He goes into great detail about how he creates characters, and even shows you his character template that he uses to think through his characters before he sits down and designs them visually.

SJ: JoJo's Bizarre Adventure has a lot of horror elements and quite a bit of gore. What are your favorite horror movies? You've spoken in other interviews about how you drew muscular body types in Phantom Blood and Battle Tendency because Stallone and Schwarzenegger were popular at the time. You've also said that you moved to thinner body types for Diamond is Unbreakable and Vento Aureo because readers were losing interest in muscle men and you wanted to do more with your interest in fashion. Steel Ball Run and JoJolion seem to represent another big shift in the evolution of your art style. What inspired the looks of Steel Ball Run and JoJolion? He then goes on to recount how important titles are. In particular he enjoys striking, absurd ones, or ones with the character's name (which, well, makes sense.) Is worthwhile advice given to many children but often forgotten later down the line, especially in writing. It shouldn't be outwardly apparent all the time, sometimes illusionary, but they are the words that glue together intrigue. From an instructional perspective, this is an excellent book to the extent that it clearly identifies the elements of manga, the way these elements connect, shape, and depend on each other, and it communicates something of the mythos, lexis (linguistic and visual) and ethos that makes manga, manga. It's the ethos part of the equation that makes this book problematic.

Manga in theory and practice

No todos los días se tiene la oportunidad de leer un texto íntegro y (casi) sin ilustraciones de un mangaka tan relevante como Hirohiko Araki, creador de JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, una obra que no obstante correspondería a un Nivel 2 de clásicos en el mundo Manga (donde el Nivel 1 son los títulos que todo el mundo, quizás, podría reconocer sin necesidad de haber leído el Manga o visto el anime—Dragon Ball o Naruto, por ejemplo), ha adquirido una popularidad muy sustancial en México y Latinoamérica, cosechando de paso un fandom detestable e indispensable a partes iguales. Araki, pues, es un autor de tremendo talento, y su semi-autobiografía funciona como resultado conceptual a una creciente demanda por su trabajo, así como la justicia nunca concebida por otros grandes de antaño que se fueron sin dejar algún documento que precisara sus memorias. My work centers around protagonists who grow as they overcome hardship. In creating Johnny, I didn't necessarily set out to depict a hero with a disability. He was the end result of my pursuit to create a character who could grow, both physically and mentally, during a race where he would be forced not only to rely on other people, but horses as well.

Araki anota cosas. Por lo que dice, lo anota todo. Cuando algo le llama la atención, le gusta o no lo entiende, lo anota. Pero no sólo hace una simple anotación: intenta explicarse porqué le ha llamado la atención, porqué le gusta o porque no lo entiende. De ese modo, cuando tenga que hacer algo, puede acudir a sus apuntes y aprovecharlo para dar forma a un personaje o circunstancia. Story. Araki says that story is the least important of the three. The explanation he gives is interesting. But I believe story has never been the strongest point of Araki's manga, so perhaps his emphasis on the other two fundamentals is unsurprising. In many ways, I agree. In some ways, I disagree. Still, nonetheless, those I admire fall in this camp. Every artist, author, musician, whatever, needs to evaluate this. Are you doing this so others can see you do it and congratulate you, eternally? Or do you WANT to do it, regardless? Is it built into you? Do you want to build it into you? Or do you want to pretend until you can't anymore? You worked for several years with a weekly deadline as part of Shonen Jump, until transitioning to a monthly deadline when JoJo's Bizarre Adventure moved to Ultra Jump in 2004. What are your feelings on the weekly vs. monthly model of creating manga?

My Book Notes

Araki Sensei: I'm extremely grateful for all the support from the fans. There are new, younger fans being introduced to the original manga after experiencing JoJo through anime and other mediums. The fact that there's a new generation of readers is the core of what JoJo is about passing the torch on to the next generation.

After reading Hirohiko Araki's book on manga theory, I realized that this was similar to a lot of writing books that I have read before. There were differences to certain approaches, but it was close to what I have read from authors. The pacing of a book is similar, the path of your characters is similar, etc. The Ki-Sho-Ten-Ketsu story structure he outlines is a good one for short story writers to keep in mind, and simple and flexible while still offering a straightforward way to structure your stories. (One of his two Implementation chapters acts as an example in great detail, which is also nice. Although after you read it, you can look at any Shonen comic and see it in action immediately.) Overall, I enjoyed reading it, and as I said above, I recommend it to new writers and Shonen manga fans. Araki himself says this book is really intended as a “passing of the torch” book where he shares his secrets with the next generation of manga producers, and that’s what it is. There isn’t likely to be too many mind-blowing ideas here, but there is a lot of things worth thinking about, and I’m very glad I was able to read it. Like I said above, if you enjoyed this, try Bakuman next, which is a dramatized version of this topic. (And an amazing one at that.) This might be a little hard to put into words, but when I draw using physical media, I almost feel like I’m caressing the drawing, and I start to feel affection for my characters. That even applies—given enough time—to characters that I don’t like when I first create them. Sometimes I’ll even cry when they die."Hirohiko Araki clearly didn't write this primarily for a western audience. The market for "manga" written by western authors in Japan is nearly non-existent. The odds of a non-Japanese person publishing a hit in a magazine like Weekly Shonen Jump is-brutally- probably less than a fraction of 1%.