Then, he started rearranging the order as if he were solving a jigsaw puzzle. That's when he asked me to cut all the panels out with a razor.

During the serialization, you have no idea what you're drawing. Working around the clock was the norm at Tezuka Productions.Īt the time, we were working on Hi no Tori (Phoenix). We worked 24 hours straight through, until morning that day. That time together is what's supporting me now. I was actually happy to be able to work with him alone. He said, 'Please stay late.'Īll the other assistants looked at me like, 'sucks to be you.' There was this one time where he called me 'Terasawa-shi,' which is very formal. Terasawa: I have too many to tell, but if I had to pick one. His influence over me is immense.ĭo you have any memorable stories from working with Mr. Also, working with him, you get to see his collection, like his books. He wasn't going to teach me everything step-by-step, so watching and learning was really important. That year I was there was really meaningful. I was hired with a one-year contract and worked under Mr. I was looking for work and I happened to come across Tezuka Production's job ad. That's when I realized I can't do shoujo manga and I need to be drawing manga meant for guys. The editor actually wrote me back saying how I wasn't drawing it from a girl's perspective, and how I'm a man. I wrote a letter asking him why I didn't get first place. What a punk, right? I was just a kid who wasn't even 20 years old.

So I wrote a letter to the Shoujo Manga Editor-in-Chief at the time. I did pretty well, but never got first place. It was more than your average salaryman's pay back then.

I looked through a bunch of stuff and once I got the gist of it, I drew my own. The first time I drew manga, I kind of just winged it. I thought even I could do this, so I began drawing shoujo manga. When I looked at her manuscripts, her drawings sucked. We were like, 'This is better than the lottery.' That's probably around 10 million yen in today's money. I guess 'you'd win' is a weird way to put it, but if you won, the prize money was 1 million yen. She said if you enter this competition you'd win. I asked her what she was doing and she said she was drawing shoujo manga. And my girlfriend at the time was drawing something. After I failed my college entrance exam, I started looking for a job. It wasn't because I was really interested in manga though. To celebrate its upcoming release, we're proud to present an excerpt from an interview conducted in 2013 with Cobra mangaka Buichi Terasawa. Based on the best-selling manga, the series follows the notorious space pirate Cobra, who battles it out with the Pirate Guild by day and saves sultry sirens of space by night. This spring, Nozomi Entertainment will be releasing the classic science fiction TV series Space Adventure Cobra. Interview With Space Adventure Cobra Creator Buichi Terasawa

Buichi terasawa manga