Pixie Trix Comix & Hiveworks Community

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BA: Your own Aoi House is the only manga that is presented in its entirety on the site. Like Megatokyo, it’s all up there for free. How did you develop the story?


AA: With lots of PEZ and Diet Pepsi!

But seriously, I first had the idea of doing a series about an American anime club back in fall 2004. I had been brought to Seven Seas’ attention through my work on the webzine I ran at the time, Animefringe: Online Anime Magazine, as someone that could create and run their website. I discovered that they were doing original manga using American writers and artists from all over the world, so I asked them if they’d be open to me proposing a story, which they were. I then gathered my thoughts for a while and come up with a story set in an anime club that’s a pretty different than what we see today. The original proposal had a bit of a shoujo slant to it with the two female leads that ran a college anime club and have aspirations of becoming manga creators...and one friend just happens to have romantic feelings for the other.

Obviously, that’s not the story that eventually got written. Jason DeAngelis liked the idea of a story about an anime club, but felt the story needed to be more harem-esque. So I put my original proposal aside and started over from scratch with two straight guys that are forced into joining a live-in anime club house that they later discover is run by all sorts of crazed yaoi fangirls. Unfortunately, Jason was unsure about how it would do in the market, and even less sure about a first time writer (I was doing English adaptation work on manga and freelance writing at the time, but this would’ve been my first self-written series). So we agreed that I would write the series as an online webmanga, and based on how it performed online, we’d consider putting out print compilations later. Little did we know what an immediate, overnight hit it would be!

Within days of launching the series, we started trying to figure out how we could eventually do print volumes of the materials. At the time, Jim Jimenez was the artist and the series was being written panel-by-panel like an American comic with each page being episodic with mini gag-based story arcs. As fate would have it, Jim had another job offer to do a full-length series, so it was decided that Aoi House would be completely relaunched as a full-fledged manga with fan-favorite artist Shiei (Amazing Agent Luna) bringing her own unique style of cute to the series.

The cool thing about the relaunch was that it felt like a course correction. It allowed me to go back to an earlier version of my proposal and add back in Sandy’s pet hamster Echiboo, which meant enormous new possibilities for the story, as it allowed for us to tell a fresh new version of the story that people hadn’t seen already. And from a storytelling perspective, I was able to start writing the series in screenplay format, which meant that instead of dictating everything panel-by-panel, Shiei was free to plot out the panels and pace the scenes as she saw fit. Essentially she became the director, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. Shiei has an amazing eye for layouts.