Mangaka don’t always stick to one style or genre. These authors have wildly different kinds of stories in their portfolios.
Highlights
- Negi Haruba went from harem manga to subversive sentai in Go! Go! Loser Ranger!
- Akihiro Ononaka delved into culinary delights before exploring dark evil in Gushing Over Magical Girls.
- Go Nagai shifted from sex & violence to morality tales with Devilman & Violence Jack.
Manga may be Japanese comics, but they come in many forms. No one’s going to confuse the dystopian yet comic style of Shirow Masamune’s Ghost in the Shell with the pretty but socially conscious tale of Moto Hagio’s They Were Eleven. But most mangaka tend to stick with what they know. The late, great Akira Toriyama mastered action comedy, and Fist of the North Star’s Buronson continued to write stories about manly men.
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However, there are mangaka who have gone beyond the subjects of their most popular works. Artists famous for harem tales have done sentai stories. Comedy horror authors have made autobiographical recollections of war. Others mixed fanservice fun with brutal violence, and even critically acclaimed icons have given schlock a go, with these mangaka who have written wildly different manga.
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Negi Haruba
Harem Manga Author Subverts Sentai With Twist On The Power Rangers
- Most Popular Work: The Quintessential Quintuplets.
- Contrasting Work: Go! Go! Loser Ranger!
Every artist was inspired in one way or another by their forebears. Negi Haruba is just one of the more obvious ones as the clue is in his pen name. He grew up as a fan of Ken Akamatsu’s Negima! Magister Negi Magi, so he used the Negi moniker when he entered the business and was moved when Akamatsu himself was one of the judges who gave his work, The Quintessential Quintuplets, the award for Best Shōnen Manga at the 43rd Kodansha Manga Awards.
It’s a harem manga that sees a tutor teach identical quintuplets to pay off his father’s debts. The strip was seen as good, clean(-ish) fun. So, it’s a bit of a surprise that he followed it up with Go! Go! Loser Ranger! Footsoldier D of the defeated Villainous Army infiltrates the ranks of his former adversaries, the Dragon Keepers, to get revenge. It’s an intriguing twist on the sentai formula that people didn’t expect from the quintuplet romcom guy.
2
Akihiro Ononaka
Wrote About An Alien Discovering The Joy Of Eating, And About A Girl Discovering The Joy Of Beating
- Most Popular Work: Many Flavors of Kumika.
- Contrasting Work: Gushing Over Magical Girls.
With culinary manga getting more of a look-in thanks to the success of Dungeon Meshi, and older classics like Food Wars, fans of both may enjoy Akihiro Ononaka’s Many Flavors of Kumika. It tells the story of a society where humans and aliens live together. Kumika, an alien who can survive on air alone, gets her first taste of udon and, fascinated by the flavor, starts a worldwide tour of Earth’s edibles to indulge her new sense of taste.
It’s a sweet tale, though Ononaka’s follow-up was more savory. Beginning in 2019, Ononaka’s latest work is Gushing Over Magical Girls, where one girl who dreamed of becoming a superheroine ends up becoming a supervillain instead. She tries to reject it, but gradually comes to enjoy doing evil, and not in a PG way, so to speak. Unlike most people, Ononaka followed up their dessert with a saucy main course.
3
Go Nagai
Manga Icon Swung Between Heavy Sexuality And Extreme Violence
- Most Popular Works: Harenchi Gakuen, Cutie Honey.
- Contrasting Works: Devilman, Violence Jack.
Not that Ononaka was the only person to do this. In fact, one of the most prolific and iconic manga artists in the medium regularly contrasted one source of his work with another. Go Nagai practically invented the modern ecchi genre with Harenchi Gakuen and continued to combine hardcore yuks with frequent fanservice in Cutie Honey and Kekko Kamen.
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However, his other works would cool off any burning libidos like the coldest of cold showers. He created Devilman, a morality tale that spilled copious amounts of claret to tell a story that wasn’t afraid of having a dour ending. Its spin-off, Violence Jack, was even more brutal, inspiring a series of OVAs that became notorious for their edgy, adult content that’s still hard for even the firmest of stomachs to endure.
4
Rumiko Takahashi
The Woman Behind Cutesy Harem Manga Also Wrote About Cults And Cursed Immortals
- Most Popular Works: Urusei Yatsura, Ranma ½, Inuyasha.
- Contrasting Works: Maison Ikkoku, Mermaid Saga.
Rumiko Takahashi’s work seems like a nice source of relief from Nagai’s fonts of darkness and d-jokes. Her oeuvre largely consists of light-hearted romcoms that occasionally have the odd nudge-wink joke. Urusei Yatsura popularized the modern harem genre and led to success in similar fields with the kung-fu, gender-bending Ranma ½, and the historical comedy Inuyasha.
