Our latest Creator Interview is with the exceptionally talented Chris Hill, creator of Rapture Burgers, former JPL engineer, and a cook of high proficiency in the arts of ramen. If it's anywhere close to as delicious as his manga, then that's a sure treat!
Chris has had quite a career, and it was great to learn more about it as part of our interview with him. Beyond his journey through the early days in Oklahoma, to a brief stint working on the Mars 2020 rover mission, to creating Rapture Burgers, his work has now been inducted into the Kyoto International Manga Museum.
This is a must-read for anyone looking for advice on how to get started in the manga industry.
GlobalComix: Tell us a little bit about yourself and how you came together with your current team behind Rapture Burgers.
Chris Hill: Sure! Where do I even start? According to the blurb I put into the book, I’m…”a Black American writer, engineer, swordsman, and pretty good ramen cook.” Which uh, yeah, is fairly accurate, although my business cards say “writer, conquistador, square dance caller.” So I'm a real Jack of All Trades, as long as the trade isn’t actually like, drawing something with my own two hands. Or singing.
Joking aside, I’m originally from Tulsa, OK, and got into this whole comics thing back during the webcomics boom of the aughts. It’s been a long path leading to the release of the manga version of Rapture Burgers, which I won’t recount here.
As for the current team, well, Adam Douglas, my co-writer, has been on since the beginning, and has seen Rapture Burgers through all the twists and turns of being a webcomic to graphic novel to animated series pilot to manga (more on that later). R.R. Kondrath, who did the graphics, is my in-house (as in lives in our house) graphic designer, sounding board, and “immoral support.” Fun fun fact: on our first date, I mentioned that I had written (at that time) three volumes of an indie GN. Apparently, Rachel’s internal reaction was “oh no, now I’m gonna have to break up with him if it’s not good.” And…well, we’re six years into our relationship, if that tells you anything.
Anyway, Rachel started pitching in a little bit while I was working on the animated pilot, voicing Alex in our scratch track (the temp voiceover before you get real actors). She eventually helped put together the pitch presentation for RB, along with a few other animated series we were trying to pitch, and ultimately used her graphic design skills for good, handling details like Sydney’s computer screens, and the Zone 006 emblem.
Pepper was, of course, a major get in terms of team contribution, on account of none of us being skilled at sequential art. I connected with Pepper on a site that brokered commissioned work between Japan and foreign clients. You could pay a small fee for a human translation of messages back and forth. To start out, I asked Pepper to redesign Alex and Camille in their own style, and I was so impressed that I offered them the long-term project of retelling RB as a manga. I’d tried out a few others from the same site, but they either assumed I wanted “American” style, or just didn’t connect with what I was aiming for. Technically, I wasn’t supposed to contact anyone outside of the site, but…well, let’s just say we found it more beneficial to work directly.
These were the first illustrations I requested from pepper, now combined into a cover mockup.
Around that time, I had also started taking Japanese lessons with Akari Murata, who is credited with “Translation Assistance.” She helped by translating the scripts to Japanese for Pepper to understand, and answering my questions.
For our assistants, first came Kunitsuna (backgrounds), who is a close friend of Pepper’s. Unfortunately, she couldn’t start working with us for over a year, so Pepper drew basically all of chapter 1-3 alone before we could get help. We’ve since redone the toning and backgrounds on many pages in those chapters with our assistants’ help.
Next came Goh Koke (mechanical), the husband of one of Akari’s friends, Thankfully we were able to make that connection, and he happens to be a mecha nerd like me, so we get along well.
The third assistant, Lucy Toyota (color and toning) is someone Pepper brought on after meeting her at an Arknights convention, I believe.
And finally, Yuki Murayama handled the jacket cover for the hardcover edition. He originally thought the design concept we went with looked too novel-ish, but that’s actually what I wanted.
All in all, it’s a great team that allowed me to reach the level of detail I was aiming for, and each and every one of them added something unique to the mix that made the final product that much better.
Hardcover jacket of Rapture Burgers.
