Reading this book without reading Araki's manga, would be like reading Truffaut's interviews with Alfred Hitchcock without seeing any Hitchcock films.

To top things off, Hirohiko can't seem to decide if he's confident in his own advice or not, at times saying he's more correct than others and at other times dismissing his own points entirely. Anyhow, my favourite part of the book - or maybe, the useful one to me - is the chapter about drawing. So he's drawing characters that one might think of as "ethnic" or foreign-looking from a native Japanese perspective (given many of his characters look Caucasian), yet he assumes identification with these clearly non-Japanese characters as if they are native.Be it manga or prose, maybe even cinematography or animation, as well as just plain paintings and drawings, there are things you can learn from this book.

This led to the realisation that the first page is integral - without them turning it, everything collapses, and all your work is for nothing. a little lighter on the theory than i had hoped, but it was an illuminating look into the lives of mangaka, who tend to be a pretty secretive bunch. Heck, even those “How to Draw Manga” books will likely give you more actual how-to than this book does, if that’s your chosen style.I think this is a good guide of how to analyse a manga *for self study* and it's also good to see how he creates his manga , and the difficulty that comes with the industry as he talks about why your works will get rejected . Araki is best known for his long-running series JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, first published in Weekly Shōnen Jump in 1986 and which to date has sold over 80 million copies in Japan alone.