Hardcover $22.46 $24.95 By contrast, is a warm family story about Yaichi, a single father faced with a new set of realities when Mike, the husband of his late twin brother Ryoji, comes for a visit. It’s not sexually explicit, but it is emotionally explicit, as Mike deals with his loss and Yaichi tries to come to terms with his brother’s sexuality. Yaichi’s young daughter Kana is the intermediary, jumping into awkward situations and defusing them with a child’s disarming frankness.

Logicheskie zadachi dlya doshkoljnikov. After all, they must not only think, but also be able to express their interesting thoughts.

Gengoroh Tagame: PRIDE Comic Vol.1 (in Japanese) Manga on Amazon.com. Get your Kindle here, or download a FREE Kindle Reading App.

The manga is being published in two omnibus volumes in the U.S.; the first came out last month. Tagame is a frequent guest at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival (TCAF), and at this year’s event, I sat down with him over a cup of coffee to talk about his past and present manga. My thanks to Anne Ishii for translating the interview. You’re known for a particular type of manga. Why did you choose to create a story that is so different from what your fans are used to? I get this question a lot.

The motivation behind writing has been the same as the motivation behind all my writing, which is I write what I want to read. What I want to see in the world isn’t out there, so I create it. So in that sense I don’t think of it as very different in terms of what motivates me to write it, the content notwithstanding. Around ten years ago I really wanted to write a gay themed story for straight readers. Fast forward to when I was talking to editors at Futabasha, my Japanese publisher. I presented to them the book proposal, they liked it, they approved of it, and voila! What was your original proposal to them?

How did you describe it? It’s about a man whose little brother marries another man, has a same sex marriage with a foreigner who then comes to visit the family and what happens.

It’s kind of a “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” kind of thing. How did it change when you actually started writing it? Was it different from the original idea?

The idea has remained pretty consistent, and that’s actually because the publisher was so accepting of the story from the get-go and very amenable to all the ideas I had for it. The idea that the publisher understood and wanted to play up was a gay story but seen through the lens of the main character who is straight, and through the main character other straight people and straight readers would learn along with them, so the theme stopped being so much about gay issues and more about family issues, what it means to have a family and to be in a family.

Hardcover $19.99 There are couple of moments the story when you see Yaichi say something startlingly blunt, but then in the next panel you see that it’s just what he’s thinking, and what he says is much more polite. Is that something you came up with for this book, or is it something you have used in your other books? Is it a common manga trope?