GlobalComix: What sort of other jobs have you had leading up to making this point, and have any of them given you skills that you find useful in managing a team of manga creators?
Chris Hill: Hmm. Well…honestly, I kind of use my comics and manga experience as a reference point for my day job, when it comes to management. Which is to say, I get a lot more experience managing people outside of work I’m paid for.
I’ve pretty much been in tech since I was 19, since I didn’t have money for college, and had been taking apart anything I could since I was like 10. Occasionally they’d go back together. Sometimes I’d even have parts that I didn’t know where they went, but I’ll be damned if the thing still didn't work.
But, back when I was a mere 22 or so years old, I worked at a major desktop computer and server manufacturer (hint: their name rhymes with “Hell”). I worked my way up from call center technician to a field installer, and basically out of sheer luck, met a guy who was building supercomputing clusters for the company’s government and scientific clients. Since I was particularly skilled at Linux (a rarity in Oklahoma at the time, believe it or not), I weaseled my way into joining that team on the side. Pretty much on the first job I shadowed, my mentor bailed on me like three days into a weeklong job, and left me alone with the most passive aggressive math Ph.D I’ve ever met. I’ll cut that particular story short and just say that once I was up to speed, I was sent out to data centers, sometimes alone, to a room with 128 servers still in boxes on the floor, and had to rack and stack the servers, run the (very heavy) Infiniband cables, configure all the networking and operating systems myself using clever automation, and ultimately deliver a working Beowulf cluster. So that really got me experience with dealing with an overwhelming amount of moving parts. Also, on one or two jobs, I was lucky enough to have a couple of contractors with me I could delegate to, but more often, I was a one-man army.
A poster by Goh Koke.
I also worked at JPL for almost exactly a year, on the Mars 2020 rover mission. Unfortunately, JPL is the intersection of government and academia, two groups known for being particularly out of date in the technology field, and not always because of the sensitivity of the missions. But yeah, let’s just say I rocked the boat a lil too much, which is one of those things they tell you NOT to do.
These days, I’m a big enough wheel down at the cracker factory that I get to lead my own projects, which means I have to like, document things and task items out for other people to maybe work on. So that’s kind of helped me with organization and the like.
Also, just generally speaking, my technical aptitude is extremely useful in managing a bunch of artists. I’m generally able to learn a piece of software really quickly and get straight to work. For example, I’d never really used InDesign before this book, but I did the entire layout and printing prep using it. I also solve problems around file versioning, restoration, etc. So I do a lot more than just writing (the afterword in the book covers some of it).
One last thing I’ll add is that dating and being friends with various artists gave me a better perspective of what a “bad” client looks like, and I learned from it. So I just do my best to always pay artists what they ask, when they ask, and not micromanage them. Because at a certain point, if I’m gonna be so controlling, maybe I should just draw the thing myself, y’know?
Adobe Indesign.
GlobalComix: What part of the manga creation process do you enjoy seeing the most or find the most satisfying?
Chris Hill: I look at this kind of creative work like jazz. There’s a song that I may have written the bones for, and in the process of coming up with a full 11-minute jam, every player in the band gets a chance to both add to the overall harmony, but also to stand out and contribute their own unique charm like in a solo, because sometimes you just gotta let your trumpet player tear it up for a solid two minutes. So I like seeing it all come together, and allowing everyone on the team the freedom to add their own flavor, as long as it’s coherent with the overall aesthetic.
Some of that just comes from me not being a fully “visual” person. I always have an image of how a scene will play out in my head, but I’ve also always been at the mercy of an artist interpreting my ideas. Of course, I provide lots of references, but I’ve learned to see and understand when something is a straight replica versus when something is “inspired by” my reference, and I think it’s important that an artist is allowed to add their personal touch instead of making a direct copy. And you know, sometimes someone on the team will catch a missing detail, or add in fun little gags that fit the tone I was writing in the first place. I love that kind of stuff!
Pepper added the visual aids to the bottom panel, including the stick figures screaming in terror.
