On its website, Tokyopop has an interview with Pop Mhan in which he discusses the obstacles to writing and illustrating Blank, his new secret agent series:
Blank is my first writing assignment. I had done little pieces here and there. But Blank is my first full writing assignment. First of all, how I went about volume one was dumb, for lack of a better way of putting it. I tried to write it, not taking into account that I had 160 pages. I took it chapter by chapter, and had a basic outline about what events were going to going to occur when. But then, this was the problem, that whole timeline is back in the archives, because it was scrapped and rewritten, redone. Ideas come and go, THAT took a lot of time to figure out, and it became, ’what in the world am I doing, where is this going, what are the themes?’ I had a lot of problems with thematic ideas throughout the project, and of course it didn’t help that whenever I got a job from Marvel or DC, it was very rushed, ‘we need it for yesterday!’ I had to jump on those assignments and for me my American comic book work is totally different from my manga work. People don’t realize that they are night and day, some people think that it’s just people walking around and talking so it’s the same. It’s not, it really isn’t. It’s a whole different idea, I think, that’s the way I approach manga at least.
Also: A brief interview with June Kim, creator of 12 Days
