Bakuman

Bakuman (バクマン.) is a shōnen manga written by Tsugumi Ohba and drawn by Takeshi Obata. The series follows talented artist Moritaka Mashiro and aspiring writer Akito Takagi, two ninth grade boys who wish to become mangaka.

The first chapter was released in Japan on August 11, 2008 serialized in the magazine Weekly Shōnen Jump. The first volume was released on January 5, 2009 and, five volumes have been released. During the first two weeks of its release, the first volume placed fourth and ninth in manga sales in Japan. It is also the first manga released online by Shueisha in multiple languages before becoming available in print outside of Japan. At San Diego Comic-Con International 2009, Viz Media announced they had licensed the series for their Shonen Jump imprint.

A 25-episode anime television series has been announced, to begin broadcast on NHK in the fall of 2010.

Plot
Bakuman begins with Moritaka Mashiro, a junior high student, leaving his notebook containing a drawing of his crush and classmate Azuki Miho in class. When he notices and returns to the classroom after school, his classmate Akito Takagi is waiting for him with the notebook and tells him that he believes Azuki likes Mashiro too. He then tries to persuade Mashiro to become a mangaka and draw the stories Takagi writes. However, Mashiro is reluctant due to disillusion with modern society and the fate of his uncle, a formerly serialized mangaka who died from overwork trying to regain that status.

Later Mashiro gets a phone call from Takagi in which he is told that Takagi will announce Mashiro's feelings to Azuki. Mashiro runs down to Azuki's house to find Takagi waiting for him. Once Azuki comes out to meet them, Takagi tells her that he and Mashiro are aiming to be mangaka. Mashiro then learns that she wants to be a voice actor and Mashiro, thinking of the romantic misadventures of his uncle, proposes to Azuki who accepts under the condition that they will only marry after both achieve their dreams. With a goal before him Mashiro sets out to make this dream a reality. His goal is to have Azuki voice the heroine of the Anime adaptation of his manga. Due to the highest probability for success, he and Takagi vow to become serialized in Weekly Shonen Jump and attempt to become the most popular manga in that magazine.

After submitting many one shots to Shueisha, Mashiro and Takagi begin with their first published series, Detective Trap, which was eventually canceled due to its declining popularity. Shortly after Mashiro and Takagi begin work on their next series, Run, Daihatsu Tanto!, a gag manga. They decide to quit the series due to its unpopularity and begin planning their next manga series, and submit their latest work The Perfect Crime Party to Shueisha.

Characters
A majority of the characters are involved in the manga industry as manga artists, editors, or assistants.


 * Moritaka Mashiro (真城 最高)
 * One of the main protagonist of the series. He follows in the footsteps of his late, manga artist uncle, who loved a classmate from afar, but never got the chance to tell her so and later died from overwork. He is fond of his classmate Azuki Miho, who wishes to become a voice actress. To avoid becoming like his uncle, Mashiro accidentally proposes to Miho. She accepts, stating she will marry him after they achieve their dreams on the condition that they must not see each other until then. Mashiro then decides to team up with another classmate, a talented writer named Akito Takagi, and try to get published and have an anime adaption of the series. The two work under the pen name Muto Ashirogi (亜城木 夢叶) He is a talented artist, but is highly dissatisfied with his drawings. He is often called Saikō (サイコー). He will be voiced by Atsushi Abe in the anime.


 * Akito Takagi (高木 秋人)
 * The second main protagonist. He starts out as one of Mashiro's classmate and after discovering Mashiro's talent in drawing in school, he proposed that they try to publish a manga together. Although Mashiro originally refuses, the two begin to work together after he takes Mashiro to Azuki's house and Azuki and Mashiro decide to get married after their dreams come true. He eventually dates and becomes married to Azuki's best friend Kaya Miyoshi. Takagi is a writer and writes the storylines for the pair's manga. The two started working under the pen name Muto Ashirogi (亜城木 夢叶) although he is often called Shūjin (シュージン). Takagi specializes in unorthodox story lines. He will be voiced by Satoshi Hino in the anime.


