We asked Tsukino Mito about manga works that will inspire your creativity. Here are more than 10 of them!
Interview and article by Tamagomago
pixiv Gakusei Manga Day, an online manga event for junior and senior high school students, will be held on August 22 (Sun). It will be a day packed with events, including a virtual trip to an editorial department where you can have your work reviewed by professional editors, and a lottery where you can win amazing prizes.
The main personality for the day's live broadcast will be the popular VTuber Tsukino Mito. She's a manga lover herself, and as the official manager of the Student Manga Club, she supports manga submissions. Today, we asked her to share some works that might be useful when it comes manga creation!
- Tsukino Mito
- VTuber. 2nd-year high school student. She has a tsundere personality, while also being a serious class president. Even though she does her best, she slightly feels her efforts are in vain. After giving a speech she often wonders if she spoke too much and feels depressed afterward.
I was in the mood for a bit of a gamble, so I read manga from my father's bookshelf.
── What kind of works did you read when you were little?
I used to buy and read Ciao. Other than that, I used to steal my father's many manga. The most shocking one was Historie by Hitoshi Iwaaki. I was traumatized by the rather gruesome scenes in the beginning. Not knowing what kind of mind-blowing gore I would find next, I made a gambling game out of it and looked forward to reading on. I also read Parasyte, Black Jack, Sayonara Zetsubou-Sensei, Katteni Kaizō, and Gakko Kaidan by Yosuke Takahashi.
── I heard that there was a time when you wanted to become a manga artist.
It was only for a while when I was a 3rd-year elementary school student. An issue of Ciao included the daily routine of a typical manga artist, and it said that you had to work at a desk most of the time. I didn't want to do that, so I changed my mind. Although I ended up being always at my desk, anyway.
── I'll ask about the works that you think people who draw manga should read, or that might be useful to them. First of all, which manga has the best characterization?
I recently read Gachikoi Nenchaku-jū by Seira, and I liked the character of Kotono Hanaori. It's a manga about women who are obsessed with male streamers. She has her own favorite too, but she claims that she's not really in love with him. However, she can't stand people who cause him trouble. One time, this streamer starts getting tips from the audience but insists that he doesn't need any of that. That's when Kotono loses her temper and starts flooding the chat with comments like: "You're all bothering him! Leave him alone!"
Scene from episode 15 of Gachikoi Nenchaku-jū (©星来／コアミックス)
Then she's not allowed to send any more comments. I've never seen a manga about someone whose comments get blocked before. Kotono is always trying to enforce her own rules, but she's quite wholesome too. She doesn't want her favorite streamer's feelings to get hurt, so she downvotes the bad comments to prevent him from seeing them. As a streamer myself, I was happy to see that they included such details in a manga.
── You once said you're a fan of Kobeni Higashiyama from Chainsaw Man.
Kobeni was my favorite. She has the ideal personality. I really like that kind of character who looks servile but actually has tough skin. I also loved Riko from Made in Abyss. I respect her as a person. However, as I grow up, I find myself liking fewer and fewer characters. When I was little, I would say, "OMG I love ____!" and go out of my way to find someone new to obsess about.
── First you'd decide which character you loved, and then you'd read the manga.
Exactly. Nowadays, I often find myself enjoying manga despite not liking any of the characters in them.
It feels good when a manga betrays the reader.
── Tell us a work that will make you feel like drawing manga.
I'd have to say Tsubasa Yamaguchi's Blue Period. It's a manga that makes you want to take action. There's a scene where the main character goes to an inn with a friend who is dressed up as a woman and does nude drawings of him. Reading it made me want to take a trip.
Blue Period vol.1 by Tsubasa Yamaguchi (Kodansha)
── You used to draw manga when you were a kid. Was there a particular work that inspired you?
Definitely Gakko Kaidan by Yosuke Takahashi. I would also read XXXHOLiC, so I think I was attracted to those get-rid-of-evil-spirits! kinds of comics. I would draw entire stories in my notebook in pencil, one-shot length.
── What manga would one find stimulating to read when working on a story of their own?
In that sense, I recently reread Fullmetal Alchemist by Hiromu Arakawa, and I was amazed at how seamless the story was. It's a bit of a spoiler, but at the beginning of the first volume, the two main characters (who are brothers) go to another city after exposing the evil of a guru falsely claiming to have "divine powers", when he's really just using alchemy. After the guru's deceit is exposed, there's an uprising in the city, and people die by the dozen. The brothers don't find out about it until much later. At first, one would think it's a simple story about good and evil just like Mito Kōmon, but it all leads to some significant circumstances in the very end.
