2025 HALL OF FAME

Originally from Alberta, Canada, Toren Smith began his career in comics writing for magazines including Amazing Heroes, EPIC Illustrated, and Eclipse Comics. He was introduced to Japanese manga and anime in 1982, and by 1986, he moved to Japan and founded Studio Proteus, one of the first companies that licensed, translated, and published Japanese comics in English.

Smith later moved to San Francisco, and along with his wife Tomoko Saito (a professional manga artist in her own right who did lettering and retouch on many Studio Proteus titles), translators Dana Lewis, Frederik Schodt, and Alan Gleason, comics creator Adam Warren, and comics lettering pros Tom Orzechowski and Lois Buhalis helped introduce Western comics fans to manga by Masamune Shirow, Katsuhiro Otomo, Johji Manabe and many more.

Smith retired from publishing manga in 2004 and sold most of Studio Proteus’ output to Dark Horse Comics. He enjoyed outdoor sports and traveling. He died in 2013 at the age of 52.

Dana Lewis first came to manga translation through television. When she arrived to live in Japan, she became addicted to a TV series based on a manga featuring a wandering samurai and his son titled Lone Wolf and Cub.. By pure chance, Lewis mentioned her interest in manga to a person she met in a Tokyo bar, who told her that he knew a literary agent who was looking for someone to translate manga. This turned out to be Lone Wolf and Cub, which, when it was published by First Comics, became one of the very first manga published in English after Alan Gleason’s translation of the Barefoot Gen, for Project Gen.

Lewis was Introduced to Toren Smith at a gathering of Japanese science fiction writers, and she became part of the original Studio Proteus team, translating everything from the fabulous futuristic tales of Shirow Masamune, including Dominion and Appleseed to the savage stories of Blade of the Immortal by Samura Hiroak, and Domu by Otomo Katsuhiro Lewis also translated the first half of Miyazaki’s Hayao’s Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind and Kobayashi Makoto’s whimsical cat comedy, What’s Michael?

Some of her translations of the Blade of the Immortal (which received an Eisner Award in 2000) were done on weekends and late at night while Lewis was working full-time as president of the Japan Society of Northern California in San Francisco.

Now residing in Japan, Lewis continues to translate manga by Tsuruta Kenji for Dark Horse comics, including Wandering Island and Captain Momo’s Secret Base. She also translates Japanese science fiction novels, including work by award-winning authors such as Tsutsui Yasutaka and Suga Hiroe, and her friend and mentor in Japanese science fiction, Yamano Koichi.

Tomoko Saito was Toren’s partner, often seen at various conventions next to him and working on various Studio Proteus projects together.

Born and raised fully immersed in otaku culture in Japan, Tomoko was a semi-pro manga artist/illustrator when she met Toren in Tokyo through her brother-in-law, Nozomi Ohmori, a science-fiction translator and book critic. Ohmori helped Toren connect to editors, artists and publishers such as Appleseed’s Harumichi Aoki of Seishinsha, and later became Toren’s coordinator/interpreter in Japan.

After moving to San Francisco, Tomoko worked as a screentone assistant on Dirty Pair for Adam Warren as she shared a small flat in San Francisco with him and Toren in the early days of Studio Proteus. Meanwhile, she was taught by the master letterer Tom Orzechowski, which naturally led to lettering on many Studio Proteus titles, including Blade of the Immortal, Domu, Shadow Lady, and Short Cuts, among others. Being a manga artist helped her figure out & develop her own retouch technique that stays close to the original art style for each title.

During that time, she also published several of her own doujinshis under the pseudonym Tomoyuki Saito, which sold successfully at Comic Market & Haru Comi. She also worked on Gainax’s computer game Animal Magnetism as character designer and main illustrator, while running a short manga series Dame Dame Saito Nikki on ASCII Mediaworks’ Dengeki Daioh magazine.

Currently, Tomoko is retired and living peacefully on a farm in Sonoma County, California, waiting to welcome her third corgi girl.

Alan Gleason was born in Rochester, NY but grew up in Tokyo from age 5 to 17 due to his father’s work in Japan. His home environment was mostly English-speaking, and he attended an American school in Tokyo, so he didn’t have much exposure to manga or any Japanese culture as a kid.

