Tweet Spotlight

Our good editor Ogino Kentaro (@gouranga_) finally decided to share some backstories regarding the creation of Spice & Wolf manga adaption that recently concluded at 16 volumes.

Let’s talk about the wise wolf

1) The thing that made ask Koume Keito-san to do the manga adaption of “Spice & Wolf” was his work on the Kusarihime adaption. I really liked the atmosphere he created. Koume-san wasn’t open to the idea at first, and he declined my offer twice. Only on my 3rd offer did he finally agree to do a serialization after going “if there really aren’t any other better artists, fine I’ll do it“.

2) Once the serialization was decided, we released a color art on Dengeki Mao along with an announcement for the launch of the manga, but the reactions from the light novel fans weren’t very good. Not long after the news was made public, the two parties responsible for the light novel and the manga got together and went for a drink where we discussed “how to make Horo look similar?“. The result as you’ve all seen.

3) The manga adaption of “Spice & Wolf” tries to recreate the dusty atmosphere of Medieval Europe by forgoing the standard inking step and strengthening the pencil lines instead. The reason we decided to use this unusual technique is because of “Kusarihime” I mentioned above, and also the “Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind” manga by the great Hayao Miyazaki.

There was a rumor that “There was a period of time when the Nausicaa manga was drawn with just pencil lines that could be FAX’d away, without any inking.” I don’t know how true it is, but I thought it was interesting, so we decided to try making our manga with just pencil works too.

However when I received the sketches of the first dozen or so pages of the first chapter, I noticed that the pages had all went undergone the standard inking procedure. I rushed to my phone and said “The pencil lines are definitely better!!” and it took a bit of convincing, but we managed to get everything drawn as we originally planned.

The artist of Spice & Wolf also dropped a comment on this particular tweet:

I am so grateful for what you did back then. m(_ _)m

4) First chapter was planned to be released with Center Color, but it was going to be boring if the early part of the chapter was colored, so we ended up coloring the last four pages of it where the naked Horo makes her entrance. It worked out great and we had the color pages included in the tankobon volume too, but making adjustments for the usual placement of the color pages turned out to be a lot more annoying than I originally anticipated.

Other than that, there are couple other stories like getting in trouble for drawing nipples even though we didn’t have the “nipple ticket“, or the evil editor‘s suggestion almost erasing Col out of existence, but that will be it for this round.

TL NOTE: It’s unclear if this “evil editor” is a stab at himself, or some outside 3rd party

Who is Editor Ogino Kentaro (@gouranga_)?

For those unaware, I mentioned Mr. Ogino in one of my previous posts a bit, but he is a freelance editor responsible for bringing to life the manga adaptions of A Certain Scientific Railgun, SAO Progressive, Railgun Astral Buddy Spinoff, Ore wo Suki nano Omae Dake Ka yo, as well as Ane Naru Mono Ni, Shoujo Kishidan x Knight Tale, etc.

Other than being one of the first people to figure out how to make proper manga adaptions of light novel materials, he also tweets a fair amount of stuff about the history and state of the manga industry.