The news of Weekly Shounen Sunday’s “Keijo!!!” coming to an end has been a hot topic, especially on the western web. While both the manga and anime performed quite poorly in Japan, Keijo found good success over in the West. This caused many western fans to be angry about the news of the manga ending so soon after the anime, and the fake story made up on /a/ about the manga getting axed due to anime’s poor sales spread like wildfire.

Thankfully, Daichi Sorayaomi, updated his blog today to share what really happened behind the scenes and all the horror stories of serilization.

Here is a rough summary of his blog post:

I was told even before the anime started airing to: “Be ready to end the series by the time anime ends”

I’ve been getting messages asking “Did the serialization end because of some disputes with the anime studio”, but anime sales had nothing to do with the decision to stop serialization. It was all between me and my publisher.

Not sure if I’m allowed to say this, but anime vol.1 actually sold more than the reported “715” figure . By a lot more actually (4-digits, not 3).

. By a lot more actually (4-digits, not 3). We double checked with the anime studio when we saw that figure on the news. I wonder how that number came to be.

I do wish my publisher (Shogakukan) had supported me a bit better.

I’ve been trying to recruit assistants through the publisher for almost a year and a half, but they couldn’t get any, so it was mostly a two-men job between my helper/assistant and I ….(sometimes it would just be me alone. (there was one time I passed out for an hour)

….(sometimes it would just be me alone. (there was one time I passed out for an hour) Also during the anime, editor said “if we had one more sponsor, it could have been broadcasted on West Japan too”. Yet, for some reason, my publisher was not one of the sponsors…..

Despite the anime airing, we were always placed towards the end of the magazine…

There was a time when I couldn’t draw due to stress…. but I somehow pulled through thanks to my assistant, anime staff, and my editor.

Personally, would have liked to continue a bit more, but it can’t be helped. (although I tried to speed things up, half a year wasn’t enough…)

Planning on adding a few extra stories on volumes 16, 17, and 18

So it appears the decision to end the series was already made before the anime, probably in line with Sunday’s recent decisions to end many of their long runners series, like Denpa Kyoushi and Hayate no Gotoku, in response to the successes of many of their rookies.

Overall, it is interesting that Shogakukan wasn’t even involved in funding of the anime, although it is understandable given how low Keijo’s manga sales were. The statement about the actual anime sales being higher than what’s reported on Oricon charts do show that there are still a good amount of uncertainty in Oricon figures, but it’s still the best we can get and the deviation shouldn’t be too high.

Source: Sorayami’s blog