In his twenties, he returned to Japan to study the language and the music. By chance, he met a volunteer group that was translating Keiji Nakazawa’s Barefoot Gen (Hadashi no Gen) into English. Gleason signed on as a translator and proofreader and has been involved with Project Gen ever since, eventually editing all ten volumes of the English edition, now available from Last Gasp. Barefoot Gen was his first real exposure to manga, and Japanese-to-English translation. Gleason wound up translating Japanese into English for a living, even after he moved back to the US.

While living in the SF Bay Area, Gleason met Toren Smith through Fred Schodt, whom he had known since high school, and began translating manga for Studio Proteus. Gleason translated all or some of the installments in several Studio Proteus-produced series, among them Black Magic by Shirow Masamune and Oh My Goddess! By Fujishima Kousuke.

In 2001, Gleason moved back to Japan and became a permanent resident. He currently lives and works in Tokyo as a freelance translator and editor.

Though he rarely translates manga now, Gleason is still involved with Project Gen and is happy when the occasional manga-related work comes his way. Most recently, he translated an architecture book in which various manga artists were invited to draw imaginative stories about the architect’s works.

Fred has a long career as a translator, conference interpreter, and author. He has written widely about intellectual currents between Japan and North America, and his 1983 Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics is today regarded as a foundational work. His early manga translations include Osamu Tezuka’s Phoenix and Riyoko Ikeda’s Rose of Versailles.

In the early ‘80s, Miyako Matsuda introduced Fred to the talented Toren Smith, a super-avid manga fan. Fred is in turn rumored to have later introduced him to Seiji Horibuchi of Viz Communications. For Toren—who later founded Studio Proteus—Fred went on to translate Masamune Shirow’s Ghost in the Shell series and Orion (one of which Dana Lewis passed on because of its hyper-complexity), as well as Yukinobu Hoshino and James P. Hogan’s The Two Faces of Tomorrow. He takes pride in having worked with Toren and Tom Orzechowski on Ghost in the Shell, which he regards as one of the best flopped, localized manga productions ever created.

He has won more awards than he deserves, including the 2009 Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Rosette, for helping to promote Japanese popular culture in North America.

Adam Warren was one of the first writer/artists in American comics to integrate the artistic and storytelling techniques of manga into his own work. He debuted with an original, English-language comic—licensed by Studio Proteus—based on the Japanese sci-fi characters The Dirty Pair. Years later, he collaborated again with Studio Proteus on a miniseries inspired by the “old-school” anime Bubblegum Crisis as well as the manga translations of Kenichi Sonoda’s Cannon God Exaxxion and Hiroyuki Utatane’s Seraphic Feather.

His subsequent career has featured a wide array of comics projects ranging from work on the DC Comics titles, including Gen13 and Titans: Scissors, Paper, Stone, to assorted Marvel Comics efforts such as Livewires, Iron Man: Hypervelocity and Venom: The End—which includes the co-creation of the character Galacta, Daughter of Galactus, later popularized in the ongoing Marvel Rivals video game.
Since 2007, his primary work has been writing and drawing the creator-owned comic series Empowered, a “sexy superhero comedy”—except when it isn’t—about the trials, tribulations, and body-image issues of a struggling young “C-List” superheroine. It is published by Dark Horse Comics.

Tom Orzechowski was born in Detroit, and began reading comics at age 5. Pen and ink lettering was learned while doing zines. This lead to work in the Marvel bullpen in 1973. Starting in 1975, and for most issues until 1992, Tom lettered Uncanny X-Men, as well as New Mutants, Wolverine, and their related graphic novels, annuals, and miniseries. Other series work included Jungle Action/Black Panther: Jim Starlin’s Captain Marvel, and then Warlock; Star Wars; and many others throughout the Marvel line.

Via Studio Proteus, a manga translation company formed in 1989, Tom lettered the U.S. publication of Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind. This was followed by work on Appleseed, Dominion Tank Police, Ghost In The Shell, and several other series during the following decade.
In 1992, Tom was tapped to letter Todd McFarlane’s series Spawn, a job he’s held for 355 issues to date. The Guinness Book of Records (2021) recognized him for lettering the most issues of a single series. Other clients have included Eclipse, Viz, DC, Dark Horse, Image, and Archie. The list continues to grow.