With graphic novels becoming more mainstream as a genre in the UK, do you think that this has aided the popularity of manga? Or do you think the popularity of Western comics is separate to manga’s popularity?

I guess there’s some overlap, but I imagine some people would say, “I don’t read manga, I only read graphic novels,” and then go ahead and read something that actually is a manga without realising it. And obviously the graphic novel format – often black and white, around 200 pages, paperback – is a lot like manga. It’s a shame that we demarket manga as somehow separate from graphic novels, because they are clearly all comics, just in different terms of the same thing. I think many people have difficulty getting into manga. Its success has obviously been helped a huge amount by anime. For many people, that’s their entry point. For some it may be their only access point.

That can be a problem in a sense, because anime, while it’s diverse and great, doesn’t always cover as broad a spectrum of content and graphic styles as manga. Manga has a much bigger spectrum. Of course, many anime are original and not based on manga. But I think if your own terms of reference are “I’ve seen the anime, I didn’t realise that Naruto or One Piece was also a manga,” and then you get into the source material, then you’re missing out on things that haven’t been adapted and that don’t have an anime version. In a way, Italy and France are the right countries for our Mangasia Exhibition to open in Europe. It would’ve been nice to have it here in London, but Britain is a bit sleepy when it comes to manga and anime. We’ve got it, but we haven’t had the big presence on TV.

Why is that?

I guess because we haven’t got enough channels. Maybe the deals weren’t worked out at the right time. There were always bits of it, but never in a very substantial way. Whereas there was a whole generation in France that grew up on Dragonball and other series on French TV in the 70s. And in Italy as well, during the 1970s and 80s, there was an explosion of TV channels. Lots of channels were like, “OK, what are we going to put on? what can we get that’s cheap? We’ll buy anime!” So, a lot of people have grown up with Fist of the North Star, or Doraemon, or other characters in a way that hasn’t happened here in Britain.