Board Thread:Naruto News/@comment-945885-20150119163247

From January 15 through January 17, Shueisha published a three-part interview between Masashi Kishimoto and Hiroaki Samura, the mangaka of Blade of the Immortal, which was published in Kodansha's Monthly Afternoon magazine from 1993 to 2012. I was pretty surprised when this was announced, as Blade of the Immortal is hands down my favorite manga. Turns out it was a huge influence on Kishimoto, who was an aspiring mangaka and university student when the series debuted.

Interview portal (Japanese)

You can read a full translation of the interview here.

Key talking points:


 * Along with Rurouni Kenshin, Blade of the Immortal made Kishimoto give up on his samurai manga and start writing a ninja manga, since he felt he just couldn't compete.


 * Kishimoto has apparantly seen at least one of [CodeProvidor's] youtube rants about Naruto.


 * Kishimoto pretty much confirms that the designs for Iruka and Kakashi were inspired by Blade's Manji and Taito Magatsu.


 * Kishimoto was heavily influenced by the way that Samura draws human anatomy, especially hands, which should come as no surprise. He also studied Samura's page layouts to the extent that he would buy two copies of Afternoon and pin the pages to his walls (to see both the front and back of each page).


 * They discuss the difficulties of drawning female characters a bit, and what kind of women they like re: bust size.


 * They discuss how they both have trouble creating villains who are unambiguously evil and tend to give them tragic backstories that make them sympathetic, and how their series both deal with cycles of revenge and what sort of things should be passed on to the next generation.


 * For Kishimoto's next series (after the Boruto miniseries), he wants to do a monthly (so he can have more time to work on the art) and to make it something unlike Naruto, though he notes that fans want another series like Naruto and some of the negative feedback he got about the Mario oneshot was that it didn't involve superpowers. He also wants to do a shorter work, about ten volumes, though Samura thinks that Jump probably wants him to do another long series and try for another big hit.


 * It concludes with drawings they did of each others' characters: Blade of the Immortal by Kishimoto and Naruto by Samura. 