Summary
Niizuma isn’t interested in most of the entries, clearly preferring Ashirogi Muto’s Future Watch submission to any of the others. During the serialization meeting, editor-in-chief Sasaki gives Ashirogi Muto a unique offer – to let the readers decide which work to publish, by featuring both Ten and Future Watch as oneshots in seperate submissions, going up against Takahama’s BB Kenichi and the sci-fi Space Yellow Gate. When the results come in however, Ten ends up in 9th place while Future Watch is a shocking 10th.
Impression
Wow that was certainly quite a revelation, though we’ve seen worse things happen with Ashirogi Muto. Most surprisingly, Ten actually did better than Future Watch, which seems like an awesome story with an epic plot. Someone should really create that in real life. To be honest, I didn’t expect either oneshot to beat their respective new series rivals, but to get near double digits? And after working incredibly hard on both submissions as well. They would have definitely done better if they got published as serializations, but results of such low rankings would make me want to scrap both ideas and come up with something new.
Either way, in the end Miura was right – gags turned out to be a better idea, and that’s what they’ll be doing I guess. I still disagree, since I loved all of Ashirogi Muto’s past serious works, and it seems to be such a waste that they’re turning to gag manga, which will only more or less appeal to a narrow demographic compared to the whole of Jack’s audience. Gags usually get old after some time too (with the exception of a select few like Ika Musume) and this time the strain will be on Takagi’s wit instead of Mashiro’s art. Hopefully he doesn’t get carted off to the hospital due to stress.
Former assistant Takahama finally turns pro, but like Ashirogi Muto he’s already having doubts about Miura. His BB Kenichi did extremely well as a oneshot, but drops to 6th place when he’s assigned Miura as editor. alarm bells go off 6th isn’t amazing for the first chapter of a serialization, but we’ll have to see how he gets on. He’s employed Nakai and Kato-san as assistants for him though, both are pretty good as far as I know. I’ve actually lost a bit of respect for Nakai now that he seems to have given up on Aoki and is going after Kato-san instead, being fine with the chance to get close to any pretty girl.
Shit’s gonna properly go down next week (err…in a few hours?) as Ashirogi Muto have to make their final decision on what to do. They’ll probably have a greater workload as well since they’re in university, but manga is clearly more important so I doubt there’ll be any problems there xD In other news, Bakuman’s anime has been green-lit for a third season this time next year, so this epic tale is far from over.
