However, while pre-serialization debut one-shots tend to see some sort of collected release if they were officially published previously, most often either as bonuses in volumes of said serialization or put together as a "tanpenshu" (literally "short story collection"), seeing a mangaka's actual amateur work published after the fact is immensely rare... which is what makes this review really neat.
As the final part of the 40th Anniversary of his debut as a professional mangaka, 2015 saw Masami Kurumada draw the manga Ai no Jidai -Ichigo Ichie-/Indigo Period -Once in a Lifetime-; yes, his 40th Anniversary was in 2014, but oh well. Running in Weekly Shonen Champion from Issue #33 to #41, & collected in a single volume, Ai no Jidai was unlike pretty much any other Kurumada manga in that it was a semi-autobiographical story about Masami Higashida, a young man who decides to try his hand at becoming a mangaka after discovering Hiroshi Motomiya's Otoko Ippiki Gaki Daisho and realizing that even an everyday ex-delinquent like him can enter the industry. As mentioned, Kurumada based Higashida's story on his own real-life one, though naturally fictionalized so as to make for a better, more interesting story, like having Higashida's two best friends go through their own respective personal hardships (life as a yakuza & on death's door due to illness, respectively). I read & reviewed Ai no Jidai back in 2016 & absolutely loved it, and thankfully in more recent time it actually received an English fan translation, so it's never been easier to recommend that people check it out. A neat touch in Ai no Jidai, though, was that Kurumada actually showed the cover pages to some of his initial amateur one-shots in the manga, with them acting as Masami Higashida's own work in the story, marking (to my knowledge) the first time they had ever been publicly shown in some form, since in real life Kurumada didn't win the single contest he submitted a work to, so he never had anything published until he made his debut in 1974 with Sukeban Arashi.
However, two years after Ai no Jidai's serialization, and a little over a year after my review of the manga, something really neat happened. When Akita Shoten published the October 2017 issue of Champion Red there was a bonus book included with the magazine, a rare but not unheard of thing with manga magazines. In this case the bonus book was Ai no Jidai BEGIN, which actually collected all four of Masami Kurumada's amateur manga one-shots in their entireties, with three of them being bookended with the pages of Ai no Jidai that indicated where they technically fit into that manga's story. For all intents & purposes, you could simply insert (three of) these one-shots into Ai no Jidai & they really wouldn't interfere with the overall story. Unfortunately, I didn't find out about Ai no Jidai BEGIN until long after that issue of Champion Red came out, and since it was never given a traditional release the book's kind of become a bit of a white whale for my personal collection of Kurumada's catalog, alongside Sukeban Arashi, Silent Knight Sho, & Akane-Iro no Kaze's individual releases (which are all similarly tough to get a hold of physically today, likely due to low print runs). However, much like how Ai no Jidai has now received an English fan translation, the same is true of Ai no Jidai BEGIN, so I can at least read & review this book. This actually is the very last of Kurumada's manga for me to write about that have absolutely no connection whatsoever to any of his major works, so let's finish (to some extent) things off by going all the way back to the beginning... in fact, it's the genesis beyond the beginning.
We start with what looks to be the very first manga Masami Kurumada ever completed, Ore wa Ano Musume ni Kari ga Aru/I Owe That Girl a Debt, which was made over the course of four months in his third year in high school; in other words, he would have been around 17 or 18, so this would have been in 1970 or 1971. The general story here is that while Kurumada had drawn in the past, he had never drawn a full comic by this point, and therefore he didn't even know the procedure in which mangaka actually made manga. For example, Kurumada didn't know the difference between penciling & inking, so for I Owe That Girl a Debt he literally just started drawing with ink right away! Not just that, but (as the story goes) he didn't have any black ink so he just used whatever he had on hand, which was blue ink; however, the version seen in Ai no Jidai BEGIN is a B&W copy, so we can't verify that here. He also made this manga without storyboarding it first, since he had no prior training. This one-shot is inserted into the story of Ai no Jidai in Chapter 3, established as the one-shot that Masami Higashida tries submitting to Shonen Jump's offices, where he's summarily put down for making a manga with bad drawings & a nonsensical story, as well the editor saying that Higashida doesn't even have a basic understanding of how to make a manga. So... is it really that bad?
