began to translate Japanese stories into English and release—to great acclaim—in the world's biggest market. In 2001, a relative newcomer to the American market, Viz, chose to release Kondo's Mobile Suit Gundam 0079;by 2002, all nine volumes had been published. Kondo was in many ways a good choice for the American marketplace. He had grown up watching American movies and claimed that those that most influenced his work were the Star Wars movies and Blade Runner, two science-fiction classics. Unlike many Japanese authors, Kondo wrote his sound effect words in English, so the publisher did not have to struggle to redraw the pages to suit this new market, a big problem with translating many other manga works.

Kondo's works were a success in the United States, and they helped introduce the Gundam phenomenon to English-speaking audiences. At first, the complicated and quickly shifting story lines and multiple characters may have been confusing to American readers, but teens flocked to this and other manga titles in part because they were so different from the comic books and graphic novels produced in the United States. Kondo told Animerica: "I'm very happy to have my work appreciated overseas. I'm especially delighted to have my work read by people in a large country like America which has so much to offer on its own."

In Japan, Kondo has continued to publish a variety of Gundam stories in manga magazines, including an ongoing series called New MS Senki. He also worked on other Gundam stories such as Gundam 0080, Gundam F91, and Z Gundam as an artistic designer and consultant. He told Animerica that he did not want to spend the rest of his career working on Gundam manga, however: "I would like to work in other genres, on works that would let me express myself more freely. I would love to work on something similar to [American author J. D.] Salinger's Catcher in the Rye," a classic coming-of-age story. As of 2005, however, none of Kondo's other works had been translated into English, so English-speaking fans of his work must wait to see what will come next from one of the people who introduced Japan's mobile suits into America.

For More Information

Books

Gravett, Paul. Manga: Sixty Years of Japanese Comics. London: Laurence King, 2004.

Kondo, Kazuhisa. Mobile Suit Gundam 0079. Vols. 1–9. San Francisco, CA: Viz, 2001–02.

Periodicals

"Kazuhisa Kondo." Interview in Animerica vol. 7, no. 12 (1999); included in Kazuhisa Kondo. Mobile Suit Gundam 0079. Vol. 2. San Francisco, CA: Viz, 2001.

Web Sites

Gundam Official.http://www.gundamofficial.com/index.html (accessed on May 3, 2006).

Johnson, Mark L. "Mobile Suit Gundam 0079." Ex:Manga: The Online World of Anime & Manga.http://www.ex.org/4.4/39-manga_gundam0079.html (accessed on May 3, 2006).

"Mobile Suit Gundam 0079." VIZ Media.http://www.viz.com (accessed on May 3, 2006).

Mobile Suit GUNDAM: High Frontier.http://www.dyarstraights.com/msgundam/frontier.html (accessed on May 3, 2006).