And to be honest, there were a lot of “on the fly” additions and rewrites that I did once the art started to solidify. Chapters 1-3 turned into a lot more pages than I expected, but I counterbalanced it by adding more dialog and narration-based gags to fit. Occasionally, I’d cut a line or rework it to fit onto the page that it needed to fit on…so in my jazz metaphor, it’s like laying down an improvised bass solo when given the opening.
Most of this dialog wasn’t in the script.
GlobalComix: Rapture Burgers has been under production for some time, are there other stories in the pipeline that you are working on or want to?
Chris Hill: I have a handful of things either sitting on the shelf, or slowly being worked on. One of them is a one-shot for a series I’ve had sitting around for a while. We’re working out mechanical designs right now, but the elevator pitch goes something like this: Giant robots. Playing football. On the moon.
WIP mechanical design.
Another, which I’ve partnered with a published Japanese light novel author to develop, is about a young girl cast into a distant galaxy, searching for her way back to Earth. It’s called Only Human, and it’s the secondary project I’m most excited about.
Besides that, we have a few animated series we’d like to pitch around again, because they’re a lot of fun, dammit!
Only Human concept art.
GlobalComix: Making manga is still a bit of a novelty outside of Japan, what have you done or been able to do to learn more about making manga?
Chris Hill: You’re right, it is still a novelty, and what I’ll say is that until fairly recently, the actual information available in English was pretty limited. Much like many other Americans, I was anime-only for a long time, and branched out into manga to get ahead on series that were moving too slow, or had long breaks between seasons, or filler. And once I started reading more manga-only content, or reading things before they were adapted, I gained a much better appreciation for it and its particularities.
So a lot of my initial knowledge of manga was simply from observation and osmosis. Sort of spotting the difference in technique between it and western comics. Once I decided I wanted to take RB down the path of manga, I got a lot of information straight from Pepper, who was kind (and patient) enough to explain to me.
There are also some details that I’ve learned by following folks on Twitter, and being part of the Maneki Manga server that you (Jackson) co-created!
One thing I’ll add here though, is that as a writer who doesn’t thumbnail/storyboard, the amount of knowledge I need to have around terminology and things like paneling technique is much less. Like I can understand and appreciate them, but I’m not the person to implement the knowledge directly. I use the terminology Pepper and the assistants use as I learn it.
Also, this is one of those things that some folks may scoff at, but after my experience with the previous iteration of Rapture Burgers (as a western comic), I opted to leave out panel and page counts from my scripts. Why? Simply because I’m not an expert on paneling, and I trust, y’know, the person trained to make sequential art. Learning how much went into manga pages really drove home that I’d get better end results if I let Pepper interpret the script and pace it out in a way that flowed well, and had things like “page turns.” Obviously, that means there’s more work for Pepper in the initial phase of interpreting the script, and I’ll apologize for that some more later!
What that means in reality is that Pepper draws a “name” or rough, and I’ve just learned to be able to read their extremely rough doodles and match them to the script. From there, I give feedback, like if a scene is paced too quickly, if there’s not enough room for dialog, if I feel like a specific action needs to be highlighted, etc. It’s a bit more like directing, I guess?
Thumbnails for part of Rapture Burgers volume one.
At any rate, I think the results speak for themselves. I’m not striving for “authenticity” as much as trying to rely on the strengths of the people I’ve hired to tell my story. Similarly, with the toning, there are so many cool effects and tricks to toning that Lucy Toyota adds that make me go “Holy crap! It’s the toning technique I noticed in Kanokari, or Aharen-san, etc.” But, y’know, I’m also not an expert on implementing toning, so I leave it to the professionals and just ask for adjustments when the “mood” isn’t hitting what I’m aiming for, or it’s visually confusing.
One thing I did do is study the lettering techniques of Seven Seas and Yen Press in particular, since lettering English is so vastly different from lettering Japanese. I also physically studied various manga volumes that I own when formatting the book for print, specifically Golden Kamuy, Pluto, 20th Century Boys, and Battle Angel Alita’s recent hardcover reissue.