A boy nearly misses the bus to get to school in Tsugawa, and when he shows his pass to the bus driver for a free ride he realizes that it's a month past its expiration date. Since he only has five yen on hand he freaks out over how he'll pay the fee, but a girl named Keiko who goes to Daisei High is willing to pay the 30 yen for him. However, the boy hates being in debt to a girl & starts arguing with her, though he does thank her after she gets off the bus; just a shame that she didn't hear him, since the door closes right in his face. While making the rest of the way to school Keiko gets harassed by two delinquents who flip her skirt, and since the delinquents go to Tsugawa this eventually snowballs into a challenge being made by the head of Daisei's delinquents, who's Keiko's older brother, to the head of Tsugawa's delinquents... which just happens to be the teenage boy who owes Keiko a debt.
The real life story behind Masami Kurumada eventually becoming a mangaka is that he submitted a one-shot to one of Shueisha's contests, but didn't even get an honorable mention. In Ai no Jidai BEGIN Kurumada admits in the afterword for I Owe That Girl a Debt that this is the very one-shot that he had submitted... and, yeah, it's clear to see why this didn't get any proper acknowledgement. Now, to be fair, Kurumada likely embellishes the reaction Higashida gets from the editor at Jump in Ai no Jidai, because the story told here isn't nonsensical at all & instead is easy enough to follow. However, it is a poorly told story where the events more or less just happen to coincide with each other, rather than truly flow in a way that makes sense from a storytelling perspective. The unnamed main character (who I'll just call "Boss", since that's the closest thing to a name he's given by his subordinates) is pretty much a rather dumb & comical character, one who's seemingly so lackadaisical that he doesn't realize that his free pass for the bus has been expired for over a month, has no real money to buy lunch with, falls asleep & misses his stop, tries to escape out of the bus via window & winds up begging for help while hanging on the outside, falls off the tree he was relaxing on when the challenge is made, & even agrees to fight without knowing of the reason why. However, in true Kurumada fashion, Boss is also extremely honorable, as once he finds out the reason why he was even fighting Keiko's brother (not to mention finds out that Keiko's his sister) he immediately stops & apologizes on behalf of his subordinates, before offering to pay back Keiko the 30 yen she spent on him... and when she declines the one-shot literally ends with them going back & forth for so long that it's nighttime, complete with Keiko's brother having fallen asleep.
It's easy to see that this story wasn't meant to be taken seriously at all.
However, what's really the worst is the artwork, and while it can certainly be excused to some extent as being Kurumada's first ever completed manga... it's just not well drawn at all. There are elements of decent art at points, & it's clear to see that effort was put into this (I mean, it had to have had effort if it took four months to draw), but even a newbie artist can easily see all of the flaws. Attempts at comical faces (like Boss being hurt or angry) are poorly handled & look comical for all of the wrong reasons, there's an attempt at perspective with Boss looking down at his hand with a low-angle "camera" that results in his hand looking both gigantic & unattached from his body, and the attempts at hatching for things like shadows wind up being immensely garish in execution. Again, you can see the potential that Kurumada had as an artist at points, but it's all just so rough in execution that it's really no surprise that the contest submission went absolutely nowhere. Luckily, Kurumada took an appointment with a Jump editor to ask about why I Owe That Girl a Debt failed so hard, which showed that he was truly interested in becoming a mangaka. From there he was given the offer to work for Ko Inoue as an assistant on Samurai Giants so that he could learn how to properly draw manga, first going every Sunday until he graduated high school, upon which he started working for Inoue full-time (though working part-time on Sundays elsewhere to make money for food). I Owe That Girl a Debt is not a good one-shot, by any means, but it was an important first step for Masami Kurumada, so it at least deserves some recognition as a historical relic... sort of.
The next two one-shots are ones that, by his own admission in Ai no Jidai BEGIN's afterwords, Kurumada made for himself on his free days while working as an assistant for Ko Inoue. The first of those was Shiosai no Uta/A Poem for the Roar of the Sea, which Kurumada states was inspired by the work of people like mangaka Tadashi Matsumori (specifically his hatching method known as "Kunekune"), mangaka/anime director Mori Masaki, mangaka Kazuhiko Miyaya, & animator/mangaka Moribi Murano. In terms of where this fits into the Ai no Jidai story, it's the first one-shot that Higashida submits to Akita Shoten in Chapter 4, which is where he meets Shonen Champion Editor-in-Chief Kabemura, a booze-lover who also has a knack for noticing talent. So let's see if Kurumada improved in any way after spending some early time as an assistant.
