Being a misunderstood visionary in the
entertainment industry comes at a high cost, and the history of voluptuous
designs in Japanese drawing is no exception. Hiroya Oku, the
legendary mastermind behind iconic works such as Gantz, has
reignited the debate in the community by proudly reaffirming
that he was the first mangaka in the history of weekly magazines to dare to
draw female characters with notoriously large breasts when no one else dared to
do so.
To understand the author's merit, you have to
go back to the late 1980s, a time when exuberant proportions were virtually
off-limits from youth publications and ecchi content was an
almost non-existent concept on the mainstream market. When Oku debuted in Weekly
Young Jump magazine with his work Hen, his pronounced-bust
heroines completely threw veteran creatives off. The mangaka himself confessed
that his more experienced colleagues openly called him "perverted" in
the corridors of publishing houses, since even series as long-lived and massive
as Kochikame maintained extremely demure and flat designs of
women during that time.
Despite the initial rejection of his
colleagues, the author remained faithful to his tastes in each project he drew
over more than three decades. That visual insistence was cemented in otaku
culture with the global success of Gantz in the early 2000s,
continued with the over-the-top sci-fi comedy Gigant — where
an actress increases her body size while maintaining her attributes — and
remains relevant in her most recent work, Kanrekihime. Oku admitted
that he never imagined living long enough to witness an era in which waifus of
colossal proportions would go from being a source of ridicule to becoming the
default standard of the entire manga industry.
Knowing that nowadays extravagant and
voluptuous designs dominate almost any story aimed at the male audience
