When Daniel Pink, a Wired contributing editor and former speechwriter for vice-president Al Gore, visited Japan he saw people reading manga, or Japanese comics. “It was like this,” he said and flipped furiously through a book in front of him, “like they were racing through it, devouring it. Coming from prose, I’d love to see someone read my stuff with that greedy speed.”
Pink writes about business and the workplace and his last book, A Whole New Mind, was a New York Times bestseller. But he never forgot about manga, and now he’s made his vision come true by writing what is likely the first American-conceived and illustrated business manga, The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You'll Ever Need. Johnny Bunko will be published this month by Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin, with an initial printing of 75,000 copies. As the title implies, the book acts as a guide for promoting your career and landing the job that best fits your talents and passions. The title character works in the accounting department at a large company but dreams of putting his creative talent to work. A chance encounter with a pair of magic chopsticks opens up a new world of opportunity for him and teaches him six lessons of the modern workplace.
“Career books in the U.S. are painfully, alarmingly out of sync with the times,” Pink said in an interview with PWCW. “They're packed with information that’s outdated before it’s even published.” Pink pointed to the internet as the starting point for most job seekers. “A lot of career and job info is tactical and people get their tactical information online,” Pink explained. “What they want from a book is what they can’t get from the internet: strategic lessons, broad lessons, those things that elude Google-ing."
Pink teamed up with artist Rob Ten Pas of the Minneapolis College of Art and Design—“the MIT of manga,” Pink joked—who provided the illustration for Pink’s script. Pink had originally sought a Japanese artist and had met a few during his visit to Japan, but the language difference made the collaboration process challenging. Additionally, Riverhead Books insisted that Johnny Bunko be printed in conventional left-to-right English format, rather than the right-to-left reading format of Japanese language manga. “A lot of readers who have read my previous books don’t even know what manga is,” Pink said. “If we did this right-to-left we’d end up confusing people.” Collaborating on a project in a foreign language is one obstacle, but drawing left-to-right, essentially drawing backwards for most Japanese artists, proved to be an insurmountable obstacle.
But with Ten Pas, the match was perfect. “I liked his art style and I liked his sense of humor,” Pink said. “I wrote the script and he would send back the pencils. A lot of times I overwrote—I [ended up] killing dialogue, killing word balloons. As a prose writer, it was really a process of embracing the form. I learned a lot. There were storytelling skills that weren’t at my fingertips.”
Pink also added sizeable portions of graphic novels to his personal reading list, from manga to conventional American and European comics, including such works as Guy Delisle’s Pyongyang, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, Masashi Kishimoto’s Naruto, Natsuki Takaya’s Fruits Baskets and Nami Akimoto’s Miracle Girls. “It’s a very potent way to tell stories, convey ideas, and give advice in a world where people have limited time and attention spans,” Pink said highlighting the communicative power and potential of nonfiction manga and comics in general.
To advertise and promote the release of Johnny Bunko, Pink will tour college towns like Boston, Chicago, Baltimore, Seattle and Austin, giving talks and doing book readings and signings at bookstores. He'll also be the commencement speaker at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, and will be a participant in BookExpo America’s “Upfront and Unscripted,” a series of live one-on-one interviews and podcasts that will be held this summer during the annual book convention at the Los Angeles Convention Center. There will also be Johnny Bunko-brand ramen noodles and blads given away at the forthcoming New York Comic-Con, to be held at the Jacob Javits Convention Center this month. A Johnny Bunko trailer has also been made to generate interest in the book.
Despite his new found love of manga and comics, Pink was quick to reafirm his loyalty to prose. But he’s eager to see how his new business manga will be received by the public. “This the last career guide you will ever need,” Pink said, “but there could be more adventures of Johnny Bunko.”
