Look Back (part two)
Continuing this month's fast lane review, child mangaka and possible author self-insert Fujino was just tasked with delivering a graduation certificate to the home of artistic rival Kyomoto. "Rival" in the sense that Fujino considers them rivals. Kyomoto takes all their classes via correspondence from home, and Fujino has never seen them in person or even heard what (if anything) they think of her in return.
So! Fujino carries the enveloped certificate to the mysterious Kyomoto's house. No one responds to her knock at the door, and apparently she didn't try calling them (or even getting any of their numbers) before coming over. So, she...okay, this is kind of a weird thing for you to do, Fujino.
Especially considering how ambivalent she was about this mission in the first place. You'd think she'd see this as a great opportunity to just stick the envelope under the door and never have to actually engage. I guess curiosity about her unseen bugbear might have overcome the raw antipathy by now, but still, just walking into a stranger's house unannounced is a very bad idea that even a sixth grader should know better than.
Fujino pokes around inside the house, calling out for Kyomoto or anyone else who might happen to be home. No response. She eventually finds a hallway filled with stacks of sketchbooks, most of them seemingly filled. Looks like she was at least sort of right about Kyomoto having a lot of free time to devote to art. Fujino also happens to find a four panel comic template that hasn't had anything drawn in it yet. In what I can only infer is a bizarre fit of spite driven on by having her suspicions about Kyomoto's advantages seemingly confirmed, she grabs a pen and fills it up herself. With a not-very-nice comic about the person whose house she essentially just broke into and whose property she's stealing.
Then, by some incredibly unlikely coincidence, her hand twitches as she's looking over her work, and the slip flutters to the floor and slides under the bedroom door in front of her before she can grab it again.
-____-
Yeah, okay, sure.
Worse still, she hears someone startle behind the door, as if they noticed the slip of paper sliding in.
Again, somehow. What, did Kyomoto just happen to be staring at the crack under the door at that exact moment? It's not like a falling slip of paper makes much noise.
Well, not sure what the fuck else she should do at this point, she hastily puts the certificate down on the floor, loudly tells the person behind the door that she's just leaving this for them, and then flees the house.
She makes it across the street before a sweaty, poorly dressed, and wild haired kid comes awkwardly barrelling out the door after her. To Fujino's bewilderment, she is addressed as "Fujino-sensei." She barely has time to acknowledge Kyomoto's identity in shocked confusion before the latter says something even more surprising.
Huh. Well. That's definitely weird. For at least three reasons.
First, the lack of any sense of violation at not only the home invasion, but also the insulting comic, is a hard circle to square. Second, Kyomoto somehow immediately inferring that this is Fujino herself and not someone else playing a prank using her artwork (with or without her own cooperation). Third...asking a sixth grader for an autograph is just such a strange thing to do, even for another sixth grader.
I guess Kyomoto really hasn't gotten much socialization. Or at least, not for the last couple of years.
Kyomoto tells Fujino that it was her comics back in third grade that inspired Kyomoto to overcome her social anxiety enough to send her own work in. Seeing her own work appear in the school newspaper alongside Fujino's has given her a joy and sense of worthiness over the latter half of her elementary school career that she'd have otherwise lacked. She saw Fujino's skills improve throughout fourth and fifth grade, and was inspired to try and keep up with her. She was deeply saddened when Fujino's comics stopped appearing in the paper earlier this schoolyear, and - in between babbled entreaties for Fujino to sign the back of her shirt - wants to know what made her suddenly stop after steadily improving for so long.
Caught entirely unprepared, emotionally discombobulated in multiple directions at once, and with no idea if there even IS a good way to tell the truth in this situation, Fujino just tells the first lie that comes to her mind.
Kyomoto buys it. She also begs to be able to see the comic that Fujino has been working on. Fujino first says that she doesn't like to let other people see her work before it's ready, and then - when she won't stop begging - says that she's really just done plotting and planning so far, without any real drawing yet. I don't think anyone older than a sixth grader would have bought this, and even then a more socially experienced sixth grader probably wouldn't have bought it, but Kyomoto's anxiety disorder has left her naive.
After managing to sell that explanation to Kyomoto, Fujino uses the oncoming rain as an excuse to run on home. Her body language seesaws wildly over the course of her run home. Some panels have her staring at the ground with a haunted, zombie-like expression. Others have her dancing and skipping. Still others have her doing whatever the hell this is meant to communicate:
Some emotional turmoil is warranted given what just happened, of course.
As soon as she gets home, Fujino goes to her bedroom and starts to draw. Furiously working on a comic so that she'll have something to show Kyomoto. Guilt and shame will not permit her to do anything else. Well into seventh grade, she's still working on this new, major manga project, which she seems to have titled "Metal Parade." Given the speed with which she started working on this project, it's probably safe to assume that she really did have the idea for it in the back of her head beforehand, even if her plans to start drawing and submitting it soon were total fabrication. She draws after class. She draws at home. She draws when her friends go out for ice cream.
Except, this time, she has at least one friend who is with her through it all.
