Prototype Issue
Giant Robot Revealed
By Dennis Nishi
(page 1 of 1)Eric Nakamura grew up like many Japanese American kids: stuck between worlds. Daily, after attending his public school classes, he went to Japanese language school, and his free time was spent hanging out at mom’s sushi restaurant.
Nakamura’s solitary world became populated with ’70s anime programs such as Raideen and Getter Robo, mangas (Japanese comics) and Japanese die cast robots.
Years later, when he met Martin Wong at UCLA, the two like-minded friends pooled their meager resources and started their own comic, Giant Robot. Over the course of 13 years, the fanzine evolved into a polished glossy with international distribution and big-name advertising from Nike, Adidas and Mercedes-Benz. Giant Robot has also morphed into a restaurant and four stores, including satellites in San Francisco and New York. Each carries an assortment of scented sushi erasers, plush toys and Lomo cameras.
RealTALK LA contributor Dennis Nishi met with Eric, who is 37 and lives in Santa Monica, at a boba café across from his restaurant and store on Sawtelle in West LA. He discussed his growing Asian pop empire.
How did you first get Giant Robot into stores? We walked into stores and ask[ed] if they’d want to sell them and got rejected half the time. People would be like, “We don’t want that.” Even now, I look at it and go, “Wow, that’s low budge.” You had to take a leap of faith to even open the cover.
Who’s reading Giant Robot? I think it’s like 18 to 30, basically. I really like meeting the readers that are 45, 50 or 60. You know they’re seeing through the design and really enjoying the articles and not just looking at pictures. There’s a little more cerebral connection.
Is it a mostly an Asian readership? It’s always been more than 50% non-Asian. It started off more non-Asian. Then it went to a little more Asian.
How much of the writing do you and Martin do these days? Usually well over half. The weird thing is that in the last issue, Martin and I wrote almost every article. I was like, why was this one better? Because we did it, man. Entirely. We write about stories that we like. It’s all about our own tastes in music, art, Chow Yun-Fat. Some things aren’t new. They’re old rediscovered things.
How do you stay plugged in? I get most of my news on the computer. Blogs. I don’t read newspapers. I watch a lot of shows online. It’s small, but it’s better than nothing. I rent DVDs. I hardly ever see movies. I’m behind on all the movies.
Do you read much manga for pleasure now that it’s become your job to write about it? I used to read Orange Road and Maison Ikkoku. Real girly stuff, but I thought it was more interesting than all the harsh dude stuff. Now I like the underground stuff like Garo and Gekiga. More like regular life story mangas. Buddha, the Osamu Tezuka comics. It’s an anthology of the story of Buddha. That’s an eight-part series of graphic novels released by Vertical Books. Those are amazing. It’s like the historical stuff that should go into the Smithsonian Institute. I kind of want to learn something when I’m reading. I’m not into just bunnies with boobs.
What else do you read? Augusten Burroughs. I never thought I’d be a fan of his, but I picked up a book in the airport and thought, “Wow, this guy is amazing.” I think I’ve read everything he’s done. He went from telling these horror stories, really freaky stuff that happened when he was a kid. The more recent stuff is more refined because he’s almost gotten over that hump. That’s where the true talent comes out.
How about a Giant Robot TV show? We’ve had meetings with some television people. Nothing’s ever worked out to how we want it. We’ve had very bad deals put on the table. Creative control goes by the wayside when you do television.
What made you decide to branch out into retail? We were writing articles about things and people would be selling stuff we were writing about. So we started off with difficult things to find. We’d get a few extra pieces and advertise it. Sure enough, people started to mail order it. This was before e-commerce. Eventually, we made an e-commerce website and started selling our T-shirts. It grew from there. We needed a place to store everything, so we opened a store instead. And we opened up more stores.
Any hobbies? We have a little group called Sculpey kids and make stuff out of clay. We get together more than once a month. Sometimes we have a theme. Sometimes not. The whole thing is just for fun. That’s what Sculpey is for us. It’s the escape.
GR2 Gallery and GR Stores
www.giantrobot.com
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