Summary
Manga may be Japanese comics, but they come in many forms. No one’s going to confuse the dystopian yet comic style of Shirow Masamune’sGhost in the Shellwith the pretty but socially conscious tale of Moto Hagio’sThey Were Eleven. But most mangaka tend to stick with what they know. The late, great Akira Toriyama mastered action comedy, andFist of the North Star’s Buronson continued to write stories about manly men.
However, there are mangaka who have gone beyond the subjects of their most popular works. Artists famous for harem tales have done sentai stories. Comedy horror authors have made autobiographical recollections of war. Others mixed fanservice fun with brutal violence, and even critically acclaimed icons have given schlock a go, with these mangaka who have written wildly different manga.
1Negi Haruba
Harem Manga Author Subverts Sentai With Twist On The Power Rangers
Every artist was inspired in one way or another by their forebears.Negi Harubais just one of the more obvious ones as the clue is in his pen name. He grew up as a fan of Ken Akamatsu’sNegima! Magister Negi Magi, so he used the Negi moniker when he entered the business and was moved when Akamatsu himself was one of the judges who gave his work,The Quintessential Quintuplets, the award for Best Shōnen Manga at the 43rd Kodansha Manga Awards.
It’s a harem manga that sees a tutor teach identical quintuplets to pay off his father’s debts. The strip was seen as good, clean(-ish) fun. So, it’s a bit of a surprise that he followed it up withGo! Go! Loser Ranger!Footsoldier D of the defeated Villainous Army infiltrates the ranks of his former adversaries, the Dragon Keepers, to get revenge. It’s an intriguing twiston the sentai formulathat people didn’t expect from the quintuplet romcom guy.
2Akihiro Ononaka
Wrote About An Alien Discovering The Joy Of Eating, And About A Girl Discovering The Joy Of Beating
With culinary manga getting more of a look-in thanks to the success ofDungeon Meshi, and older classics likeFood Wars, fans of both may enjoyAkihiro Ononaka’sMany Flavors of Kumika. It tells the story of a society where humans and aliens live together. Kumika, an alien who can survive on air alone, gets her first taste of udon and, fascinated by the flavor, starts a worldwide tour of Earth’s edibles to indulge her new sense of taste.
It’s a sweet tale, though Ononaka’s follow-up was more savory. Beginning in 2019, Ononaka’s latest work isGushing Over Magical Girls, where one girl who dreamed of becoming a superheroine ends up becoming a supervillain instead. She tries to reject it, but gradually comes to enjoy doing evil, and not in a PG way, so to speak. Unlike most people, Ononaka followed up their dessert with a saucy main course.
3Go Nagai
Manga Icon Swung Between Heavy Sexuality And Extreme Violence
Not that Ononaka was the only person to do this. In fact, one of the most prolific and iconic manga artists in the medium regularly contrasted one source of his work with another.Go Nagaipractically invented the modern ecchi genre withHarenchi Gakuenand continued to combine hardcore yuks with frequent fanservice inCutie HoneyandKekko Kamen.
However, his other works would cool off any burning libidos like the coldest of cold showers. He createdDevilman, a morality tale that spilled copious amounts of claret to tell a story that wasn’t afraid of having a dour ending. Its spin-off,Violence Jack, was even more brutal, inspiring a series of OVAs that became notorious for their edgy, adult content that’s still hard for even the firmest of stomachs to endure.
4Rumiko Takahashi
The Woman Behind Cutesy Harem Manga Also Wrote About Cults And Cursed Immortals
Rumiko Takahashi’s work seems like anice source of relieffrom Nagai’s fonts of darkness and d-jokes. Her oeuvre largely consists of light-hearted romcoms that occasionally have the odd nudge-wink joke.Urusei Yatsurapopularized the modern harem genre and led to success in similar fields with the kung-fu, gender-bendingRanma ½,and the historical comedyInuyasha.
On the other hand, she’s also capable of telling more serious romantic tales.Maison Ikkokuwas still a comedy, but its story of a humble man trying to reach the heart of a young widow was aimed at the older josei crowd than the shōnen or shojo fields. Then,Mermaid Sagawent darker, bringing an immortal seeking mortality together with an outcast in a story involving murder and religious cults. Not exactly family-friendly.
