Aiba Kyoko has been working as a manga artist since the 2000s, developing a signature style that spotlights familiar tropes and turns them on their head. While best known for her BL work (especially, in English, the stunning Derail), Aiba’s most recent series targets a different genre: the wish-fulfillment isekai.
“In a typical isekai, you become a pretty woman, or a cool guy. It’s always these positive transformations, and I just didn’t like that. So I decided to do something the exact opposite,” Aiba explained during our interview, comparing the experience of an isekai protagonist to her own convention visit. “Me traveling to America is already this much of an ordeal, so how can someone going to an unknown land have such a great experience?”
That “opposite,” upside down and reversed isekai is Oji Tensei: The Villainess’s Days of Aging Gracefully, the story of a haughty villainess who awakens from execution to find she’s been reborn in modern Japan…as a middle-aged man. Originally a one-shot, the title was greenlit for serialization after it broke its platform’s record for most comments on a one-short work. It’s now a monthly series with five chapters available at time of writing.
While the premise of the series involves playing with gender, Aiba noted that her impulse in creating the series was more about that upending of expectations than telling a trans narrative. The chapters of Oji Tensei so far focus more on villainess Chloe learning life skills she was ignorant of in her former life and coming to terms with living in an aging, unglamorous body. Aging gracefully, in other words.
That isn’t to say that Aiba is uninterested in social issues—in fact, she emphasized the subject in her Otakon biography. The story that prompted her changing interest was Young Carer: Invisible Me, which she wrote last year. “I t actually started with a conversation with my editor when we got to talking about what my background is like [as a former young carer], and we thought it was an interesting topic so I was asked to write it. It was happenstance. It became a more socially conscious piece, but I didn’t think I would do that when I was working on it.”
AIba also consulted the stories of other young carers, and the manga wasn’t framed as being autobiographical. “I only revealed my own experiences in the afterword. So it was more a story based on my experiences, a story I crafted with my own experiences in mind.”
Writing the story, though, did draw her toward writing more stories like it. “Right now, having worked on Young Carer, I want to know more about these kinds of issues, and of course, I’m interested in women and young people who have been disempowered and looking at how they are treated around the world. Having worked on stories for women, I am interested in women’s issues too.”
Character Design and Keeping Up With the Market
Outside of her interviews and autographs, Aiba also hosted two panels. The first was titled “Critiquing Fan Designs Live with Kyoko Aiba,” which was described in the con guidebook as Aiba “going through fan-submitted designs and advising them how to make their artwork look closer to Japanese anime.” This was an unfortunate mischaracterization of the panel’s subject matter. The actual subject of Aiba’s talk was the broad aesthetic differences between “anime inspired” western art and anime illustrations made in Japan. It was not, as she emphasized multiple times, about which was better, as Aiba herself enjoys both styles, but about common tells that might help artists hoping to give their art more of a Japanese “feel.”
Aiba began with a greeting in English before conducting her main talk in Japanese alongside a translator. She pulled up two characters emblematic of two different design sensibilities, which she joked were blurred out for copyright reasons. Aiba highlighted the Western design’s broad shape, foot-forward position, and heavier brow/emphatic expression (emphasized by additional art from Teen Titans, Samurai Jack, and Avatar: The Last Airbender). By contrast, the Japanese design was lanky and “weak” looking, and thus he has a lot of accessories added to make him look cool or intimidating. She also brought up beauty standards, as cultural norms are a large part of what influences character design: for Japanese designs that means a smaller nose, less prominent cheekbones, and less muscular frames (as, she said, “bulking up” is more difficult for Asian people). These elements subconsciously present themselves when designing characters.
At the same time, even those elements are malleable: “In Japan the goal is to sell as much as possible,” she said, “so whatever that is, that’s the ‘Japanese style.’” The strongly American comic book-influenced My Hero Academia came in as an example.
The other major influence on design is what the artist grew up watching. Aiba’s first favorite shoujo was Cardcaptor Sakura, while her favorite shounen was Detective Conan, and both inspire her tastes and how she developed as an artist. She feels very comfortable creating art in a CLAMP-type or Shonen Jump and Shonen Sunday style.
On the other hand, hearing from others at Otakon in 2023 that they struggled with making their drawings “look anime” made her realize that she had her own difficulties replicating Western-style art. Though she’s a fan of Disney, her attempts to draw the characters, she felt, never ended up feeling very Disney-ish. Mecha is also a struggle. “I’m not very good at it, so I don’t want to do it.”
To accompany this part of the talk, Aiba took requests for a live-drawing of an American character—first. Batman. “Very cool and muscle,” she joked in English.
Using a photo of Michael Keaton as a reference, she worked on a headshot as she spoke. “I have to think about the commercial marketability of my character design. It’s a big part of my day-to-day.” She noted earlier that she was best-known for her BL work. “Trends come and go like the wind. You have to be very aware of what’s popular. Japanese trends change so quickly it’s hard for me to keep up with it.”
