We opened this blog in June with a video featuring Love Hina and Negima!’s Ken Akamatsu while drawing one of Negima!’s characters.
What better way to open this “second season” of Masters of Manga than sharing a video featuring this same manga artist?
Here, Akamatsu-sensei talks about his schedule, which seems kind of hard. After all, nobody said that being a mangaka is an easy job!
I’m very happy to announce that Masters of Manga is back.
More than one month has passed since my last update, Tetsuya Chiba’s drawing of Ashita no Joe’s main character, Joe.
It might seem that I’ve been away on vacation, sipping pina coladas by the beach, but no. August is one of the busiest months of the year for me because of my work as a manga translator, I have to translate some new series that will be presented during the Barcelona Manga Fair (end of October).
Thus, while almost every other Spaniard out there is leisurely soaking in the beach or traveling around, I need to spend every August working non-stop to meet the deadlines. I don’t really mind, don’t get me wrong. I get to work with no urgent e-mails or phone calls breaking my concentration and, what I enjoy the most, I get to travel during the less tourist-packed seasons of the year.
Anyway, this month I’ve been working hard on Masters of Manga in order to prepare for the new “season”.
I’ve been preparing new videos and contents to upload.
I’ve worked with my fellow volunteers to create subtitles and translations for these contents.
I’ve been thinking and working on the strategy, e-mails, letters and so on to try and get more exciting interviews during my next stay in Japan (a short one in October).
And, above it all, I have created a layout sample of the book. I took Tetsuya Chiba’s interview, I transcribed and edited it, I scanned images to illustrate the text and I put it all in a created-from-scratch InDesign layout. I’m very satisfied with the result and I’m sure it will be of great help for both getting new interviews and selling the project to prospective publishers in the English-speaking world.
If you’re still not doing it, I recommend that you become a follower of Masters of Manga’s Twitter account. You’ll get news about this project and updates about my struggles and joys with everything around it. If you’re already a follower, by the way, everything I’ve been writing now rings a bell, doesn’t it?
Of course, if you are still not a member of our community page in Facebook, what are you waiting for? There I share also the information and I post pictures and more stuff I don’t put here.
Finally, you can also subscribe to our Youtube channel. I’m uploading videos all the time, mostly to have them prepared for when I decide to make them public or to show the Japanese mangaka or editors in order to get their OK. Of course, these videos are not made public yet, but –I know it’s very silly to say– I sometimes forget to click the “Make this video private” button, and than all the subscribers to the channel can see it beforehand. This happened this week, for example, with Yoshikazu Yasuhiko’s drawing of Gundam’s Char Aznable (not available now, of course)!
In today’s video we will see master of manga Tetsuya Chiba (read his profile here) drawing an illustration of Joe, the main character of manga masterpiece Ashita no Joe (Tomorrow’s Joe).
Note how Chiba does an awesome job with iconic Joe. He even bothers to paint the hat! I bet he has had to draw thousands of similar illustrations since he started Ashita no Joe in 1968, especially after finishing it in 1973, but he still bothers to make a pencil sketch first, then ink it and finally painting in red the hat, the collar and… The cheek!
IMPORTANT: I need to focus on other aspects of the project besides the website and I have decided to use the summer vacation to do that. Therefore, I’ll put the blog on hiatus during the rest of July and the whole of August. Enjoy the summer and see you in September!
In the Hideko Mizuno’s profile I posted some days ago I already wrote about her debut as a manga artist in 1955, which makes her the third professional female mangaka after Sazae-san’s Machiko Hasegawa and Glass no Shiro (Glass Castle)’s Masako Watanabe.
Here you will hear the same story from her own lips. Let’s Mizuno-sensei tell us about her debut:
Date of birth: October 29th, 1939 (70 years old at the time of the interview)
Hometown: Shimonoseki, Yamaguchi
Debut: 1955 (15 years old), with one illustration and one cut for Shōjo Club. Her first story, Akakke Pony (Red-haired pony), was published in 1956, when she was 16 years old.
Main works:Hoshi no tategoto (The Harp of the Stars), Honey Honey no suteki-na bōken (Honey Honey’s Lovely Adventures), Fire!, Gin no hanabira (Silver Petals), Shiroi Troika (White Troika)...
Awards: 15th (1969) Shōgakukan Manga Award (for Fire!), 39th (2010) Japanese Cartoonists’ Association Award’s Education and Science Minister’s Award (for her lifetime work).
Facts:
She was very influenced by Osamu Tezuka’s works and she decided that she would be a professional mangaka because of them. She managed to become one of the first female mangaka at a time when even shōjo manga (manga for girls) was created by men.
As many artists of her generation, she sent samples of her work to the reader’s corner of Manga Shōnen magazine. She never got the main prize, but the one in charge of reviewing the works and giving the prizes at the time was Osamu Tezuka.
Shōjo Club magazine’s editor Akira Maruyama, who was in charge of Tezuka’s work for his magazine (Tezuka produced the first version of Hi no Tori – Phoenix for it), discovered Mizuno’s artwork by pure chance at Tezuka’s place when he was living in the Tokiwa-sō apartments and decided that he would give her an opportunity.
She made her debut in 1955, when she was only 15 years old, with some drawings for Shōjo Club. A year later she’d publish her first story in the same magazine.
Akira Maruyama wanted more manga works for Shōjo Club, but the main authors were very busy at the time, so he came up with the idea of having some authors working together. Thus they would produce stories twice or thrice as fast (in theory, of course). He first tried with Shōtarō Ishinomori –Ishimori at the time– and Fujio Akatsuka, who created two or three stories with the penname Asuka Izumi. Then he had the idea of having Mizuno working with them as well. Mizuno would design the main characters, Ishinomori would draw the secondary characters and animals and Akatsuka would draw the back scenes and other stuff. They authored some stories under the penname U. MIA (M for Mizuno, I for Ishinomori and A for Akatsuka).
Working from her parents’ house in Shimonoseki, which is quite far from Tokyo, was very hard for Mizuno. Maruyama had the idea to get a room for her in Tokiwa-sō. Thus, she could live under the same roof as Ishinomori and Akatsuka and work together with them. She only lived in Tokiwa-sō for a few months in 1958, but she didn’t belong to the Shin Manga-tō (New Manga Party) group. She is the only female mangaka to have ever lived in the famous “manga apartments”.
In the 1960’s she created great works of shōjo manga that made her very famous. One of her most popular works is Fire!, a story about a rock band that earned her the Shōgakukan Manga Award in 1969.
Her story Honey Honey no suteki-na bōken (Honey Honey’s Lovely Adventures) was made into an anime later broadcast in many Western countries. In English, its title was changed to Honey Honey.
In the 1970s, as other female mangaka of her generation as Miyako Maki and Masako Watanabe, she started creating manga specifically aimed at adult women (ladies comics), a genre we in the West know now as josei manga.
In 2009 she self-published her memories about her time in Tokiwa-sō, with the title Tokiwa-sō Nikki (review here –in Spanish).
In 2010, the Japanese Cartoonists’ Association gave her the Education and Science Minister’s Award for her lifetime work.
I had the honor of interviewing Hideko Mizuno, living manga history, along with legendary editor Akira Maruyama. You’ll see samples of this interview in later posts!!
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