What would
you do if I told you that the secret to success in the manga industry is
to throw all your passion in the trash? Well, the creator of the famous slice-of-life Love
Is Like a Cocktail has just proven it empirically. Mangaka
Crystal na Yousuke left the entire otaku community open-mouthed
by confessing that his most successful work was born as a rather cold
experiment. He decided to completely ignore his personal tastes, his obsessions
and his artistic vision to draw only and exclusively what other people told
him. The result? He got his own anime adaptation and the biggest commercial
success of his entire career.
The hard
work of selling your soul to the market
To any
artist with a normal ego, this sounds like absolute torture. Trying to maintain
weekly motivation while drawing something that doesn't represent you deep down
is very difficult. That's why Japanese readers surrendered to his feet on the
forums. They recognize that having that corporate coldness to adapt your pen to
what really sells is a talent that not everyone possesses. The story of this
office worker who loves to drink in secret and her husband who makes her cocktails connected
massively precisely because it was designed to the millimeter to please the
public, not to satisfy the creative whim of its creator.
Publishers
are the true heroes of shonen
All this
sincerity sparked a gigantic debate about how publishing monsters actually
operate in Japan. And the truth is that this case is not the exception, it is
the golden rule. Titanic works such as Spy x Family started
with an author who did not feel any emotional attachment to his own
protagonists, but who followed his publisher's instructions to
the letter. The same pattern is repeated in the pillars of classic shonen. Akira
Toriyama needed the publisher to push him to perfect Dragon
Ball, and Masashi Kishimoto had to accept brutal changes
in Naruto's names and designs so that the work would not fail
in its beginnings.
On the
other side of the coin we have historical disasters such as Samurai 8.
There it was perfectly demonstrated what happens when an established author
decides to ignore all external feedback and does what he wants without anyone
stopping him. It is very clear that the art of making a successful commercial
manga is a team effort, where the individual ego always has to give in
to cold sales numbers.
