[INTERVIEW] Double Fake Production Secrets Interview (Patreon)

From the pages of this month's Gundam Ace is a bit of background for the Double Fake Reprise manga! Let's dive in!

With this issue begins a new reprise serialization, Double Fake Reprise Under the Gundam. True to its name, the work is a remake-style reimagining of Double Fake (by Yuji Ushida), originally serialized in the late 1980s. Bringing it to life are manga artist Rui Takato, who has long been utterly possessed by the appeal of Double Fake, and his trusted creative partner Kenji Yamamoto. The script is handled by the ever-familiar Ukyo Kodachi.

So then, what kind of work was Double Fake, exactly? In recent years, its lead machine, the D Gundam, “D” standing for Darry, the main character, appeared in SD Gundam G Generation Eternal, and, more recently still, the D Gundam First and Second were both released as HG 1/144 kits.

Double Fake began serialization thirty-eight years ago, in June 1988, in Making Journal (MJ), the monthly information magazine published by Bandai. At the time, the title was simply Double Fake, and the series ran for a total of ten chapters. Mechanical design was contributed by Hitoshi Fukuchi, also well known for his mechanical design work on Mobile Suit Gundam 00, with script cooperation by Tetsuya Asagiri.

When it was collected into a single volume in 1990, the title was changed to Under the Gundam, and later, in the currently available Dengeki Comics edition published by MediaWorks (now KADOKAWA), it was retitled once again as Double Fake: Under the Gundam. From here, we turn back to the atmosphere of the original serialization period. With scenario writer Ukyo Kodachi serving as interviewer, we sat down directly with creator Yuji Ushida. What follows is the full exchange.

MANGA DEBUT AND THE BIRTH OF DOUBLE FAKE

KODACHI: Thank you very much for joining us today! To jump right in, could you tell us what led to the serialization in the first place?

USHIDA: Originally, the series was supposed to launch with a different manga artist, but for various reasons, including that individual stepping down, the offer eventually came around to me.

KODACHI: At that point, had you already had any real experience drawing manga professionally?

USHIDA: No, I’d only worked as an assistant. I’d never drawn mecha before either. (laughs)

EDITOR: Honestly, I don’t think these are the drawings of someone who’d never drawn mecha before... (laughs) They’re wonderful. The compositions are intricate too.

USHIDA: I think I hadn't even been an assistant for a full year yet at that point. The studios I was assisting at were Kia Asamiya's, he was serializing Silent Möbius at the time, and Takehiko Ito's, who was running Future Retro Hero Story.

EDITOR: And about how old were you then?

USHIDA: Hmm... I think I was around twenty-two. I’d only started drawing manga itself when I was about twenty.

KODACHI: That’s very young...

AT THE CORE OF THE STORY: PLOT AND CHARACTER

EDITOR: How did the script take shape?

USHIDA: The initial plot I was given was a very rigid "military story," a "war story," and that didn't match my image of what Gundam was.

EDITOR: So this would have been 1988, before the serialization began, right around when Char’s Counterattack opened in theaters in March. War in the Pocket hadn’t started yet, and neither had Hathaway’s Flash as a novel.

USHIDA: To me, it wasn’t Gundam unless people were being drawn into war. But at the same time, if I couldn't create something from a different angle, there was no point in drawing it in the first place. So I made the characters the kind of people who build things, who face forward. When I first got the offer to draw a Gundam manga, what I really wanted to do was tell a story about people living in a colony. I actually built a physical model of one, made it cylindrical, bought mirror stickers from a home improvement store to simulate the mirrors. I wanted to see how the reflections would look. I spent a lot of time thinking about things like what kind of clouds would form inside a colony, probably something like spiraling vortices near the central axis. And since there's about a two-and-a-half-year gap between Gundam ZZ and Char's Counterattack, I decided to set the story in that interval”

EDITOR: Illia Pazom from ZZ appears in it as well.

KODACHI: Takato is fiercely devoted to Illia, it seems. He once talked about her for about three hours straight.

USHIDA: That might be the first time I've ever heard someone say they love Illia. (laughs) What exactly is it about her that hits him like that?

KODACHI: For boys just crossing the threshold into adolescence, the combination of dark skin, big-breasted older girl in a miniskirt was just... devastatingly impactful. (laughs)

USHIDA: If we’re talking that kind of thing, then for me it would have to be Matilda Ajan.

EDITOR: When you think about it, it’s amazing a character carrying that kind of sensuality was created in 1979. We’ve gotten off track, haven’t we? (laughs)

KODACHI: So you shifted the story toward "people being drawn into war," and Darry became the protagonist. Was the setup of "a boy who makes models (fakes), ends up making the real thing" born out of that too?

