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"A collaboration?"
Shizuru was stunned by the word.
In truth, the suggestion that she find a partner to create manga had originally come from Haruto himself. At the time, her first thought had been to ask him, but she had quickly dismissed the idea as childish.
After all, she and Haruto weren't related or particularly close, so she saw no reason why he would want to work with her. Eventually, she had sought out a senior from the Light Novel Club who was rumored to be quite talented.
However, "talented" within a student group often meant very little in the professional world. Their collaborative manga had collapsed after only five chapters of serialization and was subsequently axed.
If the competition was that fierce in a magazine with only a few tens of thousands in circulation, she could barely imagine the battlefield Haruto faced in the flagship Kiyozawa. To a magazine of that caliber, a series that would be considered a "hit" elsewhere with two or three million sales per volume was likely viewed as a failure on the verge of cancellation.
"Yes, a collaboration. I have a rather good story I've been developing lately," Haruto said, choosing his words carefully while watching her reaction.
"It is not quite suited for a light novel format. Therefore, I want to create it as a manga. But as you know, I do not have much talent when it comes to the actual drawing. I can manage rough storyboards to convey the composition and the visual flow I want, but to produce high-quality, detailed manga art? I would probably need to spend three to five years studying the craft. I simply do not have that kind of time to dedicate to learning the basics of illustration."
As Shizuru listened, she immediately grasped his meaning. "Can I ask what the genre of this new manga is?"
Haruto looked at the curiosity sparkling in her eyes and answered directly. "It is nothing scandalous. It's a standard sports-themed work centered around the world of street racing."
"Street racing?"
A series of question marks flashed through Shizuru's mind.
Blue Spring Ride, To the Moon, Anohana, and Parasyte, these works were all on completely different wavelengths. She already knew Haruto's imagination was limitless, but a racing manga? Where did that come from?
'Wait, all of those works at least had one common element. A strong romantic subplot.'
"Let me ask... is this a romance story hidden under a racing shell?" Shizuru actually quite enjoyed that kind of thing. In truth, the moment Haruto asked her to collaborate, her heart had already decided on the answer.
As long as the content wasn't something completely unhinged, like extreme fetish material or mindless fanservice, she was willing to work with him on anything.
"Romance..." Haruto hadn't even finished absorbing the entirety of Initial D from his dreams yet, but he recalled the internet memes he had seen in Shiori's memories.
He shook his head and offered a witty line he had discovered in those memories. "There is relatively little romance in this work. After all, 'racers don't need girlfriends.' They only slow down the car."
"..." Shizuru was speechless. Over the next hour, Haruto laid out the terms and obligations of the partnership.
All intellectual property rights would belong to Haruto, but the manuscript fees and royalties from the tankobon volumes would be split 70-30, with Haruto taking seventy percent. If Shizuru agreed, Haruto would return in a few days with the storyboards for the first few chapters.
No ownership of the rights and a 30% cut of the profits meant she was essentially an employee. However, Shizuru only needed thirty seconds of thought before accepting the proposal. She knew perfectly well that Haruto was asking her because they were acquaintances, because her art was genuinely good, and perhaps as a favor for the help she had given him last semester.
This connection was enough for him to choose her over others, but it wasn't leverage she could use to negotiate better terms. Given Haruto's status in the industry, offering these terms to a partner was actually quite generous.
The preliminary agreement was reached much more smoothly than Haruto had anticipated. Over the following two days, he contacted a prominent law firm, explained his situation, and had them draft a formal contract.
Haruto never liked to waste time. Once the legal groundwork was laid, he began to truly examine the details of Initial D in his mind. Collaborating on a manga wasn't as simple as handing over a script; he had to consider the ratio of foreground to background, the sense of speed, the tension in the panels, the perspective, and the overall atmosphere.
A reader only feels whether a manga is "good" or "bad," but a creator has to obsess over the mechanics.
If Haruto only gave Shizuru a plot outline, the resulting manga might look nothing like the original. The choice between a side view, a high-angle shot, or a low-angle perspective for a drift could change everything.
And while one drawing was a challenge, a manga consisted of hundreds or thousands of pages. The workload was significant.
Over the next week, the twenty-second and twenty-third chapters of Parasyte were released. These chapters focused almost entirely on the life-or-death struggle between Shinichi and the final boss, Gotou.
The reader votes continued to rise, though the pace had slowed compared to the earlier surge. By the end of chapter twenty-three, Parasyte had climbed to the fifth-place rank in the flagship Kiyozawa.
However, both the publisher and Haruto could feel that the series was reaching its ceiling. It wasn't that the work was inferior to the series above it, but rather that its genre and themes had a natural limit to the audience they could attract.
