INTERVIEW: Lea Hernandez
The Curse of Urusei Yatsura
By Carl Gustav Horn
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"And I love the way they drew me here..." Lea Hernandez makes a guest appearance in Comic Weapon Cyber Comix Special Ediction: Comic Gunbuster Vol. 2. |
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P: They have you saying in katakana, "Mei ai shiiii?"
LH: And they didn't want to show me any of this stuff. Even when I went over to [anime studio] Artmic, and Kenichi Sonoda was showing me all these covers for all these dojin, and all these cute little girls, I said, "Can I open it?" and he slapped his hand down and said,
"No." [laughs] "No, no, no, no." And I think [the manga] might have also been referencing that, even though it doesn't show Sonoda-san doing it.
P: There's a scene here where the guy gets humiliated when you see his Gunbuster dojin.
LH: And I love the way they drew me here, with these gigantic boobs.
P: He's especially upset that it's a foreigner who's seeing this. Before giving in, he briefly draws himself as a shonen manga hero, "The Japanese Who Can Say No," as opposed to The Japan That Can Say No. [politician Shintaro Ishihara's controversial contemporary treatise on US-Japan relations].
LH: Yeah, it's funny. As if there wasn't ample evidence all over Gunbuster that they were a bunch of perverts [laughs]. Like it's a big secret, when there's this cel lying in a box on the floor there, and it's this up-shot of Noriko, this crotch-cam on her little gymsuit. And I'm like, "Guys, I know how you think." But they were like, "Oh, it's our pretty vice-president, and she wants to look at the porn!"
P: [Alvin interjects] Were they all that short, compared to you?
LH: You know, most of them came up to about my ear, yeah.
P: [Hideaki] Anno is tall, but--
LH: They were all pretty compact fellows. They came up to my height, or a little bit shorter. They were all very polite, though. They were all really nice people.
P: But how did you hook up with them, coming all the way from Texas?
LH: Well, I was visiting out here. I was depressed about my career. My artwork was going nowhere. There was no market, really, for manga-style work at the time.
P: Was this when you were doing Kendra?
LH: It was after, really. It was about four or five years after that. And I was kind of bummed. Tom Orzechowski had told me this story about Marc Silvestri, who was just working out a gym, and met some guys from Marvel there, and got a job. And I'm like, "Fuck me! Fuck me! Fuck me! Fuck me! I don't go to the gym! I'm never going to get a job drawing comics! Fuck! I'm going to be lettering manga for the rest of my fucking life!
" [laughs] And I got so depressed over that, that I could barely function.
P: So this was while you were lettering for Viz?
LH: Viz, among others. I was actually doing Urusei Yatsura at the time. So I got to hear all these stories about how "Urusei Yatsura wrecked my life!
" It seemed that for anybody who worked on it, it was like The Monkey's Paw. Bad things happened. People's lives got fucked up while working on Urusei Yatsura. Everybody wanted it, and nobody who got it was happy. It was just the way things were going at the time. And Toren told me, "You know, the guys from Gainax need someone to run their American division. They want me to do it, and I don't want to. Do you?" And I'm like, "Yeahhhhh! Yeah! I'll live in San Francisco! And be a vice-president! And be rich! Yeahhhhh!"
P: It does sound very Otaku no Video.
LH: Yeah, some of it is referenced in Otaku no Video. Not very flatteringly, I might add. The gaijin they "interview," "Shon Hernandez" [the pseudonym given to Craig York, another American who worked for General Products], with his line, "Ah, to be born in this golden land!" Half of me was kind of flattered that they even remembered that I was there, since they seemed to want to forget once I left, and half of me was like, "Fuck you! Fuck you, man! Fuck you fuck you fuck you!"
‘Cause it was really very insulting. They knew they had a live one in this fellow Craig York. They knew they had a total, total geek. And they just turned on the camera and let him talk. And he was pouring out his heart, and they took the piss on him. I felt really bad for Craig, and I was like, "You guys are really being dicks. This is really very unkind and very ungrateful. We all worked very, very hard for you. We were very sincere, and we wanted the company to succeed, and you're just making fun of us." I was a little disappointed.
P: Although Gainax was a little hard on themselves, as well.
LH: Yeah, I guess everyone got shit on in that video.
P: In '91, it was all over?
LH: It was over for me in 1990. I was having a nervous breakdown from the stress.
P: So, for how long were you V-P?
LH: I was V-P for almost exactly a year, before I couldn't take the nonsense any more. Nothing was working, and every move I made was wrong, and they frequently forgot to send me my operating capital--and my paychecks. And, you know, it wasn't really uncommon for my check to be two weeks to a month late at least. And it was heart-stopping living out in California, which was more expensive than we ever suspected or imagined. It was hard to find housing, it was hideously expensive to buy anything and everything here.
P: Were you here during the Loma Prieta quake?
LH: We moved here two weeks before the quake, and that should have told me to just go the fuck home in December like I wanted to. I had this big plan in December. It was like, "I get paid $1500 a month, and that's exactly what I need to rent a van and just go the fuck back." And I really was very serious. I came within days of just putting it all on a van and leaving in December, after about three months of that.
P: Was the problem that General Products wouldn't let you create the business plan, that they were trying to create it from the other side of the ocean?
LH: I don't know. I think part of the problem was--and I'm guessing here, because I don't know what was going on, this is purely, purely speculation on my part--that there was never anybody at General Products Japan whose only job it was to run GP-USA, which they needed someone to be doing. And they found out they had all this stuff they wanted to sell, and they found out that Artmic [the studio behind the original Bubblegum Crisis series] put the skids under it, and they couldn't get any of the anime merchandise they wanted to sell. They I wanted us to sell things from, what was that thing called?
A.R.I.E.L. And I was, like, "Nobody knows A.R.I.E.L., and nobody wants stuff from A.R.I.E.L. They want stuff from Dirty Pair." And they were, "Why do they want stuff from Dirty Pair? It's so over!" I said, "It isn't over in America."
P: They couldn't grasp the fact of the time lag.
LH: They could not understand that things took years sometimes to get over to America, and especially in those days. It's almost instantaneous now, but in those days there'd be a year or two gap, at least. They didn't understand when we said we wanted this, this, and this. There were a lot of things they didn't understand, how anime fans and business worked over here, and we just could not bridge the gap.
There's more! Check in later this month for the second half of Lea Hernandez's interview!
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