Kia Asamiya said when he was drawing and having color added later on, he found that the color seemed to swallow the black sometimes and he would go back and actually put more black in there. Do you find that too?

BD: No. I mean, manga is a black and white medium quite frankly, but color is what people want, so you gotta make that change, you gotta adapt.

Do you think for manga to hit it big in the US it will have to adopt color?

BD: Absolutely, no question about it. First of all, it's just that people are used to color. Europeans love color. That's the only reason we sold Ninja High School was because of color. If it were in black and white no one would be interested in it.

Who is your audience? Who are you writing to?

BD: I'm writing to myself, if anyone. I'm just basically taking myself and everybody else for a ride. If I had to say what age group I would recommend the book for, I would say probably young adults maybe teenagers.

Talking about drawing in the manga style, what titles influenced you growing up?

BD: Oh gosh, everything, I loved Marvel comics, I loved Go Nagai, Tezuka, Ishimore, Matsumono, the guy who did "Gundam," just a lot of people. And then of course, Kirby, Steranko, Barry Smith, people like that. I just like art, I like looking at art it doesn't matter who it is. If it's something I like I just grab it take it to heart.

Do you feel Antarctic Press is particularly manga driven, or do you feel it's your own style?

BD: Well, manga to me is just something I look at because it can give me some ideas.

What's the future of Antarctic Press?

BD: We've got a lot of big plans. We're doing a top-secret project for Marvel that involves their characters in sort of a manga vein. And were doing "Gold Digger: The Anime." That will be out in October. The VHS version. The DVD version should be out a month after that.

And you're releasing it yourself?

BD: Yes, we're releasing everything ourselves, right. And were producing it ourselves. It will be only direct market. It's what we call "garage anime." Everything is in house. Finally the technology has gotten to the point where we can actually do that. Almost all with computers exclusively. In fact, even Fred's drawing the animation on computer.

So what else is happening in the future?

BD: Well, my fear is that unless distribution changes and you get more people opening up comic stores, we're going to continue to lose our venue. We're either going to want to find a new venue or were gonna have to find some way to continue distributing books on our own. I'd kinda like to see a Barnes & Noble approach to comics, or at least get Barnes & Nobles to dedicate a section to comics. They've got a section for graphic novels, but not for comics. We've got a huge section for magazines, but not for comics. I think that the problem has been that the price points have been too low for them. But now that the price points are high, I think that they could actually do better. Now you have to design the books so that people who walk into a book store will not think that comics are just for kids.

And how do you do that?

BD: I think that design is the most important thing. You know right now comics are designed to attract kids and not to attract adults. And or at least young adults. If you can do a comic a design element that works in a venue that will attract them, then I think you will get people to pick them up. Plus I think what you also you do is mix in an element that will make it worth their while. You pick up a comic you read it in 5 minutes its not worth the $2.95, you pick up a comic book and it takes you thirty minutes to read, then its worth it.

You talked about making comics appeal to adults as opposed to kids. What is the appeal of Ninja high School?

BD: It's definitely the sexual tension. The thing is I'm dealing with characters that have actual lives. A lot of comic characters have lives but they have nothing outside of themselves. That's one thing that made Marvel Comics more appealing, because they had lives outside of themselves. Back in the old days, Superman was either Clark Kent or Superman. You didn't know what Clark Kent's favorite Chinese food restaurant was, what Clark Kent's favorite TV show was, what he whacked off to, those are the kinds of things they didn't care about. The center of attention was Superman; everything gravitated toward him. Ninja High School, nothing gravitates toward those characters. Each character has its own sort of sexual tension that I try to play around with and extrapolate off. That's basically what I think is the main appeal to older readers. Because, sex is part of our lives, why shouldn't it be a part of the characters of Ninja High School?