Tabloids and Colleagues Have Field Day With Togashi and Takeuchi

Some pictures appeared on 2Channel a few weeks ago, and caused quite a stir not only with users of the hugely popular newsgroup, but the public as well. The pictures depict Sailor Moon and the other Senshi being seemingly angry with a dog, and they are considered to be somewhat symbolic of the creator Naoko Takeuchi, and her husband, mangaka Yoshihiro Togashi. These themes also echoed in sentiments uttered by Togashi's famous predecessors. First though, we'll direct your attention to the pictures. These pictures were listed under a thread titled "Sailor Moon is angry because of Togashi", and probably came from a fan who was tired of Togashi's Hunter X Hunter not being on a regular schedule anymore. One comment said that maybe this picture is really showing Naoko Takeuchi being angry with Togashi over not working or not being motivated and all she wants to do is hit him. Other images show Sailor Moon relaxing with the dog, Sailors Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, and Venus gathering power from the dog, Sailor Chibi-Moon and Sailor Moon petting a cat, Tuxedo Mask holding Chibi-Usa on his lab with Luna-P, and then all the senshi strangling the dog. After the jump we will show you all the relevant images with Sailor Moon, but there are other humorous ones of Hunter X Hunter and the dog picking his nose in front of Pokemon posted here. Again, no one knows who drew these, but perhaps this might explain some of the reasons why the boxsets are being re-released?

The first picture was also featured in another article. Another mangaka, Kenshi Hirokane (of Tasogare Ryuseigun fame) likes to also draw manga based on social issues, and he had a few comments to say about Togashi in a commentary with one of the editors of Weekly Morning, Akihiro Yoshihino. First, he asked why the editor was approving comics to be published when they were still in the draft stages, but he responded that he had fans to please, and that he could not take a break. But then he mentioned the opposite case where some comics were published after long periods of time, with the same amount of interest from the fans, to which he responded something to the effect of the fans will know that there is a lot of work put into it and it was worth the wait. The article launched into a look at Togashi based on that last point. The writer came up with 4 potential reasons for why Togashi has not returned to finish Hunter X Hunter:

1. He is too tired to draw.
2. He has no motivation to draw.
3. He received a large payment from Shonen Jump and is being lazy.
4. His wife Naoko Takeuchi punished him in the name of the Moon.

Nice to know that people are still making Sailor Moon jokes with respect to Naoko Takeuchi, eh? The writer of this article calls for the readers to take action against poor quality manga being published in these magazines (Shonen Jump is included) and to stop subscribing to it. Hirokane later said that he will always be in gratitude to his fans and will always submit his highest quality work for publishing not to let them down. He said it is always better to publish a finished project than one that is still in draft! The article ended with the writer's search for anything new with Yoshihiro Togashi, and found topics like he is finished with manga or perhaps even dead.

Whatever is going on with these two, we all sure wish we had some real answers!



As promised, here are the other images!