Mario Secret Talk
Translated by Suzaku @
mangahelpers.com
Do not reproduce without permission
Masashi Kishimoto Sensei's new one-shot, Mario, premiers now...!!
Just how was Masashi Kishimoto Sensei's treasured work,
Mario, created!? Kishimoto Sensei himself talks about the secret story of this mysterious title!!
Remake of Mario: 1998/2013
• Two illustrations with the same composition. The one on the left was drawn 15 years ago, while the one on the right was drawn only recently.
A Story That Predates Naruto
You came up with the rough draft for Mario before Naruto's serialization, and it's one of your unpublished works, but around what time did you draw this project?
Masashi Kishimoto (hereafter
Kishimoto)
: It was about 15 years ago, so I suppose in 1998. That was before
Naruto was serialized, and at the time all I had for either were rough drafts.
Mario has a very different tone from some of your other works like Naruto and Karakuri, so what was it that made you start thinking about writing this story?
Kishimoto: Before I debuted, I actually submitted several different manuscripts to
Weekly Shōnen Jump (hereafter WJ), which didn't do very well, and at the time I thought, "I wonder if they aren't appropriate for a shōnen magazine." So that was when I decided I wanted to make a manga aimed at a seinen magazine and drew the rough draft for
Mario.
So Mario wasn't originally drawn for WJ?
Kishimoto: Rather than WJ, I wrote it with the intention of submitting it to a seinen magazine. I think it was
Super Jump (hereafter SJ; magazine discontinued) that handled them in those days. It couldn't have appeared in WJ since I drew things that were a bit adult-oriented. Since I never planned to submit it to WJ, I also didn't have to inform the managing editor when I started working on it. Because I didn't tell anyone, it felt like I was sneaking around to draw it. I really loved drawing it and I wrote it without having to worry about things like page counts, so it got ridiculously long before I even realized it.
How long did it get?
Kishimoto: Well, a really long time ago in one of the
Naruto volumes I said something like, "It's over 160 pages," but I was exaggerating a bit — way later on I double checked and it turned out to only be about 130 pages.
(Laughs) They told me I could do whatever I wanted for this, so if I were to add this project to the 130 pages I did back then, it felt like I needed to do at least another 40 pages.
(Laughs) Since I'd already said it would be over 160 pages total. Still, about the original 130 pages... Yeah, I lied.
After 15 years, the treasured work premiers!!
The manuscript for Mario was shelved, and you somehow ended up starting work on the Naruto series — Kishimoto Sensei, would you mind talking a bit about what was going on at that time?
Kishimoto: Around that time, since I was thinking about transitioning from the shōnen magazine to a seinen magazine, I wasn't doing any rough drafts for WJ at all. I had just drawn the manuscript for
Mario, when a managing editor from WJ got in contact with me. "Lately you haven't been submitting any rough drafts. What are you doing?" I told him the truth, "I've been thinking I might not be cut out for a shōnen magazine after all, so I thought I'd start submitting to SJ instead. I drew a manuscript for a manga that I can submit to a seinen magazine." Then I think he said, "This manuscript, mind if I take a little look at it?" Even though it couldn't work as a rough draft for WJ, it's a bit weird but I guess I thought he might be able give me some feedback on a manuscript for a seinen magazine too, so I decided to give him just one look at it.
What sort of things did he say?
Kishimoto: At that point, the editor said, "This is the kind of manga you can draw when you get older, but there are manga you can only do right now while you're still young, so I think you should work on manga for a shōnen magazine!" After that he told me to "draw a shōnen manga just one more time" and I decided that I would create another manuscript for WJ. After that it was decided that
Naruto would be serialized, and the manuscript for
Mario has been shelved ever since.
Based on comments published in the Jump Comics Naruto volumes, Mario seems to be a manga you're really confident in.
Kishimoto: Since I was kind of edgy back then, I had a lot of bravado. I probably didn't think it would ever see the light of day, so my comments might have sounded really confident. I said, "It's the greatest manga I've made so far." If that manga never makes it out into the world, I imagine some of the readers probably thought, "Must not have been so great." Now
Jump Square (hereafter SQ) is bringing it to the world, and I've raised the bar really high, so I'm really nervous.
(Laughs) This is really shameful to say, but, "I was still just a kid back then," so please be gentle with me.
After being shelved for 15 years, why do you think now is the time to reveal Mario to the world?
Kishimoto: It's because my editor from when I was drawing
Mario and
Naruto asked the SQ editor-in-chief, Yahagi-san. Last year, we had an opening for the
Naruto movie that I worked on, and after we finished watching it at the premier we had an ordinary dinner meeting. That's when I met Yahagi-san. He came up to me during the dinner meeting and said something like, "I want you to do a one-shot for SQ." Actually, that dinner meeting wasn't after the movie premier, and I was the one who asked to do the one-shot!
(Laughs)
After hearing the request, was it decided that you'd start work right away?
Kishimoto: He had been colleagues with my first editor for a long time, and owed him a bunch of favors, so he couldn't refuse anymore.
(Laughs)
For old time's sake, do you have any thoughts that you'd like to share about the first editor you worked with?
Kishimoto: It's been a really long time, but somehow I can still remember the old days. We once had a business meeting about a rough draft, and I fondly remember doing revisions together on the same sheet of paper. And then another time, around the Chūnin Exams in
Naruto, we were making corrections to the manuscript just like so.
What are the differences between the rough draft and the version appearing in SQ!?
To make it all fit into this manuscript, you must have needed to compress a lot of things from the huge 130-page rough draft you drew back then.
