YUKITO's ROOMThe era of notebook comics
1975 to 1979
It is certain that I had drawn a fair amount of manga-like stuff by the time of low grades of the elementary school, but since I dashed them off on the back of fliers etc., they got scattered and lost.
Maybe got unsatisfied with such situation, when I was around the third grader in the elementary school, I started a very ambitious attempt as a kid to purchase a large-sized notebook and draw a long comic on the whole of it.
I made them series and they became a huge saga of 15 volumes and 3 supplemental volumes.
It was my oldest existing work of comics.
I once finished it when I had drawn the 15th volume, then made a box with a ready material to store them.
Therefore, I call them The 15-volume Notebook Comics.
It's funny that I miswrote a Chinese character for "volume" as "end" (both characters are read as "kan" in Japanese) on the box.
The stickers on it tell the era.
The two notebooks in front are the series I draw after I had made the box. I wrote "the 3rd volume" on the cover of one of them, so there must have been three volumes, but only two volumes were found.
In those days, I liked to play at monsters using small puppets of the Ultra Monsters.
Though they had been modeled from Ultra Monsters, they were just a material for me and the original setup was disregarded totally.
I took in all the toys at hand including TAKARA's Microman and Popy's Jumbo Machinder to my original stories, and played with giving the reins to my imagination such as supposing a plain plastic strainer as a vehicle.
I played a lot of roles by myself and improvised a story, which is, so to speak, a "role playing game."
The 15-volume Notebook Comics reproduced my playing at monsters on paper.
It was an extension of a child's solitary play, so I draw them without intention of showing to others.
There's no introduction, development, turn and conclusion.
I never drafted nor considered plots and drew stuff improvisatorially with felt pens or ball-points, giving free rein to my desires.
They are far from perfection, but first of all, caring how perfect one's own works are is something done by socialized persons, so it is rather senseless to require such a thing of children with more wildness.
The titles of 15 volumes and 3 supplemental volumes are as follows.
Majin Super Violence 3 volumes
Monster Revolution 2 volumes
Monstrous God Garuda 7 volumes
Escape from Gamma Star 1 volume
Demon: The Giant God 1 volume
Jat: The Special Attack Party 1 volume
Sequel To Miasma 3 volumes (Incomplete. Before I began to draw The 15-volume Notebook Comics, perhaps I had drawn a comic called <i>Miasma</i>. I think that's why I put the word "Sequel" to its title.)
The sanguineous phrases such as "violence", "revolution" and "miasma" which might get restricted-15 now, pleasantly recall the 1970s to me.
Let's take a look at the content...
This is the beginning of the 1st volume of Majin Super Violence.
By supernatural power, a bronze statue begins to move and becomes Majin Violence.
This bronze statue is very similar to Jumbo Machinder Mazinger Z. On the next page, he breaks his ear, from which he creates a subordinate. Actually, my Mazinger Z toy in the house had its ear broken, while its pilder came off and was missing.
In the story, the main characters, the posterity of the hero who had defeated Majin, and the subordinates of revived Majin continue to battle for a long time.
Even though there are 15 volumes, all contents are the same.
The stage of this story is the star Myra, where the monsters speaking human languages live. The planet once had an advanced civilization, but it was ruined after Majin Violence rioted.
The plot is such, so no human characters appear.
He is one of main characters.
At the last in the 3rd volume of Majin Super Violence, the huge pteranodon-type robot "Giant Sky Demon Dragon" (it was affected by the Demon Dragon of the Heavens Gaiking, on which heroes ride, venture to a bodily crush to Majin Violence. It seemed that all the characters had died and the story had ended.
It is likely that I drew it in 1976, so it was 2 years before the hero of Farewell to Space Battleship Yamato(1978) did suicide attack and caused controversy, I had closed my story with a kamikaze scene.
Seemingly I didn't know any other story closing than killing all the characters.
However, the main characters were not dead. 5000 years (what a wild number) after the fierce battle with Majin Violence, the heroes revitalize from frozen sleep, which is the beginning of Monster Revolution.
There is not a deep meaning particularly in its title.
The world like Hokuto no Ken (Fist of the North Star) develops in it.
I made it about 3 years before Mad Max (1979), but "the world after civilization collapse" has been somehow familiar to me since I was a kid.
The exaggerated words such as "This is the end of the world!" were probably influenced by GeGeGe no Kitaro.
Because I didn't write the dates on the 15-volume series in the box, I can't tell the exact production dates, but they had been directly affected by some TV animations and other programs broadcasted in those days, so guessing from it, it is likely that I had drawn them from the middle of 1975 to 1977.
Children feel time flowing very slowly, so as my actual feeling, it seems that I had spent longer hours for them than for GUNNM and GUNNM: Last Order.
Then, I received a baptism of Star Wars and Space Battleship Yamato (Star Blazers) and had drawn another series of a bit more sci-fi setup for a while, but interrupted it halfway.
I returned to the world of The 15-volume Notebook Comics again and started Sequel To Miasma in 1978.
I had written the production date on this, so I can tell the exact time.
This is the beginning for the 3rd volume of Sequel To Miasma, which I had finished halfway.
We can see some influence of Reiji Matsumoto in depiction of the future city and others, but the characters still are monsters -- what a laughable unbalance it is!
There are 60 pages per notebook, so it totaled easily over 1000 pages .
It is certain that I had spent an enormous labor.
Foreign interviewers often ask a happy-go-lucky question, such as "What were you doing before beginning to draw comics?" But the start point was like that, so I have a lot of trouble to explain.