Shin Aoki is a high school student who currently hangs around with the school's gang of delinquents, despite his girlfriend feeling that Shin's changed for the worse because of it. Despite this, though, the leader of the delinquents Shin hangs with forbids anyone else from even flirting with Shin's girlfriend; she's solely for him. While the two are on the beach Shin's girlfriend tries to figure out why Shin's changed from the promising young man he once was, only for another couple to pass by them & slightly bump into Shin. Shin takes offense at what he took as callous behavior & is ready to fight the boyfriend, but when Shin's girlfriend asks that he stop Shin obliges & accepts the boyfriend's apology. Looks like, despite the rough exterior he now has, Shin does still care for his girlfriend after all.
First & foremost, there really isn't much to A Poem for the Roar of the Sea. Where I Owe That Girl a Debt was 30 pages long, this one's only 18 pages long & is the shortest of the four one-shots in Ai no Jidai BEGIN. Because of that it really feels even more like a sequence of events in place of an actual narrative than Kurumada's very first one-shot, as there's really no major sense of conflict or resolution at all here. Instead, it feels more like the first half of a longer story, one that simply establishes the strained relationship between Shin & his nameless girlfriend while also setting up that Shin's still got a good heart deep down, but otherwise comes off like all set up without any pay off. To be honest, there's really nothing to say about A Poem for the Roar of the Sea from a storytelling perspective, simply because there's nothing substantial to say; it just exists.
Really, this entire one-shot is simply more an example of Masami Kurumada testing himself as an artist, and while it still has roughness to it it's definitely a marked improvement over I Owe That Girl a Debt. Kurumada's time working under Ko Inoue is clear to see in A Poem for the Roar of the Sea, as there's simply a solid consistency to the art seen here, with characters (mostly) looking drawn well enough throughout, with pretty much none of the silly reactionary faces seen last time. Kurumada also tries his hand at being more artistically experimentative at points, like the two pages above where Shin & his girlfriend look at each other while the gang beat up somebody, all while the waves slowly come in, and then once the waves crash Shin & his girlfriend are seemingly hit with a feeling a ecstasy; Kurumada admits that this was 100% a Mori Masaki homage. It all definitely comes off more like Kurumada wanted to experiment with various artistic flourishes & simply came up with a basic plot that allowed him to do so, and Kurumada himself admits in the afterword that "it only looked good" & that "the plot was non-existent".
It's easy to see why A Poem for the Roar of the Sea was never submitted to Shueisha in real life, and the end result does look a little odd for Higashida to submit to Akita Shoten in Ai no Jidai. However, much like what Kabemura says in the main series, despite the one-shot being a boring read you can see that there's something buried deep beneath. Not as a story itself, mind you, but in the experimentation in the artwork & style, so maybe the next one manages to deliver more on that potential.
The third one-shot in Ai no Jidai BEGIN is Uminari Taisho/Captain (or General) Uminari, and for this story Kurumada decided to finally make something truly akin to his idol, Hiroshi Motomiya. As he states in the afterword for this one, it was at this point that Kurumada's colleagues (likely his fellow assistants working for Ko Inoue) pointed out that they didn't like how Kurumada drew nostrils, and Kurumada took heed of that advice by deciding to abandon the more realistic look of the gekiga he initially imitated drawing. Instead, he decided to imitate more "conventional" manga, all while also aiming to include an element of "elegance" so as to attract girls alongside the boys; see, even before his debut Kurumada was always about appealing to both boys & girls. As for influences in this one-shot, Kurumada mainly acknowledges Mikiya Mochizuki's Wild 7 (specifically the use of hatching for the sound effects) & Bruce Lee's iconic film Enter the Dragon (namely in how to properly use nunchaku, as seen in this story). In terms of where Captain Uminari fits into Ai no Jidai this is the one-shot that Higashida submits to Kabemura in Chapter 5, which due to a mangaka becoming suddenly ill results in an opening for the next issue of Shonen Champion, so Kabemura decides to publish Captain Uminari in its place a fill-in, as he feels it shows the most potential out of everything Higashida has tossed at him. Kurumada himself considers this to be the best one-shot of the group in this book, so let's see if Captain Uminari truly holds up well enough.