On the other hand, she’s also capable of telling more serious romantic tales. Maison Ikkoku was still a comedy, but its story of a humble man trying to reach the heart of a young widow was aimed at the older josei crowd than the shōnen or shojo fields. Then, Mermaid Saga went darker, bringing an immortal seeking mortality together with an outcast in a story involving murder and religious cults. Not exactly family-friendly.
5
Tsugumi Ohba & Takeshi Obata
Duo Behind Moody Murder Stories Maintain Popularity With A Meta Romcom Manga
- Most Popular Work: Death Note.
- Contrasting Work: Bakuman.
Writer Tsugumi Ohba and artist Takeshi Obata went in the other direction from Rumiko Takahashi. They’re both famous for Death Note, where a high schooler succumbs to the power of a notebook capable of killing whoever its writer knows in any way they can dream up. Their later work, Platinum End, does something similar as humans wrestle with the concept of becoming God. Yet it didn’t quite catch on as well as Death Note did.
Instead, it was its immediate predecessor, Bakuman, that got the plaudits. It sticks out from the other two as it’s a romcom about a writer-artist duo who stick it out in the tough world of the manga industry in their bid to be published in Shōnen Jump magazine, and give their VA crush a role to audition for in its anime adaptation. It’s not autobiographical, but it was inspired by Fujiko A. Fujio’s Manga Michi, their semi-autobiographical tale of how they made it in the business.
6
Shigeru Mizuki
Iconic Horror-Comedy Mangaka Also Created Sobering Tales About World War 2
- Most Popular Works: GeGeGe no Kitarō, TV-Kun.
- Contrasting Works: Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths, Showa: A History of Japan, Hitler.
Ironically, Ohba and Obata’s magnum opus wasn’t inspired by Shigeru Mizuki’s older but similarly themed story The Miraculous Notebook. It was also about a notepad that could kill anyone whose name was written on it, but the similarities are purely coincidental. Horror comedy was Mizuki’s field, where he created the yōkai comedy classic GeGeGe no Kitarō, and TV-Kun, a story about a boy who can travel to different places via television.
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However, they stick out in Mizuki’s oeuvre. In a more sober tone, he recollected his time in the Japanese military with the semi-autobiographical Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths, before telling Japan’s history during Emperor Hirohito’s reign in Showa: A History of Japan. Not that he was an Imperialist, as his manga on their Austrian ally Hitler contrasted the powerful image the dictator tried to project with the pathetic reality of who he really was.
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Osamu Tezuka
The Godfather Of Manga And Anime Didn’t Stick To One Genre
- Most Popular Works: Astro Boy, Jungle Emperor Leo (aka Kimba the White Lion), Black Jack.
- Contrasting Works: Princess Knight, Message to Adolf, Dororo.
One of Mizuki’s saddest stories was a one-shot where he recalled telling his contemporaries, Shotaro Ishinomori and Osamu Tezuka, the value of getting a good night’s sleep instead of overworking to meet deadlines. It would end with him sadly revealing he outlived them by 17 and 27 years, respectively. With popular mangaka still being worked to the bone, and icons like Toriyama dying too soon, it’s a sobering short.
The best that can be said of their fates is that their works are still enjoyed and appreciated. Tezuka, in particular, cast a broad net with his different manga topics. His most iconic work, Astro Boy, was a sci-fi story about robots. But he also did gender-defying shojo in Princess Knight, samurai sword-swinging in Dororo, and medical drama in Black Jack. The Godfather of Manga and Anime tried to live up to that title by making an impact in nearly all its genres.
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Kazuo Koike
Author Of Hard Boiled Crime And Samurai Comics Wrote Marvel Comics, Magical Girl Stories, And Comedies
- Most Popular Works: Lone Wolf & Cub, Crying Freeman, Lady Snowblood.
- Contrasting Works: Hulk: The Manga, Mahō Shōjo Mimitsuki Mimi no QED, X-Men Unlimited #50.
Lastly, Kazuo Koike is arguably on par with Tezuka as one of manga’s leading authors. Through his Gekiga Sonjuku course, he taught Rumiko Takahashi, Fist of the North Star’s Tetsuo Hara, Dragon Quest’s Yuji Horii, and more. His most famous work, Lone Wolf and Cub, simultaneously inspired the Academy Award-winning drama Road to Perdition, and the infamous “video nasty” Shogun Assassin, an edit of Lone Wolf’s first three Japanese live-action movies.
On top of that, he also wrote one of the earliest Marvel manga in Hulk: The Manga and wrote Issue #50 of X-Men Unlimited. Beyond this dip into Western comics, Koike created the hyper-macho action-comedy Mad Bull 34, and the more serious Crying Freeman, before considering magical girl manga in Mahō Shōjo Mimitsuki Mimi no QED. Between manga and Western comics, machismo, and feminity, Koike’s oeuvre might have the most contrasts of the bunch.
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Fuente: successacademy.edu.vn
Categorías: Anime