5Tsugumi Ohba & Takeshi Obata
Duo Behind Moody Murder Stories Maintain Popularity With A Meta Romcom Manga
WriterTsugumi Ohbaand artistTakeshi Obatawent in the other direction from Rumiko Takahashi. They’re both famous forDeath Note, where a high schooler succumbs to the power of a notebook capable of killing whoever its writer knows in any way they can dream up. Their later work,Platinum End, does something similar as humans wrestle with the concept of becoming God. Yet it didn’t quite catch on as well asDeath Notedid.
Instead, it was its immediate predecessor,Bakuman, that got the plaudits. It sticks out from the other two as it’sa romcom about a writer-artist duowho stick it out in the tough world of the manga industry in their bid to be published inShōnen Jumpmagazine, and give their VA crush a role to audition for in its anime adaptation. It’s not autobiographical, but it was inspired by Fujiko A. Fujio’sManga Michi, their semi-autobiographical tale of how they made it in the business.
6Shigeru Mizuki
Iconic Horror-Comedy Mangaka Also Created Sobering Tales About World War 2
Ironically, Ohba and Obata’s magnum opus wasn’t inspired byShigeru Mizuki’s older but similarly themed storyThe Miraculous Notebook. It was also about a notepad that could kill anyone whose name was written on it, but the similarities are purely coincidental. Horror comedy was Mizuki’s field, where he created the yōkai comedy classicGeGeGe no Kitarō, andTV-Kun, a story about a boy who can travel to different places via television.
However, they stick out in Mizuki’s oeuvre. In a more sober tone, he recollected his time in the Japanese military with the semi-autobiographicalOnward Towards Our Noble Deaths, before telling Japan’s history during Emperor Hirohito’s reign inShowa: A History of Japan. Not that he was an Imperialist, as his manga on their Austrian allyHitlercontrasted the powerful image the dictator tried to project with the pathetic reality of who he really was.
7Osamu Tezuka
The Godfather Of Manga And Anime Didn’t Stick To One Genre
One of Mizuki’s saddest stories was a one-shot where he recalled telling his contemporaries, Shotaro Ishinomori andOsamu Tezuka, the value of getting a good night’s sleep instead of overworking to meet deadlines. It would end with him sadly revealing he outlived them by 17 and 27 years, respectively. With popular mangaka still being worked to the bone, and icons like Toriyama dying too soon, it’s a sobering short.
The best that can be said of their fates is that their works are still enjoyed and appreciated. Tezuka, in particular, cast a broad net with his different manga topics. His most iconic work,Astro Boy, was a sci-fi story about robots. But he also didgender-defying shojoinPrincess Knight, samurai sword-swinging inDororo, and medical drama inBlack Jack. The Godfather of Manga and Anime tried to live up to that title by making an impact in nearly all its genres.
8Kazuo Koike
Author Of Hard Boiled Crime And Samurai Comics Wrote Marvel Comics, Magical Girl Stories, And Comedies
Lastly,Kazuo Koikeis arguably on par with Tezuka as one of manga’s leading authors. Through his Gekiga Sonjuku course, he taught Rumiko Takahashi,Fist of the North Star’sTetsuo Hara,Dragon Quest’s Yuji Horii, and more. His most famous work,Lone Wolf and Cub, simultaneously inspired the Academy Award-winning dramaRoad to Perdition, and the infamous “video nasty"Shogun Assassin, an edit ofLone Wolf’s first three Japanese live-action movies.
On top of that, he also wrote one of theearliest Marvel mangainHulk: The Mangaand wrote Issue #50 ofX-Men Unlimited. Beyond this dip into Western comics, Koike created the hyper-macho action-comedyMad Bull 34, and the more seriousCrying Freeman, before considering magical girl manga inMahō Shōjo Mimitsuki Mimi no QED. Between manga and Western comics, machismo, and feminity, Koike’s oeuvre might have the most contrasts of the bunch.