Uminari is the "Captain" of the delinquents at Shiroyama High School who's obsessed with being a "manly man"... yet is absolutely terrified of cats & holds deep resentment towards guys who have relationships with women; in other words, he's jealous that he doesn't have a girlfriend. While going to school one day Uminari sees a girl being harassed by some students he doesn't recognize, & they reveal that they're a bunch of new transfers who are lead by the handsome Ichiro Ogami. Uminari offers to fight Ogami on behalf of his female classmate, who accepts & defeats Uminari with a single blow of the nunchaku he always has on hand. When the girl tries to thank Uminari later on he naturally messes things up by dissing her (to his immediate regret when she leaves), and in the process falls into the river they were next to. While drying off with a towel Uminari realizes that a wet towel can wrap itself around objects... which gives him the perfect idea for how to deal with Ogami's nunchaku.
It's easy to see why Kurumada was proudest of Captain Uminari out of the one-shots seen in Ai no Jidai BEGIN, because it's without a doubt the best & most enjoyable one of the lot. The story is a simple one, but it's executed the best of the three we've seen so far. Uminari is an honorable delinquent who's always up for a fight but doesn't do so simply for the sake of it or to establish power, unlike Ogami & his crew, and his interactions with the nameless female classmates (Kurumada really has a habit of always leaving one notable character unnamed in these early one-shots, doesn't he?) is fun & amusing; Uminari is 100% a male tsundere, in that regard. Meanwhile, Ogami works decently enough as the pretty boy but dangerous rival delinquent who more or less has a single trick up his sleeve with the nunchaku, and it's neat to see how Kurumada would continue his love of the weapon into his debut serialization, Sukeban Arashi, since Rei Kojinyama winds up using the nunchaku as her primary weapon; there's even a two-page splash here that Kurumada no doubt decided to replicate for Sukeban Arashi.
However, where Captain Uminari truly shines when it comes to Ai no Jidai BEGIN is with the artwork, as it really shows just how much Kurumada grew as an artist during his tutelage under Ko Inoue. Alongside his admitted shit over to a more "conventional" manga style there's just a polish to the art in this one-shot that was missing in both of the prior ones, with consistent character drawings, well drawn backgrounds, effective action stills, & even some fun & clever paneling in some pages, like with the image above. I can easily say that Captain Uminari is the first of Kurumada's amateur work to truly feel like a prototypical Kurumada manga, and if he had tried submitting this into one of Shueisha's contests then I think he likely would have gotten some form of recognition for it. If there is any one-shot I would actually recommend reading from Ai no Jidai BEGIN it would easily be Captain Uminari, by a long shot.
Finally, Ai no Jidai BEGIN ends with Bangai Group/Extra Group, and this is an interesting one simply because it's literally an "extra". Unlike the prior three one-shots, this has no connection to the main Ai no Jidai story (since Captain Uminari was the one that got Higashida published), but there's actually a neat little twist to this one. According to Kurumada's afterword, Extra Group is technically the first manga he ever drew, making it during his second year of high school. However, Kurumada also admits that it's really more of a "practice piece" than anything, and that's reflected by the fact that it seemingly doesn't have a proper ending after 19 pages, with the final page seen in Ai no Jidai BEGIN even looking to be unfinished; so, in a sense, I Owe That Girl a Debt is still Kurumada's first (finished) manga. Despite this being a "practice" manga, Kurumada admits in the afterword that he felt that it still came out strong due to the lack of pressure that the other three one-shots all had, and as for direct inspirations there's the usual Otoko Ippiki Gaki Daisho but also Tadashi Matsumori & Eiji Kazama. So let's see how Ai no Jidai BEGIN finishes off with the fourth (but also first) amateur one-shot by Masami Kurumada.
Hiryu High School is filled with delinquents, with the upperclassmen taking advantage of their status by stealing stuff from the first-years. To put a stop to this one of the first-year delinquents decides to challenge the head of the upperclassmen... and defeats him, redistributing the stolen items back to the first-years. At the same time a new female student arrives at Hiryu High who herself is a delinquent, and bumps into the upperclassmen delinquent group. Already in a bad mood the head of the upperclassmen decides to fight the girl, only to be defeated once again & for the group's "Supreme Leader" Goden to suddenly appear after she walks away... THE END. (Yes, seriously, the one-shot just stops without warning.)
