Comic Exchange Between America, Japan : In Japan, the best-known comics creators are given honorific titles and can make more than $1 million a year. Kodansha of Tokyo has 10 U.S. artists working on its flagship publication Comic Morning

In Japan, comic books are no laughing matter.

Of the more than 5 billion books and magazines printed in Japan in 1984, 27% were comics, according to a survey in the book “The World of Japanese Comics.” And unlike the majority of American comics, Japanese comics are not aimed mainly at youngsters and teen-agers.

In Japan, there are comic books and magazines that cater to commuting businessmen, housewives, science fiction devotees, sports fans, history buffs and gay men. There are gushy romantic comics, serious social action comics, and a number of hard-core, often violent porno comic magazines with titles such as Flesh Slave Dolls and Married Women’s Love Thrills.

But most of the adult comics are aimed at a general mass audience. And because they are going after the same market, these magazines are about as distinctive as American network TV sitcoms. They feature various characters and story lines, but the mass-market comics sport a similar look and take up similar themes. It’s a cutthroat business, and publishers are always looking for a distinctive, competitive edge.

One of the biggest of the comics publishers, the Tokyo-based Kodansha--it means “storytelling company”--is looking for its edge in America.

“There are a lot of very talented, very creative artists and writers here, but almost no market in comics for their talents,” said Shinobu Ishizuka, president of Dyna-Search, a Westwood-based head-hunting firm founded in 1979 to seek out American artists for a variety of Japanese projects. Four years ago it began to look for Americans to create material for Comic Morning, the weekly, 300-page Kodansha flagship.

“It was partly for prestige and partly to make the publication unique,” Ishizuka said. “No one was sure how it would work out.

“I think it has been a cultural experience for both sides.”

Kodansha pays Dyna-Search a consulting fee for finding the American talent, overseeing their work, translating the comics into Japanese and faxing the work to Japan. Dyna-Search now earns about half its income from the comics field, Ishizuka said.

So far, none of the Americans doing work for Comic Morning have reached superstar status in Japan, where the best-known comics creators are given honorific titles and can make more than $1 million a year. But Kodansha, which now has 10 Americans working on comics for Comic Morning, seems to be in it for the long run.

“They bought several episodes of a story I did for them, and then they never ran a bit of it,” said Anthony Zierhut, 29, who draws the comics at the dining room table in his Fairfax District apartment. “But they paid me for that work. I think they were just nurturing me along, looking toward the future. They invest in people.”

Zierhut, like the other Americans now doing work for Kodansha, responded to small advertisements that Dyna-Search placed in weekly alternative publications such as the L.A. Weekly and the Village Voice.

“The ad was so poorly written that I couldn’t make sense out of it,” said Matt Golden, 45, an illustrator who works out of his West Los Angeles apartment. “I got this idea that I might get to Japan out of it and meet Japanese women. So I sent in some samples.”

He then got his first lesson in the care and handling of artists, Japanese style. “In this country, we are used to everything being immediate,” said Golden, who has worked as an illustrator for National Lampoon and “some girlie magazines that are not around anymore.” He had never done a comic strip, but he had drawn narrative sequences, known as story boards in the film business, for directors who want to have their shots worked out on paper before they film them.

“Here, the attitude is, ‘Can you get it to me right away? Can it be on my desk by Monday?’ ” Golden said. “In Japan, it can be months before you hear anything at all.”

He had almost forgotten about Dyna-Search when he got a call, asking him to send in ideas for a story that could be done over several episodes in comic form. Golden, who has a number of stills from film noir movies pinned to the walls of his workroom, came up with Junction City, a series set in the 1940s about a down-on-his-luck detective who takes on a hotel security job in a seedy part of a fictional town. The stories revolved around the mysterious, shady or sexy characters who stayed at the hotel.

With almost no comment on the premise, Comic Morning hired him to do it. Golden has since turned out 100 pages of the story, which runs about four pages per issue. He said he has received almost no feedback from the publisher.

Zierhut’s dealings with Kodansha have been markedly different. He also waited several months after sending in samples before hearing from Dyna-Search. “They immediately paid me for my samples and wanted more,” Zierhut said. “I think it was partly to show seriousness on their part.”