 * Miho Azuki (亜豆 美保)
 * Mashiro's former classmate and fiancée. She aspires to become a voice actress and shows promise in the field. She promises to marry Mashiro after they achieve their dreams. However, they must not see each other until then. Since this promise, Azuki has picked up a voicing role, and is gaining growing popularity, not because of her skills, but for her looks. At one point Azuki's agent urged her to bring out a photo book, in effect becoming a gravure idol. With Mashiro's support, however, she turned down the offer and persevered in her voice acting. Her mother is the woman Mashiro's uncle fell in love with. She and Mashiro often communicate through text and sometimes through phone calls, but rarely meet. She will be voiced by Saori Hayami in the anime.


 * Kaya Miyoshi (見吉 香耶)
 * Azuki's best friend and Takagi's wife. Because her friends all have such high aspirations, she begins to feel left out and decides to become a mobile romance novelist. For her first story, she relates the romance between Mashiro and Azuki; however, Takagi ends up writing it for her. She later changes her dream to wanting Mashiro and Takagi's dreams come true as well as wanting to become Takagi's wife afterward. She helps out in inking the manga and generally maintaining a positive atmosphere in the studio. Mashiro and Takagi find that her optimistic presence in the studio helps cheer up what is otherwise very stressful working environment and feel she is part of the "team." She will be voiced by Sayuri Yahagi in the anime.


 * Eiji Nīzuma (新妻 エイジ)
 * A 16-year-old high school student hailed as a genius by many people. He wins the Tezuka Award for his manga Large bander, after which Mashiro and Takagi declare him their rival. Although Mashiro and Takagi view him as a rival, he is very friendly upon meeting them and states he is a fan of theirs. He moves to Tokyo to work on the serialization of his manga Crow on the condition he is able to cancel one series in the Weekly Shōnen Jump after becoming the magazine's most popular author. The head editor has described the difference between Mashiro and Takagi to Nizuma is "love of manga", indeed, Nizuma seems to have been obsessed with and drawing manga since he was 6,and makes loud sound effects with his mouth while drawing. Nīzuma tends to act conceited because he is hailed as a genius; however, after working on Crow for quite a long time, he is more humble, even claiming to "not be good enough of a Mangaka to be judging other people's work" when asked by his editor to judge for the Golden Future Cup. He works under the direction of the Weekly Shōnen Jump editor Yūjirō Hattori (服部 雄二郎) and works with two assistants, Shinta Fukuda (福田 真太) and Takurō Nakai (中井 巧朗), who also works with the shōjo manga artist Kō Aoki (蒼樹 紅). He will be voiced by Nobuhiko Okamoto in the anime.


 * Shinta Fukuda (福田 真太)
 * Fukuda and Mashiro first met when Mashiro decided to become an assistant for Nizuma Eiji. Fukuda had already won an honorable mention when he tried for the Tezuka Award and also got seventh place in the same issue of Akamaru Jump in which Ashirogi's Money and Intelligence ran and got third place. Fukuda then became friends with Mashiro and also competed with Ashirogi in the Golden Future cup with his original manga, Kiyoshi Knight. Fukuda then got serialized somewhat time after Ashirogi and is now an aspiring rival to Ashirogi, Eiji, and Nakai. Among these three, he is considered to have the worst drawings, though they apparently match his stories. His drawings often border on grotesque. He can be extremely conceited and competitive at times, yet helps out his rivals, who are also his friends.


