Thank you for purchasing volume thirty-seven! Those who read Jump will already know that the other day I had the opportunity to draw a self-contained work. When I did it for Jump Square I saw hell and thought “That’s enough!”, but the editors tricked me by proposing a project that almost smacks of spite: everyone has to produce one. They vilely asked me to participate, since others were doing the same.
Since it would have been worse if only I had not been able to complain with the others later on with the cry of “That experience was really hellish!”, I decided to take a position similar to that of Taro Yamamoto in the film Battle Royale by saying: “I’ve already been to hell once. It’s a first for you, huh?” … So I immediately stood at the bus stop to hell, with a big cross-shaped scar on my face and in my swimming costume, posing as a veteran: “I want to give you some advice. This is real hell… be careful!”.
However, no matter how long I waited, no one arrived and, while I was wondering if I had got off at the wrong stop, a bus arrived in front of me, or rather a huge tank that went “psssh” and moved its cannon. I took a look inside and… it was full of veterans with their bodies covered in scars! Forget about the cross on their faces, those were the sensei Osamu Akimoto, Akira Toriyama, Masashi Kishimoto, Kyosuke Usuta and Takeshi Konomi, legendary men who had apparently survived a hell unlike any I’d seen, and they were standing there smoking a cigar! It was as if I had found Stallone, Schwarzenegger and Van Damme in school uniforms, their collars turned up, while I was posing as Taro Yamamoto in Battle Royale. I immediately wiped the scrawl off my forehead and climbed into the tank, almost prostrating myself. Then I phoned my editor and complained: “This was supposed to be a bus trip through the underworld with the other authors who publish in the magazine, but I find out that only legendary authors are taking part, so it’s a legendary men’s trip in a tank!”. And furthermore, I couldn’t fit into their conversation… When I told him this, he replied that since there were so few participants, the project had been modified. Then he added: “You’re obviously not a legendary author, but it’s not appropriate to abandon a trip halfway through, so try to get away with posing as much as possible!”.
It was the formidably titled Top of the Super Legend project, but as I mentioned earlier, it involved an out-of-place gorilla like me. Phrases such as ” Are you part of the legend?”, “Try to understand the atmosphere!”, etc… But if I had known from the beginning that it was a trip of legendary authors, I would have declined the proposal with all my might. I am aware that I am not so much part of the legend as to become part of it. In this sense, I should be considered a legendary individual. Drawing a self-contained work while another one is being published in episodic form does not give you any advantage (the work schedule is disrupted). Even if everything went well, if I was told “Publish this one and leave Gintama alone!”, I’d feel down in the dumps. But being told “Keep drawing Gintama all your life!” wouldn’t make me jump for joy either… I’d end up getting depressed anyway.
However, I jumped into hell wanting to create and learn, but mostly because I wanted to make the readers happy. For a man who chose to undergo penance driven by such a pure feeling, the words, “Huh? What about you, Taro?” Or “Hey, Taro! Your swimming costume is the same as Mr. Stallone’s, you should put it on your head!” are too cruel! Taro didn’t do anything bad except for the typical “Merolin Q “* joke to give people a smile!
Instead, nothing good! The legendary men’s tank proceeded with impetus and at a tremendous speed on a bumpy road. Therefore, even though the legendary authors were smoking cigars calmly, Taro was carsick and kept vomiting into the legendary bag in a legendary manner… Really legendary!
As you know, I’m someone who completes the panels at the last minute, just in time, among those who publish in Jump. From this point of view, I’m considered a legend, or rather an anti-legend, so I could barely keep up with the others. At a certain point I realized I had jumped off the tank, thrown into an immense desert. Oh, yeah, it was the desert in the storyboard, considered… the infinite hell.
*Senseless joke that Taro Yamamoto used to make when he participated in a TV comedy show.
The reason why I complete the panels just in time – which is now legendary – is because I’m slower with the storyboard than with the drawings. The storyboard is the most important thing in a manga, because it tells you how to divide up the panels, what lines to put in, etc., and I’m slow, or rather, the fact is that I can’t get my head around it and I work on it until the very end, and I don’t feel comfortable if I don’t keep working on it until the deadline, so that I don’t have time to draw the panels.
Maybe if I’m more talented than others, it’s precisely in this. I’m not talking about storyboarding techniques, or anything like that, but the talent to stick to it! If you do that, anyone can make a decent piece of work… And I keep on elaborating on it persistently, until I reach this level, like a pathetic man trying to convince a girl in front of a couples’ hotel. It’s as if I prostrate myself completely naked in front of her, every episode. That’s the only way I can draw a manga that’s on the same level as the others. All this for a regular nineteen-page episode… So for a self-contained work of forty-nine pages, the situation is terrible. A nineteen-page episode is an easy girl, who you somehow manage to convince by feeding her, giving her a gift, and throwing yourself at her feet. But a forty-nine-page work is a girl who grew up mollycoddled and at around nine o’clock in the evening says: “Sorry, but I have to go home!”. On top of that, it was the Super Legend project, so it was more like a Shinto priestess saying, “I’m busy tonight because there’s a Shinto ablution ritual.” … An impossible feat to take her to a hotel by the hour! While I was arguing with her (“But do the ritual to me first!”), I was stopped by a policeman: “Hey, you! What the hell are you doing?Why are you completely naked?” … So it was really horrible, and having no other choice I went to an Image club*, being served by a girl dressed as a priestess. When I left the club, the clock read four days before the deadline, and I still had to draw all forty-nine pages plus a regular chapter of Gintama. That’s why I asked for a page discount, but I still had to do a nine-page chapter.
