Just Start: The Farmer and the Artist
Or: another way to think about your failures.
(This is the only time I’m going to push this at the front of the newsletter: Just Start now offers paid subscriptions. $5 a month — or your local equivalent — doesn’t actually get you anything extra, but it does help me spend more time producing longer and more original posts like this one. Please consider it!)
In the late 90s, manga creator Hiroya Oku was on the verge of bankruptcy.
He’d seen some success with his debut title, Hen, but his follow-up, if anything, was too forward-thinking: he invested a chunk of its profits into cutting-edge (for that era) 3D technology, spending two years training himself and his assistants in the new software in the hopes of creating a new kind of manga. Zero One featured a young boy who enters a futuristic VR fighting game to challenge a prodigy, facing all manner of humiliations and tribulations as he (slowly) improves. The battle scenes are done in CG, but so are many of the backgrounds, as Oku explains in this interview:
“Because Zero One was placed in a near-future society, I predicted the future townscape and created designs for items such as buildings, cars, streets and traffic signals.
I wanted an intricate and unified background to work on…however, if I had my assistants draw in the background by hand as I usually did, the drawings would not be perfectly unified.”
The learning curve was fairly steep, Oku explains — but the work was ‘actually quite fun’, and he and his assistants jumped straight in, learning as they worked. The problem? This was the late 90s, so the results were…not as good as hand-drawn manga.
“After two years of paying assistant salaries, and investing in costly computers and printers for 3D rendering, I used up most of my money,” Oku says. “Most of the money I had saved from “Hen” was gone, and I thought I was done for when the series started to get published but didn’t do well.”
We’ll get to what Oku did next in a second, but first let’s talk about Taoist philosophy.
The parable of the farmer is one of those things that does the rounds on social media occasionally, but it also recently appeared in a feature-length (well, 25-minute) episode of kids’ TV show Bluey. In case you’re unfamiliar, it goes something like this.
Once upon a time, an old farmer living on the frontier lost his horse.
His neighbours in the village said, “What bad luck!”
The old man replied, “Maybe. We’ll see.”
The next day, the horse returned with five more wild horses.
The neighbours came and said,” Wow! What good luck!”
The old man said, “Maybe. We’ll see.”
The next morning the old man’s son tried to ride one of the wild horses, but the horse threw him off, and the boy broke his leg.
The neighbours said again, “What bad luck!”
The old man replied, “Maybe. We’ll see.”
The next day, soldiers arrived to take young men off to war, but the old man’s son didn’t have to go because of his broken leg.
The neighbours said, “What good luck!”
The old man replied, “Maybe. We’ll see.”
I love that parable, not just because it’s comforting when things seem bleak, but because it’s a reminder that it’s difficult to predict how things are going to turn out in the long run. My biggest concern, for instance, is climate change — mainly because I care about what happens to my seven-year-old — and I think it’s fair to say that recent political developments make it even more troubling than it seemed six months ago. But we’ll see! Maybe the pendulum will swing the other way, and we’ll see the emergence of a political or scientific movement that actually gets things under control and gets us to the next level of humanity’s development. This doesn’t mean ignoring what’s happening and doing nothing — more on this in a second — but it’s a reason to not give up hope, and I think that’s important.
So what did Oku do?
He started working on his magnum opus.
Gantz, which ran for 13 years, sold more than 24 million copies, and inspired three films and two spin-off series, is difficult to describe. The basic pitch is that a series of recently-deceased people are resurrected, forced to fight aliens (many disguised as creatures from myth or popular culture, one taking the form of Salvador Dali’s Soft Construction with Boiled Beans), and then mostly die again. It’s incredibly graphic, frequently very problematic, and most fans hate the way it ends. But it’s also an experience like nothing else: Oku’s art is absolutely incredible, conveying a feel of motion, speed and impact that’s very difficult to get across in any other medium, and combining it with a sense of the fantastic and disturbing that’s reminiscent in scale and weirdness of Bosch, William Blake, and the Chapman Brothers’ F***ing Hell.
It’s also, if it’s about anything, about perseverance and survival in the face of impossible odds. Amid all the carnage and hyper-detailed creatures, the moments that actually make you pause are the ones where the heroes’ love and support for each other shines through: the bits where, even with limbs torn off and an endlessly-regenerating god-alien looming up ahead, they’re still moving forward because they just will not give up while other people depend on them.
I’m not saying you should read it, and I can’t stress enough that it has a lot of scenes that are horrible, exploitative, sexist, or very badly thought out, but if any of the non-bad stuff sounds interesting then you should probably watch this video about Gantz, which introduced me to the series and includes most of its absolutely insane moments.
But how does this relate to the farmer and the point of this newsletter?
Well, one of the biggest strengths of Gantz is its realistic backdrops: these battles take place across Tokyo and Osaka, in settings that make its creatures all the more unsettling by juxtaposing them against convenience stores and subway stations. And what makes them so good is that the backgrounds are rendered by computer first, allowing for detailed cityscapes and incredibly realistic water, with freakish monsters laid on the top. Oku himself explains this best:
“In the end, all the investments I had made for “01 ZERO ONE” were for a good cause.
That flop has enabled my studio to create images that no one else could.”
But the other big strength of Gantz, I think, is its central message of pulling your team together and refusing to lie down and die. Could Oku have come up with that without the experience of failure and desperation that Zero One left him with? As far as I know, he’s never mentioned it in an interview, but I’d be very surprised if not.
So the point of all this, I think, is: you never know. Maybe you’ve poured a lot of yourself into a project that hasn’t worked out, and it’s left you drained, exhausted, and financially worse off than you started. Maybe it didn’t work the way you wanted it to, or nobody liked it. But maybe you learned something along the way that’s going to lead to you making something much better down the line, even if you can’t see it right at this moment.
Maybe. We’ll see.
Have a great weekend!
Joel x
Stuff I like
🎶 Hype Music - Are You Gonna Be My Girl, Jet
It’s impossible for me to be unhappy while listening to this song, which sounds a bit like Iggy Pop, but — as the band explain — was actually heavily motown-inspired, with an intro that’s basically the same as I’m Ready for Love by Martha and the Vandellas. So good.
🎙️Podcast - David Deutsch & Steven Pinker on AGI, P(Doom), & The Enemies of Progress
This is the most good-natured argument I’ve ever heard, between two well-informed optimists who disagree with each other on an absolute tonne of stuff. Very pleasing.
🎉 Fun thing - The Fold-And-Cut Theorem
Did you know that you can make any shape that contains a pattern of straight cuts by folding a piece of paper up and then cutting it once? Incredible but true. I’m always looking out for weird stuff to show the seven-year-old, and this one was a banger.
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