 * Kō Aoki (蒼樹 紅)
 * Aoki (real name, Yuriko Aoki (青木 優梨子) is an aspiring female mangaka that only recently began to work in the shonen genre, previously having worked exclusively as a shōjo manga author. Aoki is a beautiful woman a couple of years older than Mashiro and Takagi, which her editor believes will help her sales. She is distrustful of men, as she draws a number of suitors interested in her appearance, including her assistant Takurō Nakai, whose advances she rejects a number of times. Because shōjo art styles do not match well with Jump, she initially needs help from assistants and artists in order to be published. She is initially paired with Nakai Takurō for her first series, Hideout Door. After Hideout Door is cancelled, Aoki resolves to return to shōjo, although she is later convinced to stay on working for Shōnen Jump. She is now working on the serialized series "The Time of Green Leaves," which is an ecchi series, although she now does her own drawings with assistance on the ecchi portions from Shinta Fukuda.


 * Kazuya Hiramaru (平丸 一也)
 * A new mangaka who, one day, picked up Shōnen Jump for the first time in his life, and decided to quit his job to draw manga. His series is called Otters 11 and became serialized around the same time as Mashiro and Takagi. He can be overwhelmed easily and finds it hard to deal with the stress of writing a manga. He frequently shows up at the other mangaka's studios to hide, but is always soon found out by his editor. He complains about his job a lot and wonders aloud why he ever decided to do it in the first place, but consistently ranks high with the readers in the questionnaires. Due to this, he has been called as a manga genius possibly on the level of Nizuma Eiji, especially considering he has barely read any manga.


 * Ryū Shizuka (静河 流)
 * An 18-year-old newcomer mangaka who submitted a manga called Shapon for an issue of Treasure. Eiji considered him and his story to be second only to Mashiro and Takagi's manga in the same issue, stating that he was amazing and deep, and would have won if he had not have been up against Ashirogi Muto. Because of the dark subject matter of his manga, he is working with a young editor named Yamahisa to make it more Jump-friendly. He has social anxiety disorder and is reluctant to talk to his editor face-to-face, instead preferring to have his meetings over the internet. He is a recluse who has spent much of his time in his room with video games and his computer since the 8th grade and is sensitive to the words of others. He starts to become more comfortable talking with Yamahisa further on in the story and Yamahisa later helps him buy his own apartment and begin conversing with people.

Manga
Written by Tsugumi Ohba and drawn by Takeshi Obata, the chapters of the Bakuman series have been in Shueisha's Weekly Shōnen Jump magazine. Since its premiere on August 11, 2008, over eighty chapters have been released in Japan. The first volume of Bakuman was released on January 5, 2009 and, eight volumes have been released. Several chapters of the series have been released on Jumpland's official website in Japanese, English, French, and German; the first chapter was released on August 19, 2008. It is the first manga released online by Shueisha in multiple languages before becoming available in print outside of Japan.

In addition to the success of Bakuman in Japan, the series has also been licensed in Korea by Daiwon C.I. and serialized in their Comic Champ manhwa magazine, by Tong Li Publishing in Taiwan, and Tokyopop in Germany. It has been licensed to be released in English.

Reception
Carlo Santos of Anime News Network praises the conflicting viewpoints of the protagonists and is surprised that the series succeeds, not only as a manga about manga, but as slice-of-life series about the dreams of youth. However, Santos comments that this series could learn from Ohba and Obata's previous series Death Note; the beginning is not as gripping and the plot twists are "pretty weak" and "seem like petty contrivances". Despite this, he believes that the series is "another hit".

The first volume of the series placed fourth out of thirty in manga sales in Japan for the week of January 6 to January 12, selling 154,675 copies during that time. The week after, January 13 to January 19, the volume fell to ninth place selling 38,176 copies. The second volume followed suit placing second during the March 2 to 9 week, selling 228,056 copies, and falling to seventh during the following March 10 to 16 week selling an additional 62,947 copies. The third volume continued the trend and placed fourth during the week of June 1 to June 7, selling 200,369 copies and placed sixth during the next week of June 8 to June 14 selling 67,541 copies. During the first half of 2009, the first volume placed twenty-eighth and the second volume placed twenty-seventh of fifty top-selling manga in Japan, selling 381,633 and 394,567 copies respectively.