And finally, while I’m on the subject of learning how to make manga, I will say that I made a conscious choice not to follow the writing style of shonen manga in particular, and I didn’t try to mimic anything in particular. Unfortunately, the default idea of anime and manga for many Americans, including in the indie manga community, is supernatural battle shonen series. We don’t talk enough about the really diverse and varied kinds of manga available in Japan that we often never see or hear of. One of our assistants, Goh Koke, once explained, “in America, you see the beautiful, golden grains of sand that are manga, but if you come to Japan, you’ll see that the beach is also full of garbage.” Which is to say that, by the nature of licensing and the need to be able to sell in secondary markets, we really don’t get the exposure to everything that manga is. This has led to a really strong bias towards needing to create the visually detailed styles of the most popular manga, and a focus on…well creating more supernatural battle manga. To me, it’s the equivalent of making an indie superhero comic, and if that’s your jam, absolutely go for it, but it’s a crowded market.
Basically, what I’m getting at is that I’d like to see wider acceptance of manga that doesn’t center on battling with magic, energy blasts, or whatever. Because I flat out don’t read those manga at this point.
GlobalComix: I’ve heard recently that your manga was recently accepted into a museum in Japan. Can you tell us more about that, and what that means to you and your team?
Chris Hill: Oh right! Yeah, the Kyoto International Manga Museum is host to the only physical copy of Rapture Burgers Volume One in Japan (...for now). I sort of caught Pepper and team totally off guard, because I didn’t announce that I was submitting the book, and because there’s a warning that the museum may discard or donate books that are too similar to others, or…I guess not worth studying? Basically, it’s not as simple as sending them a book.
For me, I think it’s a mark of honor and legitimacy. Not that I didn’t think we were legit! Once I learned about the museum, I wanted to find a way to make them aware of what I was doing, and hoped they might be willing to take my quaint, 364-page book into their archives.
Rapture Burgers is an example of…well, as I said before, I welcomed the additions and personal touches from the Japanese team, and the end result is a bit of a seamless blend of American and Japanese influences. It was made to be easy to get into, and for people who appreciate banter, small details in lines of dialog, quirkiness, and the ability to bounce between humor and sincerity. My goal was to make a story that was true to my voice and the culture I know, and not try to imitate the superficial details I’ve gleaned from consuming Japanese media.
In that regard, lately I’ve been talking about how I only recently realized that Rapture Burgers is pretty firmly in the “metamodern” aesthetic, so it might be the first metamodern manga? Probably the first to be consciously aware of it, at least. And that in itself goes to being a bit unique in the manga space.
Anyway, the team is very excited about it being accepted into the museum! One of the assistants lives pretty close to the museum, and plans to visit soon, so I’m hopeful we’ll get some photos!
GlobalComix: Why make a manga and not a western comic? What draws you to making manga specifically?
Chris Hill: Ah, this is a good question! So, I haven’t fully explained the history of RB yet, but basically I made 3 ½ full western-style graphic novels of Rapture Burgers in the past, with Mimi Alves. They did an amazing job with what they were given, but to be honest…from the start, we were always influenced by anime. I used to make opening sequences set to music by the pillows (of FLCL fame) using the panels from the comic. But, you know, making an original anime in the late 2000’s and early 2010’s was pretty unattainable. So we opted to try our hand at manga…and we tried that once, and submitted to an indie manga publisher we had a connection to back then. They uh, didn’t like it.
So we did what we could when we got the opportunity. We simply didn’t know of, and certainly didn’t have access to, anyone who could do the manga “style” well, and we weren’t going to ask someone who wasn’t practiced in it to try. And to be fair, I’m just as much influenced by The Simpsons and classic American sci-fi novels as I am by anime and manga, so landing on a solid western style fit the tone pretty well…though I’d occasionally feel like I was outgrowing the initial cuteness with all my crazy world building and dark revelations.