Kyomoto and Fujino are a team now. Kyomoto draws the backgrounds in a slightly simpler and more cartoonified version of her traditional photorealistic style. Fujino's foreground elements are good enough now that with just a slight adjustment to her own style, she can prevent them from clashing with the backgrounds. It's anyone's guess how good the actual story is. Considering that Fujino seems to be the sole brain behind that aspect, and that until now she's pretty much stuck to gag-a-week sunday funnies type stuff, I can't imagine that it's very good. Even before considering the fact that they're thirteen years old, which isn't exactly the age you expect really good storylines to come from. Still, their artistic skills are solid, and whatever they may lack in life and storytelling experience they seem to be doing their best to make up for in sheer enthusiasm.
They spend more or less all the free time that seventh grade allows them working on Metal Parade. They finish it just in time for submission to that competition the following winter, and their dedication and well-calculated work delegation pays off.
Kyomoto is notably staring down at the table and sweating while Fujino does all the talking. Her social anxiety problem might not be quite as bad as it was in elementary school, but it's still pretty crippling. Chasing after Fujino when she went to her house must have been nothing short of a herculean effort for her (I suspect that she started chasing her as soon as she recognized the art style, before she had time to actually read the speech bubbles and realize the comic was mocking her. That would have probably had the opposite effect on someone with her kind of anxiety problem, and this would have been a *much* sadder story).
On a brighter note, Fujino is probably one of very few actual friends Kyomoto has ever had, and having this relationship with her is almost certainly helping her overall mental health. Her managing to drag herself to this publisher and even sit in the same room with the interviewer while Fujino talks is probably something she couldn't have managed a year ago.
Also, one other very important detail here: Shueisha is the publisher of Weekly Shonen Jump, THE big name in shonen manga. It's the line that Fist of the North Star, Dragonball, and JoJo's Bizarre Adventure were all first published under. In much more recent times, it's also the publisher that Tatsuki Fujimoto, the author of this comic, got started with. So, this could be another autobiographical element, or it could just be a matter of Shueisha being by far the biggest game in town and thus the most likely fit for the story.
Later that winter, the girls trudge through the snow to their closest comic shop, and see the fruits of their labor ripe and ready for harvest.
They bagged the second place prize of one million yen. Not sure what year this is supposed to take place in, but at modern rates that's about $7,300 US, which is pretty damned exciting for a pair of thirteen year olds. Both of their parents have helped them open their first ever bank accounts, now that they have enough money to need it. Fujino has also withdrawn 100k yen - a fifth of her share - as cash to celebrate with, which Kyomoto is flabbergasted by. Kyomoto can only think of money in terms of security and investments. Fujino, who hasn't spent her whole life shut away in her bedroom, can think of much more immediate uses for money. Besides which, the way she sees it, this was just their debut onto the manga scene. Now that they've got both name recognition and the attention of a major publisher, they're sure to have more comics published soon, and they'll start pulling in a regular income before they even finish high school.
...granted, from what I've heard about working conditions for Weekly Shonen Jump contributors, Fujino might end up rueing those words.
For now, Fujino convinces Kyomoto to go out on the town with her. It's okay if Kyomoto doesn't want to withdraw any of her own money, it's Fujino's treat. Kyomoto really has to steel herself to go out around people so much, but she manages. They get crepes, go to a movie, hit an arcade, etc. After their night out she has to admit that she really enjoyed it even if it was hard for her.
Also, they only spent a little over 5k yen, leaving Fujino with the vast majority of what she withdrew to go ahead and put back in the bank. Kids really don't cost much to temporarily satisfy, heh.
As they return home, Kyomoto thanks Fujino for everything. For pulling her out of her shell. For encouraging her to do something with her artistic skill instead of just using up free time and salving her own loneliness. Fujino's response is...off putting.
That might just be a joke, but her serious expression that the comic makes a point of zooming in on doesn't support this reading. Tonight's events seemed like a display of generosity on her part, but...hmm. Now I'm wondering if Fujino might be more manipulative and self-serving than it seemed. Our first introduction to her back in third grade DID call attention to her large and fragile ego, but...I dunno. Maybe she really is just joking, and I'm reading too much into it.
...or maybe I have it backwards, and Fujino is thanking Kyomoto for helping her make a prizewinning comic. IE, helping her win the prize was already all the payment she could ask for. Yeah, that feels more natural for sure, even if it doesn't quite fit her expression.
Anyway! Throughout middle and high school, Fujino and Kyomoto keep making comics. And, at least for the most part, they keep getting published. Their horizons expand as they branch out into more diverse visual subject matter. Nature. Architecture. They master it all, one new avenue at a time.
The fact that it's always Fujino credited as the author feels ominous. On one hand, she's still the writer and storycrafter as far as we know, so it's industry standards for her name to be more prominent than the background artist's. On the other hand, in light of the earlier hints about Fujino's personality, I'm starting to feel like this might all be a leadup to Stan Lee screwing Jack Kirby out of all the cash and fame.
They enter their senior year of high school with multiple publications under their belts, and a bright future ahead of them doing hard labor in the Shonen Jump mines under the lash of a Shueisha taskmaster.
This seems like a good place to end a post.
