Interview: Katsushi Ota, Editor of Faust Magazine

The first wave of the Japanese pop culture invasion was anime in the Sixties and Seventies, with Astro Boy, Kimba the White Lion and Speed Racer, with many more notable series after that. The second wave was video games. (Nintendo, Atari, Konami, SquareSoft and all the rest that have given several generations game controller blisters). The third wave is manga. What will the fourth wave of Japanese pop culture be? Some folks in the publishing world are betting on J-Lit -- light novels influenced by manga, anime and video game culture.

On the forefront of this latest invasion of Japanese pop culture is Katsushi Ota. As the editor of Faust, a literary / manga anthology magazine from Kodansha, Ota-san has been turning heads in the Japanese publishing world with Faust's unique mix of pop culture lit for the otaku generation. Faust also aims to nurture worldwide otaku cultural exchange by presenting Fred Gallagher's Megatokyo to Japanese readers in the March 2008 issue.

There are already successful editions of Faust in Korea and Taiwan, and in Summer 2008, Del Rey Manga is publishing the first issue of the American edition of Faust. With stories and illustrations by fan-favorite manga creators such as CLAMP (Tsubasa, xxxHolic), Yun Kouga (Loveless) and Takeshi Obata (Death Note, Ral Ω Grad), Faust is looking to hook manga, anime and video game fans into this new expression of the culture and art that they already love.

Ota-san was Del Rey Manga's special guest at the 2007 New York Anime Festival. After his panel appearance, we sat down for a lively conversation about manga, light novels, and serving Megatokyo back to Japanese otaku. Read my interview with Katsushi Ota and find out why he thinks Harry Potter has more in common with Nintendo than J.R.R. Tolkien, and his hopes for this latest Japanese culture invasion.

Faust was picked as one of the 20 hot manga to watch in 2008. See the rest of the top 20 list and check out what's ahead in the months to come.

Image credit: © Deb Aoki