The Kuroda Iou “shaking like a puppy” incident of 2003

The received wisdom among many of Kuroda Iou’s fans has been that his output has been slowed because of health issues. In 2008, a couple of posts on his blog revealed that he’d been hospitalized multiple times that year; one post mentions asthma, another mentions that for a time it looked like he would need surgery for something called PVS. But this summer he tweeted a clarification that he is in relatively good health and has not been battling illness all these years, so while it is true that he has gone through some health scares in the past, it does not appear to particularly impede his work now. I’ve recently become aware of an incident from 2003 that might shed more light on why his work pace has somewhat slowed since his heyday.

In 2003 some students from Keio University visited the offices of Ikki, the monthly manga magazine that serialized Kuroda’s Sexy Voice and Robo (2000-03). Some of the magazine’s editorial staff, including its editor-in-chief Egami Hideki, talked to the students about what their work consisted of; a completely unedited transcript of the talk was later posted on the students’ research group website.

About Blue Period’s creator Yamaguchi Tsubasa

Blue Period fans will not be surprised to learn that its creator Yamaguchi Tsubasa went to art school, for both high school (the now-defunct Metropolitan Art High School) and university (Tokyo University of Arts, the school that Yatora aims for in the manga). Unlike the characters in Blue Period, however, she was submitting manga for her school assignments rather than paintings or sculptures. She says she dutifully submitted paintings at first, but in her second year she decided to lean into her longtime passion for manga and focus on working within that medium, despite majoring in oil painting. For her graduation project she put together a little collection of various manga pieces she’d done as a student, which she then submitted to publishers. An editor at Monthly Afternoon took an interest, which (some years later) led to her adaptation of Shinkai Makoto’s She and Her Cat in 2016, and then Blue Period the following year.

Some nuggets from Fujimoto Tatsuki, enthusiast creator

A lot of manga artists say they themselves don’t read much manga, but Chainsaw Man and Fire Punch artist Fujimoto Tatsuki is a manga buff who wears his enthusiasms on his sleeve. Asked about how he came up with the stories for his manga, he mused that it was a matter of consuming a lot of other people’s work and learning to “incorporate the works I like, the scenes I like, into my own manga.” This might in part be the influence of his editor, who once recalled how, after taking on a 17-year-old Fujimoto as a potential artist, he started mailing him boxes of manga and DVDs, because a good creator needs to consume a lot of good work.

Fujimoto again talked about “cramming the stuff I like” into his own work in a statement just last month, in which he interestingly described Chainsaw Man as his attempt to create “an evil FLCL” or “a pop Abara.” The Nihei Tsutomu connection has been pointed out before; Samura Hiroaki suggested that he saw Nihei’s influence in the facially unexpressive characters and “dry scariness” of Fujimoto’s work, which Fujimoto confirmed. (Edit: Fujimoto’s conversation with Samura has been translated into English in full over here; I highly recommend it.)

Bong Joon-ho, manga fan

When Bong Joon-ho talks to interviewers in Japan, he likes to bring up manga. It stands to reason that he would be a fan of the medium: the storyboards he draws for his films are manga-esque works of art, and he used to draw cartoons for his university newspaper as a student. I’ve combed through some of his interviews in the Japanese media to bring you the highlights of his manga shout-outs. To the surprise of no one, it turns out he is a man of good taste.

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Urasawa Naoki

In 2006, Bong went to Japan to promote The Host. At the time, Urasawa Naoki was arguably at the peak of his fame as he neared the end of 20th Century Boys. His work had been published in Korean for years and Bong had long been a fan, so a conversation between the two of them was arranged as part of the PR campaign for The Host.

In the conversation, Bong gushed about his long relationship with Urasawa’s work: while working on the screenplay for his first film (Barking Dogs Don’t Bite) he was reading Urasawa’s Happy!, while working on the screenplay for his second film (Memories of a Murder) he was reading Monster, and while working on the screenplay for The Host he was reading 20^th Century Boys. It’s clearly not just flattery: he was able to recount specific scenes, specific shots.

A little background on Yokohama Kaidashi Kikō

It never really caught on among its (admittedly small) English-speaking cult following, but there is a term used by Yokohama Kaidashi Kikō fans — and even by the series’ creator himself, Ashinano Hitoshi — to describe its idyllic post-apocalyptic setting. It comes from an artist’s note on the dust jacket of the first volume, where Ashinano describes the manga as taking place “after the festival-like world has settled down,” in a time called “the Era of the Evening Calm” (夕凪の時代).

The cause of the Era of the Evening Calm is never explained in the manga. Readers tend to make the obvious connection between its rising sea levels and climate change, but Ashinano has partially pushed back against this interpretation: in an interview included in a YKK art book from 2003, he explains that he originally intended for the Era of the Evening Calm to be the result of a “natural cycle,” rather than man-made climate change. “Within that natural cycle, the humans are like ants, moving up and down [together with the water levels]. It’s not some sort of comeuppance for something that humans did; they’re just pushed around [by nature].”

There’s a YKK novel that’s set after the Era of the Evening Calm; I haven’t read it myself, but the internet says it features an era called “the Night of Man” in which the world population has shrunk even further, nearing extinction. It wasn’t written by Ashinano himself, but the author clearly had his blessing in order to publish it, and the idea for the Night of Man is brought up at the end of the manga’s final chapter.

The Furuya Minoru reinvention

Some artists are almost predestined to have a career in manga, whereas others seem to just stumble into it. Furuya Minoru originally trained to become a barber after graduating high school, but he quit after a year because of how hard they worked him. He decided to try his hand at manga. Within a couple of years he managed to win a contest with a stupid gag one-shot that soon turned into a stupid gag weekly series, Ike! Ina-chu Ping Pong Club. It’s not much remembered outside of Asia, but in Japan, Ping Pong Club quickly became a massive hit. Furuya found fame and fortune at breakneck speed: within a year of it becoming a regular weekly series in 1993, the tankobon were selling nearly a million copies each. The tabloid magazine Spa! interviewed Furuya about how he went from nothing to becoming a millionaire, calling his story “an America dream for the modern age.” He turned 23 that year.

Ping Pong Club continued to sell like gangbusters for its entire 13-volume run, selling 20 million copies by the time it ended in 1997. His next two series were Boku to Issho (1997-98) and Green Hill (1999-2000). Reading them now, they read as a period of transition between Ping Pong Club and his later work: silly gross-out humor remained central, but you could increasingly see the darker hallmarks of his later work.

While both of these transitional series are generally liked well enough by fans, Furuya seems to have seen them as disheartening failures. He is pretty press-shy (like most manga artists), so he does not appear to have publicly spoken about this at length. What little he has said, however, is bracingly honest.