Cover of Silent Mobius QD volume 1
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Kia Asamiya has been writing manga for nearly 40 years. His most famous work, Silent Möbius, is an explosive fusion of genres: it takes place in a Blade Runner-style cyberpunk dystopia, depicting the plight of AMP, a team of female witches, telepaths, and even robots to fight Lucifer. Hawks, a mysterious force from this dimension. After creating two spin-off manga based in this universe, Silent Möbius Tales and Silent Möbius QD, Asamiya also worked in many other genres, even doing design work for Western comics and car manga and car culture, My Favorite Carrera. His most recent production, That’s My Space Opera! (or SPEOP!/Space Opera for short), is currently being adapted into an audio drama starring Runa Katagiri, who plays the main character Opera Cat. ANN had the opportunity to speak with Asamiya and Katagiri at Otakon in Washington, DC. Guests spoke about the inspiration for the team behind Silent Möbius and the importance of giving diverse characters a voice and amplifying that voice.
One of the first things I noticed when reading Silent Möbius was the mixture of different genres and cultures: supernatural and fantasy with sci-fi fantasy. I was wondering how you incorporate different genres and cultures into your work?
Kia Asamiya: Its basis is definitely cyberpunk. And, like Silent Möbius, a lot of things in the late ’80s were heavily inspired by cyberpunk properties like Blade Runner. However, if you follow the same premise as Blade Runner, you will crash and burn. So cyberpunk is one of the elements, but another element of it is things like the spiritual part, the Lucifer Hawk part, and then bringing those together with a multinational group just for women. That’s basically where Silent Möbius comes from.
Is there a particular reason why you chose to focus specifically on women in a cast?
ASAMIYA: I want to say that what you mentioned with regards to “ensemble” is really interesting because I feel that “ensemble” is a great way to talk about it. There is actually a musical element to it, as the organization is named AMP. It comes from a musical sound amplifier, as in an amplifier. So, I believe that the amp is as important as the speaker in conveying messages in this world. That’s also reflected in the diversity — everyone in the cast excels in their own specialties, with their own backgrounds. For example, they’re all female, but everyone is different because you have a shaman, a spiritualist, an onmyōdō expert, a cyborg, an ESPer, and a cyber information expert. They all have different things they are good at. Then, AMP is there to amplify “sound” around the world.
Regarding the idea of AMP: I noticed while reading Silent Möbius there was a lot going on but in a very good way. It’s like an explosion of energy and ideas pouring off the page, and it’s a lot of fun to read that way.
ASAMIYA:I believe that’s also an interesting point because the amp analogy in the Silent Möbius QD is a little bit more similar. As the number of AMP members increased, I divided into three teams and gave each team a name associated with the sound amplifier, such as Woofer, Squawker and Tweeter. The names of the teams made sense to me in the context, as did the roles of the speakers, as opposed to the roles I assigned them as part of the context.
To change the conversation a bit, you’re publishing a relatively new work, Space Opera. What was the process of adapting Space Opera into a non-visual audio medium?
ASAMIYA: In terms of those kinds of media formats, Silent Möbius is also an audio drama. And giving the character a voice is essential; giving them that voice will help you understand the world and characters a lot better. And voicing the characters, putting on world music or soundtracks is really important to create the feeling of the manga because manga is a visual medium. I believe having that voice adds an extra layer. That’s why I gave Space Opera a TV/audio series.
Runa KATAGIRI: So I can’t say too much about the process, but voicing Opera Cat was a lot of fun. It’s been 5 years since I was able to take on this role, and 5 years ago, when everything started, I was still a new voice actor. However, even when I first got to know Asamiya-sensei, he immediately said, “Do you want to do the voice acting?” And that’s when I was really surprised. This gave me the opportunity to voice something when I was new, even allowing me to go to Otakon like this. So it’s all thanks to Asamiya-sensei.