Hunter x Hunter is a Japanese manga (comic) by Yosihiro Togashi. It happens to be one of my favorite fictional works. My history with this work is... Let me start by talking about my mom.
Growing up my mom never let me read comics. She had some strange rules about what we could do or couldn't do, at least from my perspective. Like, I could have friends over and have them sleep over. I could go to PC cafe's. Those were all A-OK but I wasn't allowed to read comic books.
This is even stranger because she had no problem letting me watch animated cartoons. I grew up on Peanuts and Disney but when it came to Japanese comics I couldn't watch any of them. Strange! Anyhow, where there is will there is a way so I had my ways of getting exposed to comics but being a good mama's boy I was, I couldn't get myself to fully commit and read those books with my own two eyes.
Fast forward a few years and I came to America. When I was a sophomore I had my best friend from Korea study abroad in America, and even better: he was going to live with us! It's like the best feeling, meeting your best friend after a few years of missing them and immediately getting to live with them.
My friend, named Ron, read a lot of comics and he knew how to read the latest releases as well. He particularly liked the basketball comic Slam Dunk, so he kept on reading it in his free time. At this age my mom had relaxed a bit and didn't have a problem with me reading comics, so I also started reading comics starting with Slam Dunk.
After Slam Dunk I read Dragon Ball, the comic I yearned for all my child days. Dragon Ball is like... In my opinion the vanilla ice cream of comics. It's just so reliably good, a staple in the genre of Japanese comics. Everything ultimately gets compared to Dragon Ball so now that I had my fundamentals, I started reading other things and one of the other things I read was this work called Yu Yu Hakusho.
Yu Yu Hakusho was at first this catchy comic that featured a high school delinquent who became a "spirit detective", chasing wrongdoing ghosts, arresting them, and sending them to the afterlife. But soon its tone became grimy and dark as the cases became more and more hardcore. I found my puberty self getting super drawn into this work and I really enjoyed reading it to the end.
The author who wrote Yu Yu Hakusho was Yoshihiro Togashi. Hunter x Hunter is his next work, and while I loved the guy's previous work I had a lot of other comics to read so I didn't really catch up to Hunter x Hunter. I thought, 'by the time I finish Naruto and Bleach Hunter x Hunter must be finished'. This was around 2003. Hunter x Hunter is still not finished.
The crazy thing is, why is it not finished? After finishing Naruto and Bleach I started Hunter x Hunter. So here's where things get interesting, and this is the meat of what I want to share with you today.
Apparently Togashi wanted to end Yu Yu Hakusho while it was a casual spirit detective comic. But because the comic was doing so well, the editorial board wanted to extend the comic against his wishes. So he was forced to come up with more story and draw them under tight deadlines since he hadn't planned for the story to extend. Coupled with his poor health, this led to a severe burnout for the artist.
After Yu Yu Hakusho ended Togashi had the upper hand in negotiations because he proved to the publisher that he had star power. He agreed to serialize his next work with the same publisher under a powerful condition: he is immune from required weekly serialization and can draw when he wants.
When he puts in the work, his worldbuilding ability and drawing is just on a different level. What's the best way to put this? He's just infinitely stylish. I want to show you how he draws:
But with the free serialization, here are some of the chapters he officially released:
These are NOT preliminary sketches. These are final copies that were actually published. When these were published, needless to say there was a tremendous amount of backlash and criticism for the lack of professionalism. Hell, even I was like "wtf?" as I was reading it, but the story was so captivating I had no choice but to continue reading. The artist continued to take more hiatuses, published more chapters like this, and eventually finished the story arc.
Later on it was revealed that he was going through a tremendous amount of back pain and there was physically no way he could sit and draw with effort. Looking at things from his perspective, he has a choice. Either wait for his chronic back pain to get better (no promises), or publish something and move the story forward. He chose the latter.
Now I want to introduce you to a different Japanese comic that you may have heard of. It's called One Punch Man. It's about this superhero who's SO strong, he just needs one punch to end any villain.
This is the actual official artwork for the series.
The reason I'm talking about this today is, I see too often people giving up on doing anything or outputting anything because it's not good enough. Too many people wait for the right conditions and they'd rather output nothing than put out something "bad".
We are evidenced by the above that in the grand scheme of things, the quality of individual outputs doesn't really matter all that much as long as we are clear on what is essential to our output. Comics are stories told in visual format. It helps if the artwork is great, but because both of them knew that what matters is visual storytelling they focused on the essential elements that tell a story through art, not the quality of the art.
Hunter x Hunter is still not finished. One Punch Man actually got re-made with a professional artist who focuses on the art while the original author exclusively works on the story. So One Punch Man now has the stereotypical "professional" look, but we can't deny that it was possible because the author decided to move the story forward regardless of how it looked.
The power to create in the future will be equivalent or even more valuable than the power to make money right now. The generation of information, creation of content will be what determines value in society in the future. We're already seeing the seeds of it in our world; if your mom told your grandparents that she was going to be a content creator, would your grandparents have understood? But if your child (perhaps hypothetical) says they want to be a content creator, you'd see it as a legitimate possibility for the future.
Information generation and dissemination, when compounded by your life experience, will give you tremendous amount of self-authority in the future. It's equivalent to a healthy body in an agrarian society, it's equivalent to being a nepo baby in the world of capitalism. Regardless of where you are in your life right now, creation is a skill you must take seriously for self-reliance.
Take these examples and give your work an opportunity to be created and put out in the world. Even if it's equivalent to a few squiggly lines in a world full of classical European art. Learn more about how I help you create with natural ease with the soon-ending Middle Way program, and stay tuned for my future trainings and material on happy content creation. Emphasis on the happy.
Billy Seol
July Life Coach
julylifecoach.com
