Half of his life takes Kenny Ruiz applying himself thoroughly with pencils after following the advice of his older brother, Raúl, a professional graffiti artist, who, tired of being asked when he was little, to draw him ‘Dragon ball’ and ‘The Knights of the Zodiac’ encouraged him to do it himself even if it turned out badly at first. This Alicante born and Granada soul started at age 20, studying and then teaching at the Joso School of Barcelona, and today is one of the ‘mangakas’ of reference in the national scene, who has also managed to drive a pike into the difficult and exclusive market of Japan, where few foreign authors succeed, including his generation partner, Ken Niimura from Madrid. In a few lines he himself will reveal how, but summarizing a lot: he is drawing a series with the characters of Osamu Tezuka, revered as the God of manga. Kenny Ruiz is one of the stars of this Manga Barcelona, where he participates in talks and signatures of Planeta Cómic and where he is an old acquaintance: he signed the 2019 poster and won an award in 2011 thanks to ‘Dos espadas’, one of his most popular works and his entry into the manga after being blanked in European and American comics and even Disney.
They asked me ‘The Avengers of Tezuka’ and I created the ‘Star Wars of Tezuka’
Kenny Ruiz
“Tezuka created hundreds of characters and the company that manages their copyrights, Tezuka Productions, had the idea two years ago that other Japanese authors would reinvent them. So, Frédéric Toutlemonde [editor francés] He fought so that European or American authors would be invited to the project “, Ruiz tells this newspaper before traveling to Barcelona for the show. From there the magazine ‘TezuComi‘. “And they gave me a short story. I asked ‘The legend of Son Goku’, the character from Chinese mythology who inspired ‘Dragon ball’, which was the origin of my passion for manga. ”
And it worked so well that the Japanese gave him another challenge: “Making what they called ‘The Avengers of Tezuka’, a story uniting diverse Tezuka characters from different eras and genres, from samurai to robots to children. And I created the Team Phoenix, in the key of science fiction, instead giving them a ‘Star Wars’ by Tezuka “. Again it worked so well that they proposed to turn it into a monthly series.” And that is the exceptional thing, that they put me in a privileged position, at the same rate as the Japanese authors and publishing it in the powerful magazine ‘Bessatsu Champion’ “, says the cartoonist.
Unlike another of the Spanish references, Ken Niimura, or Eduard Balust, who have also managed to work for Japanese publishers but moving to the country of the rising sun and speaking Japanese, Ruiz does it with a translator and from Madrid.
Of ‘TezuComi’, Planeta Cómic has published two volumes (a third will come out in 2022) with a selection of stories, including that of Ruiz -‘Boku no Songoku ‘-, but also of other front-line Spaniards who have adopted the codes manga / Tezuka as Ken Niimura, Juan Díaz Canales, Víctor Santos, Belén Ortega or David Lafuente and unpublished covers by Paco Roca, Miguelanxo Prado and Jaime Martín.
Ruiz is also one of the veterans who publishes in the magazine ‘Planet Manga’ together with young promises, a quarterly publication with Comics by Spanish authors manga promoted two years ago by David Hernando, editorial director of Planeta Cómic (and which seems to have created a school: the revista ‘Kame kame’). On the pages of ‘Planet Manga’, names such as Ana C. Sánchez, Luis Montes, Blanca Mira, Laia López or Sergio Hernández and Toni Caballero.
“There you see that there is a lot of talent and a lot of interest in publishing in manga style, although many of us are chameleonic and as readers we have very eclectic influences,” explains Ruiz, author of ‘Telémaco. In search of Ulysses’ or ‘The lightning hunter’. “The manga talks about emotions, he is more concerned with seeing how the characters live the events than with telling what happens. I also liked superheroes, but I didn’t know what the X-Men felt, only what happened to them. With ‘The Knights of the Zodiac’, on the other hand, yes. The authors want readers to get excited and feel things. ”
Teen feelings
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Ruiz also highlights the “passionate and super-faithful” profile of the manga audience, “sensations that are breathed in the atmosphere of Manga Barcelona”. “If you tell a good story to the Spanish reader, it doesn’t matter that you’re not a Japanese author,” adds who highlights how the Japanese industry knows capture teens, “an age with confused feelings, with diverse themes such as the desire to improve, doubts, sadness, passion for sports, fear of failure & mldr; There is a manga for each emotional state”.
The characters of Tezuka-Kenny Ruiz
Among the Tezuka characters that Kenny Ruiz has brought to his Team Phoenix are, among others, the princess knight, Kimba the white lion, and doctor Black Jack. “The princess knight pretends to be a man in the Middle Ages because of the salic law. I wanted an elegant protagonist but at the same time tough and aggressive. I turn Kimba into a humanized, strong and courageous animal.” “Tezuka had an amazing talent for doing iconic things with few strokes. I did not want to ‘marry’ any of his characters and I have been making a game of balances between them. He had a head full of stories and reading it causes a tsunami of ideas to relate them, “he explains.
Along with them, Ruiz created an original character of his, Fire. “She is the heart, the glue between the others, she accompanies them and translates my admiration and love for Tezuka’s characters.” All with samurai, wizards, bounty hunters and spaceships. Yeah, “Star Wars” vibe, an aesthetic that I love madly. ”
Reference-www.elperiodico.com