Personality of the week: Kenshirô Sakamoto

We thought we knew him through his production for a very young audience. Kenshiro Sakamoto creates a surprise by returning to the forefront with a horrific manga!

As a child, his passion for manga accompanied him even in his dreams! Fan of the children’s magazine Comic BonbonKenshirô Sakamoto piled up copies in the space between the wall and his bed, so much so that the piles eventually reached the level of the mattress, andhe sometimes slept on it. However, he would have to wait until his college years to get the hang of it. While a friend congratulates him on his drawings and suggests he make a manga, the teenager studies the boards of his favorite titles and self-taught the art of storytelling in order to draw his first manga with pencil. Upon leaving high school, Sakamoto wanted to learn more from professionals, and integrated Human Academy school.

Once graduated, the young man has only one desire: be published in your favorite magazine, the Comic Bonbon. He has numerous meetings with publishers and participations in competitions, before finally publishing his first one-shot. The beginning author nevertheless needs to gain experience, and increases the number of assistant positionsnavigating between numerous authors – he worked for two days with Hiro Mashima. This approach is reminiscent of the strategies of J-RPGwhich he has played since a young age, and of which he injects several elements into his first series, Totsugeki Chicken, again published in Comic Bonbon. Elements that are also found in Buster Keel ! (available from Kana editions), which is in the heyday of Kôdansha’s Gekkan Shônen Rival magazine. The recipe works wonders, since this first shônen series spans twelve volumes between 2009 and 2012.

With Pitch-Black Ten (available from Pika Éditions), in 2015 the author ventures into a darker register… which does not suit his readership: the initiative will only last three volumes. Sakamoto then decides to return to his favorite register: mangas for children. He then inherits a spin-off from Fairy Tail, Happy’s Great Adventure (available from nobi-nobi editions!) that Mashima entrusts to him with serenity, aware of his professionalism. During the eight volumes on which he worked between 2018 and 2020, Sakamoto develops a new idea for a series without considering a Japanese publisher likely to be interested. He then proposed his project to a French company, and it is Kana who publishes the three volumes of Toah’s Ark in 2023 ! Invigorated by this new experience, the mangaka now turns to a new register for him, seinen. It is in the online magazine Comic Medu from the publisher Got that he has just debuted a horror series, Crazy Sun. One more step in an unusual eclectic and versatile journey in Japan!