Personality of the week: Kouji Miura

Value does not depend on the number of years, they say. The rise of Kouji Miura, whose manga Blue Box is adapted into an anime, does not contradict the proverb… but is also the fruit of hard work.

Born in 1995, Kouji Miura does not yet know how to read when the flagship Shônen Jump series One Piece and Naruto begin. Mangas that she will soon devour, by borrowing his older brother’s magazines. His passion for shônen strengthened around the age of ten, with the anime series Maho Sensei Negima!, whose songs she sings at the top of her lungs at school. But the real revelation came in 2008, with the manga Bakuman, which details everything behind the scenes of the mangaka profession. That’s good, the teenager has been drawing since she was very young! It doesn’t take more for Kouji Miura sends his first boards to a Shueisha competition, while she was still in middle school. The teenager perseveres in high school, with no less than eight participations in three years. She even goes so far as to bring her boards to Shônen Jump editors visiting Sendai!

Kouji Miura distinguishes himself from the other candidates by essentially proposing romantic comedies, a genre little represented in boys’ magazines. His efforts ended up paying off with Shônen Magazine, where it was published in 2013, at only 18 ans, obtaining honorable mention twice in a row in the new talent competition. The young woman then moved to Tokyo, and multiplied opportunities under the pseudonym Yuuki Satoshi, notably thanks to the appearance of applications dedicated to manga. Thus, his first series Aozora Rubber was published in 2015 and 2016 on Mangabox, an application launched in December 2013, and it is on the Magazine Pocket application that Sensei, suki desu is noticed by the public. So much so that the title will make a passage through the Shônen Magazine as a sign of consecration, but will however stop after four volumes.

The beginner mangaka is indeed convinced that a romantic comedy must absolutely contain many gags et a good dose of eroticism. Unfortunately, these constraints end up harming his works, which struggle to stand out. While she is preparing a new series that she wants to present to Shueisha, Kouji Miura therefore decides to ignore it. So begins Blue Box (available from Delcourt/Tonkam editions), where intermingle romantic conquest and sporting competition. Moreover, if the mangaka makes her hero a badminton player, it is because she practiced this discipline during her secondary studies. Started in April 2021, the series is one of the spearheads of Shônen Jump, including in its digital version Manga +, where its English version is popular around the world. We understand better why an animated series has been started, such a consecration for Kouji Miura at only 28 years old. Or a further step in his promising career? The future will tell !