During a recent interview with Japanese publisher Shueisha, Chainsaw Man creator Tatsuki Fujimoto revealed that he wouldn’t mind it if he stopped drawing his mega-popular shonen series entirely, so he could focus solely on penning its off-the-rails story.
While discussing how the iconic Studio Ghibli director Hayao Miyazaki halted his retirement to get his final film How Do You Live (aka The Boy and the Heron) across the finish line, the Chainsaw Man creator was asked if he thinks manga and anime creators ever truly retire. Fujimoto responded by saying he would like to follow in the footsteps of Kaguya-Sama: Love Is War creator Aka Akasaka, who is no longer illustrating his own sequel series, Oshi No Ko.
“I thought that was good. ‘I want to do that too!’ Yes. I definitely think it’s more fun that way,” Fujimoto told Shueisha. “Of course, there’s the joy of balancing the story with the art, and I think there’s also the joy of just the story, but if it’s just the art, I think I’ll end up in a narrow world when I deliver it to everyone.”
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Fujimoto hasn’t had assistants since Look Back
The topic was broached after Fujimoto admitted he was jealous of how detailed the background artwork was in Miyazaki’s original Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind manga, saying “I really want to draw more lines and shades in my manga, but I can’t do that with a weekly series.” Unless he’d be able to hire more assistants, that is. While Fujimoto’s former assistants, Yukinobu Tatsu, Yuji Kaku, and Tatsuya Endo have gone off to create their own manga series in Dandadan, Hell’s Paradise, and Spy x Family respectively, Fujimoto said he was recently able to get some assistants to help with Look Back, his one-shot manga about making manga.
“When I drew Look Back, thanks to the success of Chainsaw Man, I was able to pay the assistants for a long time, and I was able to do it because there were people who followed me. However, it is absolutely financially impossible for a newcomer manga artist to spend as much time drawing as he likes,” Fujimoto said implicitly taking a few potshots at the untenable schedules publishers impose on manga creators.
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Reddit suggests Fujimoto hire Oshi No Ko’s artist for Chainsaw Man
While some fans on the r/manga subreddit don’t even want to imagine living in a world where Fujimoto isn’t drawing Chainsaw Man, they do sympathize with his perspective, especially given how rigorous his weekly deadlines (he has to pump out another 20 pages for Chainsaw Man Part 2 every Tuesday).
“Fujimoto can do anything he wants as long as he keeps on cooking,” LeleTheKing wrote.
“If Look Back is in some way autobiographical, then that would be a sad end to his drawing career,” PsycDrone63 replied. “But [being a] manga artist is an insane job, so it’s understandable.”
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Although Fujimoto never explicitly laid out plans to take a step back from drawing Chainsaw Man, the idea that he might one day do so prompted Redditors to earmark manga series like Death Note and the Monogatari series as examples of how a manga can still do gangbusters with a winning author and artist combination. Redditor asianant suggested Fujimoto hire Oshi No Ko artist Yokoyari Mengo to draw the book since she’s already a huge fan of the manga, routinely posts fan art of its characters on her Twitter account, and made Chainsaw Man canon in recent chapters of Akasaka’s supernatural idol series.
Fujimoto might wanna sleep on DMing Mengo considering the artist once went on an impromptu vacation from drawing Oshi No Ko to recover from reading Chainsaw Man. I can only imagine the mental health days Mengo would accumulate if they had to actually draw Chainsaw Man as a job.