At any rate, we did those original graphic novels for like, 6 years, until I went down the path of really, truly trying to get an animated series made. So I spent some years working with an animation studio, getting an animated pilot…well, pilot animatic with like 5 min of finished animation. Anyway, I spent a long time working to get that animation made, and trying to get a studio or production company to pick it up for development. We got some voice actors, the whole deal. And some of it is really funny, but the whole thing is kind of a mess. Plus, that was going to be very much American animation, and I wasn’t able to sway the studio to do it in one of those western anime-ish styles.
A screenshot from the Rapture Burgers pilot.
Which is all to say that it ultimately didn’t go anywhere, but I did do a lot of reworking of the beginning of Rapture Burgers in the process, and decided I wanted to take another crack at telling the story using the lessons I’d learned from the first go-round. To make it a manga…well, it was the only option as far as I was concerned. This was going to be the “everything and the kitchen sink” version of RB, and I made sure it would be the best book I was capable of making, in the exact style and format I’d always wanted to make it in.
I think what really drew me to manga, and does so even more now, is how dynamic it can be. It can convey a sense of motion on a still page in a way that’s satisfying to me, and more commonly dabbles in the hyper detailed visuals that I’m drawn to and want to use in my stories.
GlobalComix: What advice would you give to others who want to make their own manga, either indie manga or to submit to a publisher?
Chris Hill: For indie manga, my main three pieces of advice for everyone are:
1) don’t hold yourself to the standard of mangaka in Japan who happen to have some of the most popular manga in the world at the moment. They’re exceptions, even in Japan, and are the product of a system that doesn’t exist outside the country. We simply don’t have the infrastructure in the US that Japan does for even indie manga, and especially not for those aspiring to be pro. Viz and Manga Plus are putting in the work to create viable paths to getting your manga broadly published, but it’s probably going to be a couple of years before we see the real effects of those programs.
2) Be punk. Make whatever the hell you want because you want to make it. Go against genre conventions, make deeply personal stories, make things that are unmarketable. But be aware that it’s not the case that “if you build it (your comic), they (an audience) will come.” Marketing is a skill in and of itself, and ultimately it comes down to your goal in making comics. Not everyone is out to make commercial art, or wants to fight for popularity or sales, and as a creator, you have to make that decision.
3) Be realistic, and set reasonable milestones. For me, just finishing this book was the big milestone. Holding a physical copy of our years of work, and being able to read my own book, in its completed form, was the satisfaction I set out for. The rest…well, the rest is a lot of work convincing people to buy it.
More specific advice for artists would be to understand the visual techniques at play and lean into the dynamism and sense of motion that makes manga stand out. This means studying paneling, how action is depicted, when to use break out panels, etc. My personal opinion is that knowing Japanese terminology is less important than understanding how to implement the concepts the terms describe, and how they differ from western comics.
For writers, I would say try to understand that you’re working in a very visual medium, and to trust the very visual artists you’re working with. Also, this is my opinion, but dialog and storytelling absolutely do not need to follow a hard structure. Kishotenketsu is perhaps useful for understanding how some manga is written, but what we’re seeing a lot more clearly lately is that many mangaka are inspired by American movies outright. And the three-act and five-act structures already have similar elements, so I don’t feel that there’s really much of a need to obsess over trying to fit into a writing structure/style/formula. Plus, fitting into a formula is, by definition, formulaic. So, much like learning 3-act structure, I think something like Kishotenketsu could be used as a starting point, but it’s a reflection of the writer how they use that knowledge.
The other thing I want to point out is that, especially for dialog, there are some cultural preferences in Japanese manga that don’t fully align with English speaking tastes, like how much characters do or don’t speak, or how much context English needs, or the style of humor. Some of these differences aren’t really all that important as long as you’re writing for the audience who can (and likely will) read your story, which is going to be the audience that can actually understand the language on the page. And don’t even get me started on self-proclaimed western otaku versus a wider audience.