At the same time, she observed that the market is reaching a point where the norm is being lost—in other words, breaking the standard has become the standard. While very popular works can become a standard of their own, Aiba noted that anything from three years ago is considered “old,” and she has to constantly reinvent herself in order to stay relevant on the market. “If you only watch shounen, you’ll be left behind! If you love shounen, you still have to read adult titles, read shoujo, and watch movies to see what’s popular.”
She mainly draws in Clip Studio Paint and alters the available brushes, though she has downloaded custom tools when a particular project calls for it. Her daily schedule involves going straight from getting up to working over breakfast, and she’s in front of a computer roughly 18 hours a day. An audible sympathetic wince went through the audience.
“Everyone love Shonen Jump, right?” She asked. “The schedule for that is even harder. Three hours of sleep is a lot.” Her slide deck for her workflow also included an illustration of the kinesiology tape she uses to prevent hand pain, which she described as taping on so that it pulls down on the hand and relieves tension.
Juggling multiple series at a time can also be a challenge. In addition to writing Oji Tensei, Aiba is also currently publishing a series about a high schooler’s journey to become a novelist, titled The Narrow Road of Okuda. In theory, Aiba creates a board, a rough, and a finished version of a page. “While I’m waiting to move on to the next step with [the board] for company A, I’ll start on sketches for company.” She paused. “That’s the ideal. In reality, things pile up, get muddled, and I lose a looooot of sleep.”
As far as continuing to develop, Aiba doodles frequently and imitates the styles of manga she currently enjoys. Her favorite designs vary, because artists are often skilled in very different conceptual areas—Inoue Takehiko of Slam Dunk excels at photorealism, for example, while Kazuhiro Fujita’s Ushio & Tora is much more stylized. She also shouted out Takahashi Rumiko’s character designs as a favorite.
With Batman finished and a little time left, the audience threw her a curveball request: Mordecai from Regular Show. A bit of Googling ensued. “It’s super cute! This is the first time I’ve seen this.” She continued while sketching. “In Japan I have a reputation for drawing cool guys, so I’m happy to be drawing stuff like this [as a change of pace].”
One audience member asked whether there are Japanese fans obsessed with Western media in the same way the assembled fans loved anime. “Oh yeah, that exists,” Aiba said without missing a beat. “For example, I watch almost entirely foreign dramas.” Both Bones and White Collar came up as examples.
The next question, about Western works that had significant cultural impacts on Japanese writers, was harder to answer. She contrasted looking at cross-cultural influences in storytelling to influences in fashion: “Whenever you’re looking at fashion it’s easy to pinpoint, ‘you’re using this style,’ but with storylines it’s harder,” Aiba said. “Of course, when I’m looking at works I often say, ‘ah, this came from this drama or this drama.’ This year’s Conan movie looks like it’s borrowing pretty heavily from Sherlock, but that’s just my opinion. I might be the only one who sees that.”
Aiba mentioned that visible fan support can be huge for an artist, as evidenced by Oji Tensei getting picked up for a series. Physical mail in particular is seen as a sign of significant support, given the extra steps it takes to create versus an online comment. An audience member followed up to ask if the quality of the mail matters or merely the quantity. “For me the quality of the letter matters in how it sticks with me,” Aiba responded, “but [publishing] staff is interested in quantity.” And fanmail from overseas? Bring it on! “Sometimes I get letters from foreign countries, and editors are like, ‘wow!’.”
The Process of Creating Manga
In a later panel with shoujo artist Kino Hinoki (best known for adapting No. 6 and 7th Time Loop: The Villainess Enjoys a Carefree Life Married to Her Worst Enemy!), titled “The Process of Turning Something Into a Manga from an Original Work,” Aiba went more into her daily process when drawing manga. Once again, Aiba opened with a greeting in English. “This is Hinoki Kino, who is a very famous manga artist; and I’m Kyoko Aiba, just a normal mangaka.”
Aiba’s respect for Kino shone through clearly throughout. Both had brought examples of chapters-in-progress to compare for the audience, though Aiba asked audiences not to take photos as hers wasn’t yet published. Kino’s process usually begins with a text outline for the page, boarding, drafting, and proofing before finalizing a page; in between are multiple check-ins with the author of the original work.
Aiba’s process is much more streamlined, with far fewer checks. Her descriptions were firmly tongue-in-cheek throughout. “It might be because I make original work. Or it might be because I’m lazy.”
“The plot [text page] Ms. Kino does? I don’t do any of that. Why? Because I’m lazy.” Instead, Aiba starts by boarding the layout of her page. “Then after I send it to the editors, they usually say, ‘okay.’ And the part where you submit a first draft? I skip that too!”
Aiba’s assistant helps with shading, which Aiba illustrated with an on-page note for the chapter-in-progress. It reads, please do the shading for 空 (sky). “My assistants looooove these notes.”
To sum up, with the same deadpan humor that makes Aiba such a pleasure both to read and to speak with: “Ms. Kino does things very meticulously and carefully. And I do things very efficiently.”
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