(©Hiromu Arakawa/SQUARE ENIX)
── One could never guess it was all a foreshadowing...
I was pleasantly surprised by the concept of a manga betraying the reader: at first, it seems like a story about saving people with alchemy, but in the end, it turns out that the brothers' skills were totally taken advantage of.
The feeling of being in touch with the artist's sensibility is vital.
── Which artist's style do you find especially enjoyable?
Yoshiyuki Sadamoto. I like him so much that when I was asked who I would like to do the cover of my CD album, his name was the first to come up.
Also, I really loved Yuriko Hara's Cocoon Entwined, which was recommended to me by a listener. It's about a school for girls who grow out their own hair to make uniforms, and the detail in the drawing of the hair is incredible.
（©原百合子／KADOKAWA）
Then there's the web manga The End of the Goldfish Kingdom by The Imitation Crystal (模造クリスタル). The scenes where the main character and her friends are in the classroom are drawn beautifully. It's good to see how the art in web manga is rapidly getting better.
── What would you recommend to people who want to try their hand at essay manga?
I love Toru Seino's Tokyo-to Kita-ku Akabane. It's about a pub neighborhood in Tokyo with a hectic ambiance, and it's an account of the artist's experiences when he used to actually live there. A homeless woman named Paty gives Toru Seino pieces of her own skin as a gift. She is, by all means, crazy, but when combined with the medium of manga, she becomes a beloved character.
Seino is currently working on a manga about a snack bar in Akabane called Sayonara Candle. There is an episode where a drunk customer pees on the karaoke machine, causing it to malfunction and making it impossible to sing songs other than numbers 1 through 99. (laughs)
（©清野とおる／双葉社）
Toru Seino's Sayonara Candle ep. 1
── Even the most off-putting episodes turn out a bit better in manga, don't they?
They're reworked to perfection. Seino originally used to keep a blog with his illustrations, and I really liked it, but it was too underground for me to fully appreciate. But when he draws the whole story in the shape of a manga, by even adding some real pictures here and there, each episode becomes more and more convincing, and you realize that those people truly exist. It's a perfect balance. Seino has influenced the way I do my report-style streams very much.
Can getting stabbed with needles cure insomnia? [My Experience] - YouTube
This personal report-style live stream features drawings by Tsukino Mito herself.
I've also read the works of Kitsuko Manshu (she has since changed her pen name to Mankitsu, and thereafter she will be referred to as such). I heard that she became a mangaka because Toru Seino told her that her personal experience manga were funny and that she should keep drawing them. Mankitsu is also very interesting, and I really liked her blog. In the manga about saunas YuYu Wonderland, Mankitsu says that she used to be an alcoholic who used to drink to forget until she realized she could give her brain the same experience by getting into a very hot room and then into cold water - that's when she managed to cut back on alcohol. I remember thinking I have to give it a try someday.
（©まんしゅうきつこ／扶桑社）
I also really liked Shigeyuki Fukumitsu's Tsuma to Boku no Shoukibona Ikuji (Eng: My Wife and My Small Childcare). The author has two children, both of whom are a bit slow and can't keep up with others. My brother and I were the same way, so I could relate to them very much. Group activities are out of the question for us. When I went to watch my younger brother learn martial arts, he was the only one who didn't understand the moves and was clearly lagging behind. I was one of those elementary school kids who felt like I was the only one who didn't understand anything even though I was paying attention like everyone else, so I felt very close to this particular work.
Shigeyuki Fukumitsu's Tsuma to Boku no Shouukibona Ikuji vol. 1 (Kodansha)
── Did it feel like you couldn't keep up with the people around you?
Definitely. My brother's judo teacher would ask my mother what could be the reason behind the lag, and she would reply that it runs in the family. I figured as much.
── Do you choose essay manga based on how relatable they are, their realism, or just for fun?
Both Mankitsu and Toru Seino aren't afraid to do outlandish things, so I think the main reason I choose them is that they're able to come into contact with other people's sensibilities. Toru Seino is the kind of person who loves talking to weirdos. I want to be like that too.
