In the
brutal manga industry, reaching old age without breaking your back or ending up
in a clinic is basically a statistical miracle. George Morikawa,
the legendary author who has been drawing uninterrupted fights in Hajime
no Ippo for 35 years, has just confirmed what everyone feared: his
body did not give up any more and has ended up in the hospital.
The bill
for publishing 1,515 chapters
The news
fell like a bucket of cold water this Friday. Through his social networks, the
mangaka announced that he had to be hospitalized at the beginning of the week.
Although he kept the morbid details about what exactly went wrong in his
system, he made it very clear that the work will go on hiatus of
at least a month to focus strictly on its recovery.
For a guy
who has been publishing in Kodansha's Weekly Shōnen Magazine since
1989 almost without stopping to breathe, taking thirty days off sounds more
like a life-or-death doctor's order than a simple vacation. In fact, the
machinery had already been showing signs of critical exhaustion; Just last
December the work had another pause, and its monumental chapter 1,515 came out
with difficulty on March 5.
The
eternal debate of health and retirement
To calm the
masses and prevent Japanese forums from panicking, Morikawa uploaded a sketch
of the next chapter from his isolation, asking fans to wait patiently for him.
However, at this point in the game, the community is much more concerned about
the man surviving to enjoy the royalties generated by his more than 100 million
copies in circulation, than about seeing Ippo Makunouchi return quickly to the
ring.