What I’m getting at is that you shouldn’t worry about appealing to Japanese tastes if you’re making an English-only manga and only have access to an English-speaking audience. I went through the process of translating and localizing RB to Japanese, and uh, let me tell you, those are two different things. One major thing to be conscious of is that we use lots and lots of non-literal terms and phrases in English, so literally translating them is nonsense. And to be fair, Japanese has the same, so the goal of a good translator is to localize the language by conveying the spirit of the words and not their literal meaning. I spent so much time translating from English to English by explaining the colloquialisms so we could find something similar in Japanese. And this is all in the effort to make the dialog sound natural to a native Japanese speaker who isn’t obsessed with American culture.
There’s a joke on this page that we spent some time finding an equivalent for in Japanese.
Anyway, I digress, but I think it’s important that your writing should reflect your voice, and not an image of what manga “should” sound like, because that starts to feel derivative at best. Not to mention, most of us aren’t fluent in Japanese, so what we’ve absorbed from Japanese media is sometimes poorly translated, stilted, or just awkward. Your voice will be influenced by the language and culture that are part of your identity, so lean into it. That’s a hill I’ll die on.
For those aspiring to be published, here’s my advice:
If you’re in America, be prepared for a lot of unanswered submissions. Go to portfolio reviews if you can. Focus on publishers who put out work similar to yours, since they’re more likely to “get” your passion project.
If you want to be published in Japan professionally, be prepared for a lot of rejection and unpaid labor as you try to get something accepted. Most importantly, find a Japanese editor to work with if possible. It’s happening more often that a manga that started as web-only gets picked up in Japan, but there’s a huge language and cultural barrier between the English speaking indie world and the Japanese doujinshi world.
Drawn by Pepper, color by Lucy Toyota.
Lastly, there are some things that are “universal” at this point, in part due to America’s dominance over the film market for so long, like the concept of an inciting incident, and especially the need for your characters to have defining characteristics beyond the physical. They need motivation, elements of relatability, and to feel like more than a cardboard cutout. I’ve recommended before reading the TVTropes (yeah yeah, it’s a useful tool) page for a series that someone is deeply familiar with or they really like. It’s illuminating at the least to see how the community there is classifying common archetypes and character traits, and it helps build media literacy to start seeing the patterns.
GlobalComix: Do you submit your works to any manga contests or for awards?
Chris Hill: Currently, no.
I’ll probably submit RB to the International Manga Awards, and the one-shot I’m working on will likely go on MPC. It’s possible I’ll put the first chapter or so of RB up on a contest site, but my feeling is that the volume is meant to be consumed as a whole, and should be judged as a whole as well.
Just generally speaking, I’m not really a competitive person, and I’d rather the small sums of money from the awards go to people who need it more. So the primary reasons I’d enter a manga-specific contest would be for visibility, from having the entry published or just simply being in the running. I hear that’s a common tactic in Japan.
I would like to submit RB to some US awards for consideration though…for the craft.
GlobalComix: Are you wanting to debut in Japan or with any publishers in the USA?
I have the aforementioned punk attitude about what I make. I’ve always said that I simply have stories I want to tell, and I’m gonna tell them whether people like them or not. If a publisher wanted to work with me to distribute and market RB, for example, I’d love that, but it would have to remain creator-owned. I pretty much surpassed the idea of submitting the traditional way a long time ago, since I’m not interested in asking permission to tell a story, and would rather spend a lot of time crafting a singular concept instead of taking the shotgun approach to blasting out a lot of ideas to see what sticks.
For my other stories, we’ll have to see how they pan out. I might be looking for a publisher for them in either country in the future, but I think my collaborators in Japan would actually prefer to stay indie. The schedule’s better, y’know
But hey, should publishers come knocking, I’d seriously consider what they’re offering.
Thank you again for an amazing interview, Chris! Check out the links below to start reading, or follow Chris and his adventures here on GlobalComix and abroad.
- Start reading Rapture Burgers
- Follow Rapture Productions, LLC
- Find Chris on Twitter (X)
- Visit the Rapture Productions website
Have you had a chance to read Rapture Burgers? Let us know what you think in the comments!