USHIDA: Pretty much. We thought a story about creating something yourself would be more interesting than a story that’s only about fighting. And a fake made from fake materials is basically already the real thing, isn’t it? When the compilation edition was being put together, the editorial department asked me what we should do for the title, and for the Pure Cyber Comix edition we gave it the title Under the Gundam.

THE HIDDEN PASTS OF DARRY AND HIS COMPANIONS

KODACHI: I’d also like to ask about the background settings for Darry and the others, their past, which wasn’t spoken of in depth in the work itself. I’d really love to use it as reference for the project.

USHIDA: Darry and the others are from Side 2, Hatte. At the beginning of the One Year War, the Zeon forces carried out the colony drop, right? I figured that during that event, there must have been Zeon soldiers, people like Ramba Ral and Hamon, who thought, "We can't bring ourselves to kill civilians. Let's save as many as we can and help them escape." Monotone Mouse (MM), is a company that repairs colony exteriors. Darry’s old man got detained by the Zeon forces and was coerced into cooperating with them. Essentially, MM was tasked with figuring out where to attach propulsion systems to drop the colony. Darry was still just a little kid then, and the Zeon were trying to use him as a hostage so they could force his father to stay in line. But then they see how absurdly good Darry is with piloting, or they see the things he’s building, and they start to think, "This kid shouldn’t be dying for something like this." And then it becomes, "We’ve spent all our time doing nothing but rotten things, but maybe it wouldn’t hurt to do one decent thing. Let’s save him." So they put him aboard an emigrant ship.

EDITOR: (We’ll omit the rest here, since it concerns developments still to come.)

USHIDA: I think it could be interesting to tell the story of Darry right after he was saved, when he was still just around middle school age. The only problem is... the Gundam wouldn’t appear in it. (laughs)

KODACHI: The thing I loved most about reading Double Fake was that Darry has a backbone. He holds to his convictions all the way to the end. From the very beginning, he goes out to save lives, he refuses to kill until the bitter end, and ultimately, that’s what leads to that outcome. I also really loved that almost delinquent-manga atmosphere it had. Hearing you explain directly today why Darry is the way he is makes it all click for me.

BEHIND THE MECHA DESIGN: COLLABORATING WITH HITOSHI FUKUCHI

KODACHI: When it came to the mechanical design, what was your back-and-forth with Hitoshi Fukuchi like?

USHIDA: Fukuchi kept bringing in all kinds of ideas, and I’d say, "Yes, love it!" and fold them in enthusiastically. Since the D Gundam is a worker suit for use inside a colony, my initial image was that it could even be something ugly and utilitarian, like heavy equipment with a crane attached. I wanted to depict the process of this clunky, ungainly piece of industrial machinery gradually taking on the form of a Gundam.

KODACHI: The variations that appear in the story, like the Zaku Head, are fun too.

USHIDA: Well, it’s for labor use, so there’s no real need for it to be humanoid.

KODACHI: The D Gundam Third that appears in the latter half gives the impression that, compared with the Second, the feel of the artwork changed a little from the design sheets.

USHIDA: Ah... honestly, the Third was incredibly hard for me to draw with the level of skill I had back then. (laughs) Getting the proportions of the parts right, especially things like the long protrusions on the shoulders, was a real hassle. Whenever I tried to draw it in a dynamic action scene, I couldn't maintain consistency. So I'd tweak things based on my own drawing habits, adjusting and fudging it to make it a little easier to get down on paper.

AN ENDING CHANGED BY PAGE COUNT

KODACHI: The ending is different between the serialized version and the Pure Cyber Comix version. What was the reason for that?

USHIDA: When we were putting together the compilation volume, the idea came up to add color pages, specifically, a prologue and an epilogue. But once we got to the stage of actually compiling the book, the page count just wouldn't work out no matter what, and we had to cut something.

EDITOR: And after those adjustments, it became that ending.

USHIDA: That’s right. We even cut opening splash pages to make the page count fit.

KODACHI: Had the number of serialized installments, ten in all, been decided from the start?

USHIDA: I don’t remember the details exactly, but I think it probably had been. One collected volume’s worth, or something along those lines.

LOOKING AHEAD TO THE REPRISE EDITION

EDITOR: The first chapter is already finished, actually. (They show it to him to read.)

USHIDA: Ohhh, they’re drawing it with my sense of proportion. (laughs) They can feel free to do it however they want, though.

KODACHI: That's the power of Takato's deep respect for the original.

USHIDA: I'd be totally fine with them rearranging things to their own taste. That kind of difference is interesting in its own right. Man, this really makes me want to get back into it myself. It makes me want to draw manga again. Today was a truly valuable experience, thank you.

KODACHI/EDITOR: No, no, no, no, the pleasure is ours! We’d love to continue getting your help with story developments and everything else going forward, so we hope you’ll keep working with us!