The gore, the body horror, and the "man-eating" premise were fresh and had helped the series build a dedicated following quickly, but those same elements were a double-edged sword that alienated a large portion of the general public.
Regardless, Haruto was satisfied with the result. He didn't expect every mid-length work from a parallel world to be an untouchable masterpiece that could effortlessly crush the entire industry and take the number one spot. The literary scene was far more resilient than that.
To rank fifth in the flagship Kiyozawa for an author who was a newcomer only two years ago and was still competing in rookie contests last year was already an astronomical feat.
Among the authors who had competed alongside Haruto in the Ascent of New Gods, none besides him had even managed to get a work serialized in any of the Big Three magazines.
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In late March, Haruto arrived at the Manga Research Club with his hand-drawn storyboard drafts for the first three chapters of Initial D.
Shizuru took the sketches from him, and her brow immediately furrowed. She knew Haruto was a "genius" at many things, but she hadn't realized his drawing skills were this abysmal. Her own doodles from when she was four years old had more depth and composition than these chicken-scratch storyboards.
Despite the art, she began to read through the story with intense focus.
The setting was a fictionalized version of Japan. The choice of setting was crucial because the premise of Initial D was deeply rooted in local geography. In Japan, because the land is mountainous and relatively compact, you can have rivalries between racers from different prefectures and the ambition to "conquer the mountain passes of the country."
If it were set in a massive country like China or America, the premise would fall apart.
You could spend a lifetime without seeing every city, let alone conquering them one by one in a car. He kept the car models like the AE86, the FD, and the FC.
Since it was set in an alternate Japan, it would be jarring to see high-end supercars from other parts of the world. He planned to include technical specs like horsepower and torque as appendices in the manga; the car enthusiasts would appreciate the detail, and the casual readers would focus on the plot anyway.
He kept the names of locations like Mount Akina for the same reason, changing them would create logical inconsistencies. The story of the high school boy from the tofu shop began to unfold.
The RedSuns team arrived to conquer Mount Akina, easily defeating the local racers. Their star driver, Keisuke, drove his top-of-the-line FD, only to be effortlessly overtaken on the downhill by an old, obsolete AE86. This event sparked a rivalry, as the RedSuns sought a rematch against the legendary 86.
Everyone assumed the driver was the shop owner, the legendary "Bunta," but no one suspected that the person who had out-driven the FD that night was actually the owner's son, a high school student named Takumi who barely even cared about his driver's license.
By the time Shizuru finished the storyboards for those first three chapters, her expression had shifted from disdain for the art to wide-eyed astonishment. "Is... is there more?" she asked, looking at Haruto with anticipation.
The content was rough, and the protagonist was represented by a simple circle with a face, but Haruto's control over the "cinematic" flow of the panels was breathtaking. Shizuru realized that if she followed these storyboards exactly, the resulting manga would be professional-grade on day one.
The storyboards were excellent, but the sense of anticipation was what truly got to her. Haruto had cut the draft right at the moment where Takumi, motivated by the promise of a full tank of gas, headed up the mountain in the 86 to face his challenger. It was a perfect cliffhanger that made her want to scream in frustration.
If a "garbage" sketch could create this much tension, what would it be like when it was drawn as a real manga?
"Isn't three chapters enough?" Haruto asked, sounding confused. "Isn't it the industry standard to decide on a serialization based on the first three chapters? People usually won't look at more than that anyway."
"..." Shizuru's expression stiffened, but after a moment of hesitation, she whispered, "I meant... I want to know what happens next in the story."
"Well, let's put that aside for a moment," Shizuru said, her clear eyes meeting Haruto's. At this point, they only had a verbal agreement; no contracts had been signed.
She took a deep breath, a trace of nervousness appearing on her beautiful face, and asked for final confirmation. "Haruto, are you certain you want to entrust this work to me? You're sure you want to collaborate?"
"Yes," Haruto replied without a moment's hesitation.
"I understand. I will sign the contract as soon as possible. And..." Shizuru looked back at the storyboards on the table. "I will probably need over a month to carefully illustrate these first three chapters into a finished product."
"Over a month? Does it really take that long?" Haruto asked, blinking.
"Of course it does! I do not have any assistants. While I am fast, Initial D is different." Shizuru paused. "It is an interesting work. I need to spend a significant amount of time designing the character models and defining the specific art style."
Haruto nodded in agreement. The original art style of the source material was iconic but arguably dated for a modern audience. He felt that if the work were to be serialized in today's market, some refinements were necessary.
Finding the perfect balance between realism and a modern aesthetic would require a lot of discussion between him and Shizuru.