Kishimoto: Well, this might sound a little like an excuse, but at the time that I was drawing
Mario I wasn't considering how it would be printed in a magazine, so I just thought, "I can draw whatever I want," and the page count grew too large. Since it was 130 pages long it couldn't fit in the magazine, so this time I rearranged it to focus tightly on 49 pages. If I could really have done 160 pages, I think that would have been just about perfect.
(Laughs) Though I suppose that if I had to do 160 pages, I wouldn't have had enough time to draw them.
Yet this feels similar to a remake. When you were redrawing the new version, did some parts give you more trouble than others?
Kishimoto: It definitely felt like, "I'm being dragged back into the past." It was a lot like drawing a completely new one-shot, where you're creating everything from scratch, because it was unfinished and I had envisioned the imagery so long ago, but trying to cut everything down was very tough. Since I had a lot of momentum at the time I drew the manuscript, I was really worried about which parts I should condense. Some of the composition needed rearranging, too, because I think it felt a bit amateur. I really overdid the boasting back then, so please accept my sincerest apologies.
About how much time did you spend working on it?
Kishimoto: Actually, the time I spent on
Mario wasn't too extensive. Even though it was commissioned quite a while back, I thought, "I have to do it, I have to do it," because if you procrastinate you end up running out of time. As the deadline drew closer and closer, my drawing became more and more frantic.
Regarding the story and illustrations, what were some of the major changes or corrections?
Kishimoto: First, I took out the goggles. That's because I'd already done goggles once, in
Naruto. After that, I changed the character designs a little bit as well. Also, while Mario got around on a scooter in the rough draft, I made him travel by car in the SQ version. I've fine-tuned the neighborhood, too.
Could you share some of your thoughts on redrawing illustrations from so long ago?
Kishimoto: I think I was able to make the illustrations cleaner and more legible than the ones from back then. Since I've been drawing
Naruto for more than ten years, that's probably influenced it somewhat. I was asked to do some color illustrations, so I did an illustration using the same composition as one of the old drawings (pictured on the right page), and I hope people have fun comparing them. The background, I drew that myself in the original, but this time it was done by an assistant. Some small details, he's missing the cigarette and ring. In the rough version, he's got bandages covering the wound on the left side of his forehead, but I didn't cover it up in the SQ version. The rough draft had a subplot involving the injury, but it was cut from the SQ version so there was no reason to hide it. That scar is a relic from the rough draft, so I'm going to keep the story to myself for now.
Check out something from Masashi Kishimoto that's unlike anything you've seen in Naruto!
So, was there anything you had a hard time with back when you drew the original rough draft?
Kishimoto: At the time I didn't care about the number of pages and I was drawing whatever I liked, so I didn't have a single worry. I was in a happy place. Guns, contract killers, I love all that cool, old school stuff, and I watch a lot of movies with gunfights.
What do you like most about those gunfighting movies?
Kishimoto: I like the way they direct how guns are handled. For example, the hammer rises before each shot is fired, so it's almost like the hammer is this punctuation that's interposed between moments. You can see it when you're watching the movie. I'd always wondered if it was possible for a manga to depict the same kind of gunplay. I thought it would be interesting to use that kind of direction in a manga someday. However, it's actually pretty hard to draw those sorts of actions without a lot of pages. So I had to trim a lot of that this time around. That was a bit disappointing.
Are you familiar with things like the components of firearms?
Kishimoto: I like the designs of guns, and have studied some models, but I don't research them like an enthusiast might. I'm really not that interested in stuff like when they're manufactured or what bullets work with which generations of guns. That is to say, I'm more interested in what surrounds the guns, like the atmosphere in Mafia and yakuza films. In the Mafia stuff, you get the big shootout scenes, and things like family and romance, and the nuanced depictions of conversations between fellow human beings. Those are the kinds of dramatic moments that I love and cherish.
Mario is set in New York!?
The announcement illustration has a lot of skyscrapers in the background, so is the style of Mario's setting based on somewhere overseas?
Kishimoto: First off, the world you see is New York, in America. It's not completely accurate since I couldn't go gather research, but I think it's fair to say, "This city is a fictional double of New York." The buildings I drew back when I did the rough draft were all my own designs. This time around, for its appearance in SQ I thought I'd make an effort to do corrections while looking at photographs, but there were several buildings that I'd put a lot of thought into when I originally drew them, and I left those unchanged. So when you look at it now, there are still some strange places. Those are the places that give me nostalgia for the days when I drew the rough draft.
Dear reader: A message from Kishimoto Sensei
In closing, for those who are going to read the SQ version of Mario after this, could you talk about some of Mario's highlights?
Kishimoto: From the viewpoint of readers, although I think that the style of
Naruto has made a strong impression,
Mario is something I originally drew for a seinen magazine, so I think it'll give them a completely different vibe, and I really hope to see comments like, "This isn't the same old Masashi Kishimoto." Since there were a lot of tricky parts, I'm really dreading the reviews.
(Laughs)
By the way, other than Mario, do you have any other unpublished works on the back burner?
Kishimoto: I do not! Even if I did, I wouldn't admit it because it would raise expectations.
(Laughs) I often ask myself, "What do I want to draw?" It stops when I answer, "Whatever is most interesting." If I get another opportunity I'll draw it in secret, and I won't reveal the secret until I think it's ready. When that time comes, I sincerely hope everyone will read it.
Then we'll look forward to you saying, "It's time to reveal the secret."
Thank you, Kishimoto Masashi Sensei!!
The special one-shot, Mario, starts its mission on the next page!!
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