All in all, I was faced with a legendary work schedule: fifty-eight pages in four days!
*Men-only clubs where girls in cosplay offer customers erotic shows and sexual performances.
To put it simply, asking to complete fifty-eight pages in four days is the equivalent of saying “DIEEEEEEEE!”.
The time it takes to draw the pages of a manga varies from person to person. As far as I’m concerned, working normally, I can complete a page in about an hour and a half. But that applies to Gintama, which I’m used to drawing. In the case of a self-contained work, since the characters are not well defined, even calculating the shortest possible time, it takes me two hours. If I work without sleep, I can complete twelve pages a day, and at this rate I could then reach a maximum of forty-eight pages. In addition, I had been on the storyboard for more than a week, without interruption, and I was exhausted both physically and psychologically. I hadn’t slept for a few days and it was impossible for me to stay awake all night. “Sensei, it’s impossible.” … In this desperate situation, a feeling similar to resignation was about to arise in my staff. But I’m Hideaki Sorachi, a legendary anti-legendary who has exceeded three figures of gory moments on the brink of expiration!
So I proposed the theory of the triple Kaioken: “By drawing a line at three times the usual speed, the boards will also be completed three times faster. As a result, four days might seem like twelve”. So, inciting everyone’s fighting spirit, taking off my hundred-pound G pen and the equally heavy brief I used to train in, I slid the pen on, completely naked, and managed to complete nineteen pages in twelve hours. However, even if the triple Kaioken makes it three times faster, it multiplies the stress by thirty! And since I resorted to it already exhausted, the stress exploded and I began to tremble without being able to remain seated. I was drawing standing up. Then my legs started to tremble, and I ended up wandering around the room. I couldn’t keep still, when I kept quiet I felt like running all over the place shouting “Aaaaah!”.
“Someone let me kick his ass!”
“Sensei, calm down! Take a nap!”
I went to bed but I couldn’t sleep, I kept fidgeting. It was the first time I had experienced something like that since I became a mangaka.
I was in a borderline situation without being able to draw or rest as I wanted. In front of me appeared a man with a shaved head, whom I had never seen before, who spoke to me in the carefree voice of someone who can’t take in the atmosphere: “How are you?”.
Actually, I knew him: “Y-you’re… Honda?!”.
At that instant Honda slumped to the ground, spilling Jelly Belly from his mouth.
“Hondaaaaa!”
“S-Since my hair grew… I changed my appearance.”
“Don’t lie! You… by any chance…!” Yes, the deadly work schedule of fifty-eight pages in four days was the result of Honda’s efforts, who had managed to reduce Gintama to nine pages by steadily lowering his head. It still remained a murderous, if already miraculous, programme.
“Since those in high places were petulant, I shaved my head. Then they shut up. Cough! Cough!”
“Don’t talk! If you spread more Jelly Belly you’ll die! Wait! I’ll shave too!”
“D-don’t worry! Compared to your suffering, being bald is nothing, Sorachi sensei! Sorry I couldn’t postpone the deadline! Cough! Cough!”
Honda was more broken up than I was. In fact… it was as if I had shaved his head with a clipper.
They say that a mangaka and his editor are one body and one soul, but there’s no reason why he should experience the same suffering as me because of a bald head.
“I’ll never forgive those editorial staff!”. Blaming everyone on them, I picked up the pen again. I hadn’t slept for a few days, I was exhausted both physically and morally, and completely naked after having taken off my G-nib and my brief, both of which weighed a hundred kilos, but I couldn’t thwart the miraculous work schedule that my editor, that is, my alter ego, had torn up by balding himself and thus depriving himself of the chance to go to a Village Vanguard shop that he likes so much! I wasn’t the only one suffering, Honda had made me realize.
“Not just me!”
FLAAP
“Mr. Sorachi! That… isn’t that…?!”
A hundred-pound wig had just fallen to the floor…
CONTACT WITH THE READERS: QUESTION CORNER 96
QUESTION FROM MR. “GREAT FRIEND (LAUGHTER)”
Every episode of the manga always ends at the right point. Do you ever find yourself missing pages or running out? How do you fix things on those occasions?
ANSWER:
It almost never happens that I have pages left over, but it often happens that there aren’t enough pages available. In that case I try to fit everything in by shrinking the cartoons, and when I can’t, I eliminate some of them, sometimes excluding the whole page… In short, it’s like doing a puzzle. For a self-contained manga, it’s the hardest thing… Kochikame* is monstrous in that sense.
*Abbreviation for the title of the comic Kochira Katsushika-ku Kameari koen-mae hashutsujo, which lasted for forty years.
The “Sorry, Jelly Belly” special ends here. I’ve written for a long time, but I think you can see how many men fight desperately, shedding tears and blood, to complete a self-contained work. In fact, I am almost always the one who makes many cry tears and blood… But this time I went too far, I disturbed so many people that it didn’t seem real. It was like I was playing Dynasty Warriors. Apart from Honda, I apologize to everyone.
However, I too have been in a terrible state, my life has certainly been shortened by at least three years. I even fainted once, so at least for that reason, please accept my apologies. Then, even though Honda shaved his head, he already had very short hair. In addition, he forced me to participate in the project using a swindler’s trick. So he’s to blame as well. Let’s call it even, since we all suffered together, okay?
By the way, I’ve been reduced to this despite being given a two-week break. The authors who participated in the Legend project published their self-contained works as if it were a normal thing, without taking breaks or breaking deadlines…
LEGEND AUTHORS ARE FORMIDABLE!
New topic: “I should have waited another hundred years”.
Yorozuya Shinigami 