Animetion Home Animetion Titles Animetion Retailers Animetion Message Board Animetion Links About Animetion UK

REIGN OF TERRA

Every clothes shop in the world has t-shirts with random Japanese lettering, but very few have cool original artwork accompanying it.  TERRATAG does.  Not just clothing either, high-quality prints and canvases featuring Japanese-inspired work are produced by this London-based artist.  And it does not stop here - TERRATAG has worked with Production I.G, Harvey Nichols, Sony, Manga Entertainment and Aphex Twin and is a major influence on the UK anime scene and has a worldwide fanbase. 

From the moment he saw the cover to the 80's electro-rock record Flaunt It by Sigue Sigue Sputnik (click here to view), TERRATAG was hooked on all things Japanese.  He went on to discover manga and anime until forming his studio in 2002, dedicated to created vibrant Japanese-inspired artwork. 

HISTORY

Terratag started University in 1989 and decided for his first term of his first year that he would do his thesis on anime and manga, entitled A socio-cultural assessment of the Japanese Comic.  He the spent the best part of three years researching many aspects of Japanese history, arts and culture. Through his research he met Helen McCarthy, co-author on The Anime Encyclopaedia, and became a member of Anime UK.  Back in the early '90s the scene was much smaller and monthly meetings would be in Helen McCarthy's living room, with only around twelve people gathered around the TV watching imported laser discs whilst Helen McCarthy read the synopsis of each anime.  This was well before the internet had taken off, no torrents and the like in those days!

Whilst at University Terratag became mates with the musician Aphex Twin and ended up going on tour and designing his logo (click here to see the logo).  It was around the same time he won a competition, announced over pirate radio, to design a logo for a techno club called Knowledge.  From these projects more work rolled in and marked about 8 years or so of creating graphics for the music industry.  Other clients included Andrew Weatherall, Global Communication, MuZiq Orbital, Warp Records and Joey Beltram. 

After graduating from University he became Prototype 21.  Prototype 21 was and still is a design and T-shirt print company where Terratag is responsible for the creative output.  From 1993 to 2002 Prototype 21 was also the brand name of a T-shirt and clothing brand - the forerunner to Terratag.

THE LAUGHING MAN



One of the most recognisable icons from modern anime, Terratag was approached by Production I.G to produce this image for the series Ghost In The Shell: Stand Alone Complex.  In the series, The Laughing Man is a hacker which hacks into people's visual programming and they see this image obscuring faces.  It is a terrifying thought that such a happy image could infiltrate people's minds in the near future. 

The story of how Terratag got the Ghost In The Shell gig is as intriguing as the image itself.  5 years ago he did design work for Japanese game & music label Frognation and sent out loads of stickers promoting Terratag in the process.  Dai Sato, the script editor for Stand Alone Complex, had one of these stickers on his laptop which was in turn spotted by director Kenji Kamiyama.  Kamiyama then contacted Terratag has he liked the mix of Western & Japanese influences in the work he saw and asked him to red the short story 'The Laughing Man' by J D Salinger.  The story focusing around a baseball team, which is where the cap of the face in the image comes from.  The quote 'I thought what I'd do was, I'd pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes' is from Salinger's more well-known work The Catcher In The Rye.  The original text follows the quote with 'That way I wouldn't have to have any goddamn stupid useless conversations with anybody. If anybody wanted to tell me something they'd have to write it on a piece of paper and shove it over to me. They'd get bored as hell doing that after a while, and then I'd be through with having conversations for the rest of my life.'  The relevance of this to Stand Alone Complex makes much more sense when you have seen the series in full.