Yeah, it's easy to tell that Extra Group is indeed an "extra" for Ai no Jidai BEGIN, and that's mainly because there's barely a plot to be seen here, even less so than in A Poem for the Roar of the Sea. In fact, it's kind of hard to tell who the "main" character even is here, since at first it's seemingly the male first-year who beats up the head of the upperclassmen, but then the story ditches him completely & focuses on the female delinquent for the second half, with the male first-year never appearing again. Also, yes, literally no one in this one-shot is given a name, except for Goden on the very last page... and even then Goden is only seen in silhouette. In a weird way, I think it's actually best to look at the head of the upperclassmen as the "main" character, since he's seen throughout the entire thing, but then he'd be a rather poor main character, all things considered. There are also little teases of a seemingly larger plot in Extra Group, like two of the male first-year's allies in the first half looking like they're planning something (maybe a coup against the guy who did all the fighting?), and clearly Kurumada had planned on doing something with Goden due to his appearance at the very end, possibly getting payback against the female delinquent. Really, at this point I'm just looking for minor things to write about for a one-shot that's clearly unfinished & more or less was never even intended to be finished, in the first place.
As for the artwork, I'd actually argue that Extra Group looks better than I Owe That Girl a Debt in pretty much every way, though it's still clearly a flawed & obviously amateur product. Still, the lack of any self-imposed pressure by Kurumada honestly results in this "extra" one-shot looking overall better than the actually complete one-shot that Kurumada seriously thought would be a contender for one of Shueisha's contests. Characters just tend to look better on the whole here, with one of them even looking like a precursor to Ring ni Kakero's Kazuki Shinatora a little bit, the paneling is more solid, and despite not really having much of a story it still reads & flows much easier than I Owe That Girl a Debt does. Really, Masami Kurumada should have just continued working on Extra Group & submitted that, though obviously with a proper title, and while I still don't think it would have gotten acknowledgement it would have been a better overall product, & would have likely made a better impression with the editors/judges, than what actually was submitted.
I really can't be too harsh on the one-shots seen in Ai no Jidai BEGIN, since they're literally Masami Kurumada's amateur work, the stuff he made both before & during his days as an assistant to Ko Inoue, and this collection wasn't even sold by Akita Shoten as a traditional release, instead simply being a bonus included with an issue of Champion Red. Really, this book is more of a fun little peek at Kurumada's earliest days, showing how he advanced from someone who literally knew nothing about making manga, but clearly still wanted to draw, into a proper student of the game under a teacher who clearly taught him well & got him ready for the grind that is manga serialization. While it'd be easy to say that I Owe That Girl a Debt shouldn't have been the one-shot that Kurumada submitted to Shueisha, since it's so clearly terrible, at the same time that's what led to him getting the opportunity to work under Inoue, so it was important that Kurumada was that naively wide-eyed back in the day. A Poem for the Roar of the Sea also isn't good, and arguably might even be worse than I Owe That Girl a Debt in terms of storytelling, but as a test bed for artistic experimentation it's interesting to see that Kurumada was clearly wanting to expand his skills.
Thankfully, it all culminated in Captain Uminari, which really should be seen as the first "real" manga to come from Masami Kurumada, as it has just enough of a polish to it that it really should have been submitted to another contest to see how far it could have gone. It's truly a testament that shows just how much he grew as an artist during his assistant days, and showed that there actually was potential within Kurumada that that could be unearthed; he just needed some actual teaching & experience to let it out. As for Extra Group, it truly is what it says it is but at the same time it's arguably better than I Owe That Girl a Debt in some regards, which is kind of shocking & amusing. I think it's pretty obvious that Ai no Jidai BEGIN is absolutely something that will only appeal to the most hardcore of Masami Kurumada fans who care about his origins, but it is really neat that Kurumada was willing to share his old amateur manga one-shots after all this time, knowing that only one of them was actually anything close to "good". As one of those most hardcore of Kurumada fans I'm glad that I was able to read them, & review them here, but I obviously won't be saying that most people should really check these out.
Well, OK, maybe Captain Uminari if you're just really into one-shots.
Manga © Masami Kurumada
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