INTERVIEW: F.J. DeSanto on rebooting, honoring ‘Cyborg 009’

Cyborg 009, the classic manga from Shotaro Ishinomori, has resurfaced thanks to the team at Archaia. With words from F.J. DeSanto and Bradley Cramp, illustrations from Marcus To and colors from Ian Herring, the graphic-novel reboot is a way for Ishinomori’s characters to live on and reach new audiences.

The book, which was released this fall and has been buzzed about at comic conventions, tells the story of nine humans who are abducted by a nefarious organization and made into weapons of mass destruction. Although their objective is to cause harm, the nine cyborgs fight their technological inclinations to find their inner-humanity.

For DeSanto, who has had a successful career in television and film, the project is many, many years in the making. One could say he’s been building toward this graphic novel since he was a manga-reading boy growing up in New York City.

“I grew up with a strong love of manga and anime,” DeSanto said recently in a phone interview. “And fortunately through this, you know, fortunate career I’ve had, I developed a relationship with Ishimori Pro in Japan.”

Ishimori Productions owns the rights to Cyborg 009, so DeSanto presented them with a game plan about reintroducing the manga to an American audience. “And I thought the best way to do that was to sort of, you know, build the franchise here,” said DeSanto. “The first thing we did was get a lot of the translated English version of the original manga out on Comixology because a lot of it hadn’t been in print here in over like 10 years. And then I was able to sort of come up with a game plan with how to do a sort of, you know, new graphic novel … that would take the original story and really introduce it to a new generation of fans.”

DeSanto said this isn’t a “westernization” of Cyborg 009, but instead a gateway for fans to enter the series.

“It was always about finding what’s the best way to honor the original source material because quite frankly the material was so strong that you don’t really have to deviate. It’s more like you’re taking great elements from the franchise and piecing it into a new three-act story that people can get onboard with.”

One challenge with the project was trying to reduce the original vision of the manga to the length of a graphic novel. The creators were conscious of how quickly they needed to jump into these iconic characters and backstories. Manga, which usually allows more space to develop characters and showcase action, is a slightly different world.

“Joe, Cyborg 009 himself, being sort of the centerpiece of it, you know, we wanted to make sure that by the time it was over, they were invested in those characters and wanted to see where they were going to go after that,” he said. “I think the fun part with Joe was he would serve as our entry point into this unique world. We’re learning as he learns, and I think that’s a lot of fun.”

DeSanto said he personally finds the character of Joe fascinating. He’s a person with a rough background who is made into a human weapon. He’s not exactly the “chosen one,” a common archetype in comic books. He didn’t look for this life or choose these abilities. That quality goes for all the cyborgs. “This is something that happened to them, and they’re sort of forced together by circumstance,” he said. “And I think that’s an infinitely more compelling story than most other superhero books.”

The common denominator among the nine cyborgs is their yearning for humanity.

“I think what in particular about Cyborg 009 that stands out to me is always that hopefulness to it. Whereas X-Men, you know, they have these powers, and they’re sort of whining about it. … [In Cyborg 009] there’s a positivity that to me embodies the human spirit of hope, which is, yes, these things happen to us but we’re going to use them in a positive way to push humanity forward. And I think the beauty of Cyborg 009, and it’s really with Ishinomori’s work in general, is always about the human spirit will always triumph over technology, and I think that’s essential to anything we do with this world.”

To work on the English-language edition of Cyborg 009 is a full-circle moment in DeSanto’s life. He remembers being exposed to the manga when growing up in New York City, and now he’s helping launch the title’s resurgence.

“I was exposed to manga and anime right when it first came here through Gatchaman and Yamato under their sort of American guises of Battle of the Planets and Star Blazers in that post-sort of- Star-Wars world, and it just sort of blew my mind to see animation like that,” he said. “Growing up in New York, Manhattan always had a great bunch of Japanese bookstores.”

The greatest sense of accomplishment for DeSanto was when the publishers decided to move ahead with a Japanese edition of the new Cyborg 009. “That’s the moment when I realized that if they weren’t happy with the book or they felt it wouldn’t appeal to a Japanese audience, they would never do that,” he said. “They would just let it come out here and never speak of it there, but they actually did go and have it released there. We actually had a band do a theme song for it in Japan, etc., and it’s done pretty well in Japan. To be honest with you, I was possibly more excited to see the Japanese version of the book in Japanese than the U.S. version just simply because it was like a weird … coming full circle, my entire life of growing up with that stuff.”

Now Cyborg 009 is ready to inspire conversations on technology and humanity to a whole new generation.

“It was sort of hard to gauge what the fan base was for it here,” DeSanto said. “Hopefully we’re building on these multiple generations where this continues on for another 50 years.”

By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com

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