Interview: Thunder 3 Editor Dan Joseph Takes Us Through the Breach of this Multiverse Saga
Find out about the multiverse-jumping action/adventure Thunder 3 directly from Kodansha USA's English-edition Editor, Dan Joseph!
If you're in the mood for an exciting action/adventure with stunning art that pushes the boundaries of the manga medium, look no further than the sci-fi epic Thunder 3 by Yuki Ikeda!
To celebrate the series debut in print and digital on November 5, 2024, we sat down with the English-edition Editor, Dan Joseph, to ask about this universe-jumping epic and unveil some secrets about this story and how the debut volume came to life.
Read below for our inside look at Thunder 3!
Ivan: Hi! My name is Ivan Salazar, the senior marketing director at Kodansha USA. And I'm here with the Thunder 3 Editor, Dan Joseph.
Dan: Hi, I'm Dan Joseph. I'm a Senior Editor here at Kodansha USA.
Ivan: So, Dan, could you tell us briefly about your position as a Senior Editor and your history with Manga?
Dan: My position involves editing Japanese translations of manga into English. For every book that comes across my desk, I do a side-by-side. I check every panel and just make sure that we're putting out absolutely the best English-language content we can. And I've been doing that for coming up on about five years now, I think. And I got into manga in the 80s when there wasn't very much available in English. So, a lot of the stuff was coming out through, for instance, First Comics was releasing Lone Wolf and Cub in square-bound, individual issues, and Epic started doing AKIRA in the full-color edition. That was my introduction to it. Only the classics. There wasn't enough of a market to kind of branch out from there. And since then, as the market has expanded, my taste and palate have expanded as well, while also engaging with it on a totally different level.
Ivan: One of the newest titles you're editing is Thunder 3 by Yuki Ikeda. Could you give us the elevator pitch for it?
Dan: Three ordinary middle school boys from a crudely drawn manga world find themselves transported to a photo-realistic world, which is under attack by alien forces. And the laws of physics are different there, so they discover that they have the superpowers required to help that world defend itself.
Ivan: So, when Thunder 3 first came to Kodansha USA for localization, were you excited to edit the series?
Dan: I was! I'm a lifelong science fiction fan—that's a big part of my reading and just my life in general. So, getting a book like this with such a unique sci-fi premise was really exciting for me. It's obvious at a glance that the contrast in art styles is such a huge part of what makes this book special. And it's doing something that sci-fi can't do in any other medium. You couldn't do this on the prose page, so it's really exploiting the unique properties of the comics medium to do this really cool sci-fi premise. It made me feel excited the same way seeing Who Framed Roger Rabbit did when it first came out—that the medium is being used in sort of a new way.
And it's just a great sci-fi piece on top of that. Both on the realistic side—the mechs and stuff look fantastic—and both art styles are great. They work well together, and it's just a really cool concept, so I was excited right off the bat.
Ivan: And I know you mentioned that Thunder 3 is definitely a big sci-fi story—in terms of the fact that it jumps to a different universe and also uses different art styles to indicate that. Do you think that this is a story that can appeal to more than sci-fi fans?
Dan: Absolutely. These kids are very normal middle school kids. So they don't get chocolate on Valentine's Day. The protagonist is annoyed by his little sister—who actually also gets transported to the other world, which is why they go after her, so she's having her own adventure. So, I think it's got elements of a lot of different kinds of stories, including shonen, seinen action, and this big sci-fi thing happening in the background. So, it's got a little bit of something for everyone, I think.
Ivan: So, because these kids really are just jumping universes, especially in a visually obvious way, how is Thunder 3 similar to other multiverse stories or even isekai stories?
Dan: It's just these two worlds, so far, so more Stargate than Everything Everywhere All at Once, or Time Bandits—just to date myself a little bit. But the contrast—stemming from the art style and also from what's happening in these two worlds—is so stark that you really, immediately, get that feeling of different worlds. And the art does such a good job of setting the two universes apart, even though the same people live in them, the same places exist in them. It still feels like two different universes, which I think is a really interesting way to do it.
I mentioned Stargate, where aliens come from another planet or plane of existence. In a lot of those stories, the threat is external, but in Thunder 3, they go to their own world, albeit somewhat different, and there's this external threat that they have to deal with. So, I think the story does ground it in our reality in a nice way while still having that sort of multiversal feel.
Ivan: So Dan, whlie you were editing Thunder 3—and without spoiling anything—was there anything that really surprised you about this story?
Dan: If you look at the cover, it has this very sort of Saturday morning cartoon action vibe, which it's doing intentionally. It's kind of a send-up of that, which I think works really well. But I was surprised by how much heart the story has. It gets deep into some of the more difficult, emotional ramifications of this alien invasion. In volume two, there's a sort of bottle episode that's actually really intense and moving. And then it spreads out from there. There's a cute sidekick, there's serious action with sci-fi superpowers, and cool tech. And it keeps throwing new elements into the story. So it's much more than just, "kids go through portal to another universe." I think Thunder 3 will keep surprising us, all of us.
Ivan: Even in the first chapter, we are introduced to a lot of interesting story elements: From seeing the aliens we counter, in the new dimension, to "hearing" some of the alien language—presented in a kind of "alien text" fashion that we can still read— to the way the art changes styles really highlighting where the kids come from versus where the world that they inhabit when they jump dimensions. As the manga editor, was it challenging to play with all these different elements and still give the best representation of this manga in English versus the original Japanese version of Thunder 3?
Dan: Yeah, there were a lot of interesting challenges with this from a production and translation standpoint. You mentioned the alien speech. The way it was done in the Japanese was that it was rendered, essentially illegibly, with the Japanese translation underneath it. So what we ended up doing was scrubbing out the Japanese from pages, and instead of replacing that with English, we found a new alien font, that's just this side of legible and gives it that kind of distance from our everyday reality. But you can also just read the dialogue in the dialogue box. We spent a long time searching for exactly the right font for that. And I like to think we found it.
There's not a ton of dialogue in this book. There's a lot of action, which means a lot of sound effects and a lot of big two-page spreads. So there's a lot of work for the letterer to make sure that the sound effects look good, that they fit correctly in the panels and mirror the feel of the original Japanese version. And for the content of the sound effect itself, I actually went back and forth a lot with the wonderful translator, Cat Anderson, about what is the sound of an alien spacecraft hovering over Tokyo. What's the sound of a superpowered middle schooler jumping two miles into the air? So, we actually collaborated a lot on that, which doesn't always happen. So, that was a challenging but really nice part of working on this book.
Ivan: So, are there any other thoughts you have on Thunder 3 that you'd like to impart to the fans?
Dan: I think this book is just a really fun read for anyone. It's relatively breezy, but there's plenty there for even the most seasoned sci-fi veterans. Anyone can pick this up and enjoy the story. And I think there's someone for everyone to project themselves onto and go on this adventure. I hope that people will see what a sort of unique and fun book this is and take this journey through the multiverse with all of us.
Curious for more information about Thunder 3?
Check out the series info and free chapter 1 preview below:
Thunder 3
By Yuki Ikeda
Debut Date: November 5, 2024
Three ordinary schoolboys come into possession of a DVD that supposedly opens a gateway to a parallel universe, but when their backs are turned, Pyontaro's little sister Futaba passes through and gets kidnapped by the aliens that have overrun that version of Earth! Discovering that their cartoonish bodies make them supermen in the hyper-realistic parallel universe, the boys set out to rescue Futaba.
Rated: 13+
Preview the FREE first chapter of Thunder 3