Zierhut, who primarily made his living doing story boards and as an art director on low-budget feature films, proposed a science fiction story about intelligent, lizard-like creatures that live on a distant planet. He was given the go-ahead, and drew the series in a manner that emulated the simple, sparse style used by many Japanese comics artists.

But the Kodansha editors wanted something different.

“I would get cryptic messages like ‘There needs to be more viewer interest in the background,’ ” he said. “I figured out that what they wanted was more detail, more activity in the drawings.”

He turned out several episodes before Kodansha pulled the plug on the series without running a single page. “I think they realized I was losing interest in the story before I even did,” said Zierhut, who nonetheless was paid for all his work. “It would have been hard to sustain over a long period of time.”

Zierhut next suggested a science fiction story set in the Old West that was inspired by a Halloween costume of a robot he once created. Called “One-Eyed Jack,” it was about a robot that had been sent to Earth from another planet. Jack, who wears a cowboy hat but who is obviously a robot, wanders through late 18th-Century California, helping out prospectors and having adventures.

The Comic Morning editors like this story and have printed a couple of pages from it as a teaser. But it hasn’t run regularly.

“In two years they have bought nearly 100 pages,” Zierhut noted. “And so far, only two have been printed.”

This is not unusual. Comic Morning collected about 50 pages of “Junction City” before running any of it, according to Golden. When the last of those ran in March, 1989, the company put the series on hiatus even though Golden had since turned out 50 more pages. The editors told Golden that the second installment will begin later this year.

“I’m not sure if anyone is going to remember the series after all this time,” Golden said. “But it does not seem to bother them.

“They are always developing for the future, looking at the big picture. It took the Japanese years to develop the Infiniti car, for example, but when it was done, it was really terrific. They are doing the same with high-definition television.”

Nancy Meshkoff was more used to the Japanese way of conducting business. When she was a child, her family lived in Japan. “I grew up reading more Japanese comic books than American ones,” said Meshkoff, 35, who lives in New York, where she primarily makes her living by providing video services for film productions. The services include instant replays for directors and operating the video screens that are a part of a scene.

She had been developing Japanese comic-book ideas in 1986 when she spotted a Dyna-Search ad in the Village Voice. “I had spent eight months drawing up a sample because it was something I was interested in,” she said. “I was going to try and sell my stuff to Japanese publishers on my own. Then, by coincidence, there was this ad, and I sent my work to them.”

After a couple of false starts, Meshkoff was put to work on “New York Report,” autobiographical episodes from her life in that city. “In Japan, there are great comic artists and wonderful writers,” she said. “What we have to sell is that we are foreigners. New York, to them, is an exotic foreign capital.”

She did comics about New York outings, her friends, her work in the film business and even her vacations. There were tales about visits to museums, muggers, Guardian Angels, the ballet, Central Park and even her romantic life.

“It drove me crazy trying to come up with a story a week,” she said.

The series ran for two years and has been collected into a paperback called “New York” with a picture of Meshkoff on the cover.

None of the Americans as yet make a full-time living from Japanese comics. Their pay ranges from $70 to $100 a page, according to Dyna-Search’s Ishizuka. The maximum turned out by any of the American artists on a project is about 20 pages a month. The most popular Japanese artists/writers commonly turn out several hundred pages a month.

“They suggest that if you stay with it for a long, long time, you can get rich,” Golden said.

He is not sure he is willing to wait. Golden’s heart is in the film business, and he has been developing a film noir project that he hopes to sell to a producer. In the meantime, however, he finds the comics work enjoyable and hopes to do a follow-up to “Junction City.”

For Meshkoff, it has been a welcome creative outlet. “I can make a lot more money doing my video work,” she said. “And working on a film is extremely social. I’m part of a team, and I get out and meet people.

“But it’s not really creative. Doing the comics is a great balance for me, because I get to do something the way I want it done. When I am drawing, it sometimes drives me crazy to be alone, but it’s very satisfying.”

Zierhut, however, would like to make Japanese comics his life’s work. “American comics are done by committee,” he said. “You have a writer, an inker, a penciler, a letterer and a colorist, all on the same story. But the Japanese artist--even though some have assistants doing some of the detail and background work--basically does everything. He creates it all. It’s his vision.

“When I work on a comic story, I create the characters, design the sets, do the costumes, write the dialogue, work out the story. It’s like making a film that is truly my own.”