Wannabe manga creators Mashiro and Takagi are starting to get some recognition for their indie work but decide to change tack by going all-in on mainstream battle manga as their ticket to the big time. Meanwhile, manga prodigy Eiji Nizuma is plowing well ahead of all rivals and even their ladies are starting to overshadow them with their successes in anime voice acting and cell phone novels (ah, Japan!).
I read the first couple volumes of Bakuman nearly 9 years ago and I’m just now getting around to resuming the series! I don’t really have an excuse for why this is as I loved the first book and the second wasn’t bad. Maybe it’s because I could see the series for what it is - a realistic and detailed look at the manga creation process and only that - and felt it was too repetitive/didn’t offer enough for me to read more of.
At any rate, given the overall lack of quality I’m finding in most of what I’m reading these days, I’m happy to settle for a mediocre comic, saw this one on the shelf and thought, why not? And I’m glad I did because it’s a good series, albeit very slow and any kind of narrative tension is almost non-existent.
What struck me the most about our protagonists is how young they are: they’re both 15 years old and still in high school. And yet they’re so mature in their dedication to their craft, so disciplined and ambitious - it’s incredible, inspiring even.
And you could say, well, that’s fiction, but a lot of manga creators start young and achieve massive success while also still really young - Akira Toriyama was 28 when Dragon Ball took off, Tatsuki Fujimoto was even younger when Chainsaw Man blew up when he was 25, and so on. They didn’t start at those ages but worked up to it from childhood. Maybe it’s just an accurate depiction of the culture.
Some creators in this series though, you could say there’s definitely some kind of mental disorder there. Like Eiji Nizuma, the manga prodigy and sort-of rival, whose behaviour pretty much points towards him being on the autism spectrum. It is weird too that a publisher would be so dependent on the output of teenagers for their business, or that the parents are basically absent and the kids all have their own professional studios already!
It’s a very dialogue-heavy book, so you can’t speed through it like most manga. They very carefully take you through the processes of manga creation: the editorial meetings, the storyboarding, the calculation behind the storytelling, how Shonen Jump works as a publication (and this is a Shonen Jump book so kudos to SJ for publishing a comic that’s quite brazenly critical of it), where to get ideas, and so on.
All of which is to say, it ain’t the most exciting comic to read. I’m interested in the creative process so I got something out of it but it’s definitely a niche topic, even if the creators do try to work in some excitement with relationship drama. There are no real stakes either - people this driven and this accomplished this young are going to succeed. It’s not a question of if but when. So all we’re doing is watching them fail and get better, over and over, and waiting for them to triumph, as they inevitably will because tenacity, much more so than that nebulous concept “talent”, leads to results in any field.
I liked that they included an older character - Takuro Nakai, a 33 year old assistant to 16 year old Eiji - to show the other side of manga creation. How some creators never do make it and end up drawing backgrounds heading into middle age. It gives you a more rounded view of the realities of the business.
Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata are the creators of the bestselling Death Note and I noticed how the editor character, Hattori, kinda looks like Ryuk the Shinigami. I wonder if that’s a deliberate nod to the character or whether they really did base Ryuk’s appearance loosely on their editor.
Bakuman won’t appeal to everyone and it’s easy to put down - there’s no exciting storyline to compel you to pick up one book after another in quick succession. It’s also the kind of series you can take a break of nearly a decade from and pick it up again easily because it’s straightforward: it’s about creators creating and all that entails. But if that thoughtful, esoteric material is your thing, Bakuman, Volume 3: Debut and Impatience delivers.
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