Challenging the boundaries of manga with panel layout
── Which works can teach you how to use panel layout and pages when drawing manga?
Hiroaki Magari’s Magari Hiroaki no Jiyuu-chou (Kodansha)
Hiroaki Magari's works. The structure of the manga in the short story collection Magari Hiroaki no Jiyuu-chou (Eng: Hiroaki Magari's Free-use Notebook) is... intense. For example, in one story, a man commits suicide by jumping out of a window, and he falls down and down the page, while his memories alternate inside that window, like a kaleidoscope.
── And the windows are the panels...?
Exactly. In another story, there is a boy who is able to see a QR code that shows the past, and when the reader opens the QR code on their smartphone, they can see pictures of the past just like the boy. Magari had a Flash manga series on the web called Majokko Tsukune-chan, which was also quite elaborate. Every time you clicked on a panel, a new one would appear, and you could also click on an unsuspected part of the picture to be led to a hidden ending, or things like that. Every episode crossed the boundaries of manga; it was so entertaining!
(©まがりひろあき／講談社)
Purposely created discomfort and laughter
── Are there any manga that you think do a good job portraying sadder atmospheres?
I'd have to say Misumisou by Rensuke Oshikiri. Oshikiri's other wors, like Derodero, are fast-paced and come with a dose of black humor, while Misumisou is just about a girl who gets bullied. Her house is burned down, and she seeks revenge. After hunting down one of the boys, she kills him while he implores her with the words "Time out! Time out!". Those words were so out of place, and the scene was so graphic that I laughed a little.
There's also a scene where one of the bully girls gets a paper cut on her hand and puts an adhesive bandage on it, and then the main character who was being bullied goes into berserker mode and cuts the girl's finger off. And then you see a bandage on top of the amputation like if it was a simple paper cut. I really felt that the artist tried to do whatever possible to make those scenes unpleasant. It's like he's trying to figure out how much discomfort he could intentionally cause.
(©押切蓮介／双葉社)
── That scene is really something, isn't it? Going the opposite direction, what is a comedy manga so good you wish you'd drawn it yourself?
It's not properly a comedy manga, but I would say Himitsu no Chaiharo (Eng: The Secret Child Hello Work), written by Osamu Suzuki and illustrated by Sakurakura Meg. It's about a very poor girl who turns to the so-called Child Hello Work*, a secret organization that allows children to get jobs. These jobs involve, for instance, secretly killing off the dog of an elementary school girl on behalf of her father, who hates it.
(* Translator's Note: Hello Work is a real-life employment service center operated by the Japanese government.)
Osamu Suzuki and Sakurakura Meg's Himitsu no Chaiharo vol. 1 (Kodansha)
── Not something you would ask your average elementary school student.
Crazy, isn't it? It's a manga with a lot of twists and turns, I guess intentionally. The protagonist's bullies go through the trouble of creating a fashion magazine just for her. It says stuff like, "Amazing! This girl creates all her outfits by combining her only six pieces of clothing!"... I mean, their bullying tactics get quite creative. There have been daytime dramas like Botan to Bara (Eng: Peony and Roses) that have many plot twists, but I think this work especially reflects the authors' intentions.
── If you were to draw a manga, what genre would it be?
I'd like to work on an exciting slice-of-life manga. I'm imagining something like Rin Ryokawa's Asobi Asobase. I'd also like to work on a manga-style food report that is all about parfaits. I think there is a lot that can be said about parfaits because they come with many layers. Still, they are expensive, so the protagonist should be quite well-off... I already have some ideas in mind.
I want participants to lower the bar, in a good way!
── Gakusei Manga Day is coming up on August 22 (Sun). What are you looking forward to the most?
I'm curious about the advice of the editorial department in the virtual trip. Before becoming a VTuber, I've met my fair share of uncouth men and women working in the film industry, so I thought that most people in their 40s were only familiar with Slam Dunk or Dokaben. But when I spoke with a pixiv employee in his 40s, I was shocked to hear him talk about the most recent, trending titles. I realized he was a man of culture when he brought up some hot title that's currently being serialized, and that I'd never heard of. So I think it would be fun for the participants to have a chance to talk with an active manga editor.
── Last but not least, is the Student Manga Club still looking for members?
Sure! Please tag us when posting your manga on pixiv, participate in the day's events... and feel free to lower the bar - in a good way, of course!
