Origin Story: How I became a Shonen Mangaka Full-Time

I want to get an anime before I turn 30 so I'm starting a manga and web tune studio today I'm going to be telling you guys about my journey as a author how I went from just a young kid to eventually a finance bro to eventually now creating manga and web Tunes full-time in the Shonen space now trying to get this anime before I turned 30 but before we get into the video please drop a subscribe and drop a like really helps with the algorithm and let's get right into the video so as you know I'm trying to in anime before I turned 30 believe it anime and manga is actually what got me into storytelling as a whole before I even did the manga and web chune stuff I was a novelist and I'm so lucky to be in a position where I am able to make a living making Shonen Series in the United States which is ultimately not very conventional place to be making shown in type projects and you might be wondering how I got into manga and web Tunes to begin with and it all started with the first time I saw a pair of boobs that is correct my mom got me a manga called Dragon Ball you guys might know of it the first chapter has Bulma and she shows her her breasts and her butt in the first chapter and I was like seven and I was like oh my God what the hell this is so cool yeah I basically went on to read a lot of Dragon Ball and and kept borrowing manga from the library basically I started reading that series and then moved on to stuff like Shaman King Zach Bell one piece know reading Inu Yasha reading a lot of shownin type of stories was even so into it that I was even drawing my own manga on pieces of paper and I would print it out using my scanner at home staple the bits together and sell them for quarters on the playground in my primarily white school where no one gave a crap about what we were doing I wasn't making a ton of money guys don't worry and then I discovered tunami it went from comic books to eventually animation where I was watching Naruto Dragon Ball bleach all on the big screen I guess like when I was a kid you know I didn't get bullied that much liking anime because Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh were super big at our schools but when I got older yo I was getting bullied in high school for being the biggest nerd in in the school I mean I was totally cool with being the biggest nerd in the school but like anime was definitely not cool when I was growing up it wasn't really a potential career path making manga and that kind of stuff one day I decided to flip a coin because I was also an anime artist I used to draw anime and I used to also write Fanfictions throughout this whole period of time from elementary school through middle school and eventually when I got to high school I decided hey I'm only going to become good at either writing or drawing so which one am I going to be good at eventually I flipped a coin to decide whether or not I would become a writer or an artist because I didn't think it was going to be possible for me to be good at both just because I wasn't putting enough time into both things heads was writing tals was Art I landed on heads and I became a writer for the rest of my life I actually quit art I had an Instagram that was Art Instagram and I just stopped drawing from that day onward just kind of sad but at the same time I was so driven to make something a cool story after that day I took off to start writing my first novel I was 14 years old when I started my first novel which was age of Darkness complete ripoff of Naruto I'm sure I have another video out there talking about how it's such a ripoff and how I eventually managed to turn it into its own thing but it was very inspired heavily by Naruto got like a 100,000 readers on Wad and then I eventually took it to publish when I was 17 years old about to go to college from there I kept publishing novels that were primarily anime inspired because I thought that it was impossible to make a living doing comics and manga in the United States you could primarily make a lot of money off of novels though because I was seeing another guy named Turtle me you might know him he does the beginning after the end there was another guy making money doing kind of anime style stories also on Amazon so we were publishing actually at the same time I kept writing novels my second novel was the sequel which is age of Darkness 2 which came out when I was 18 then when I was 19 God of War Aries came out which is another series but that was my first bestseller and then I wrote another one ghost wolf and then you know eventually the novel streak stopped because I got an opportunity to write for Western Comics American comics and that was the first time I really realized that I could take my writing skills and work with an artist to bring a story potentially to life I was doing American Comics at the time but my goal was obviously manga because I was super inspired by Japanese manga anime that kind of stuff and that was why I was writing my stories was to basically create my own version of that and So eventually shipped it over from the American comic space into manga and so I actually worked with my first partner his name is um Ali we did a manga called somnia and we were publishing with a bunch of kind of Indie Publishers I had some terrible experiences with a lot of Indie manga Publishers and Indie comic Publishers I won't say any names but I'll say that a lot of these Publishers felt like they were primarily middlemen for the publishing stuff which was like they can get you printed they can run a Kickstarter for you they can Market you at this point in time I knew how to print stuff and I knew how to Market myself probably better than a lot of the Publishers did because I maybe 40,000 followers at this time but I had a several other like Instagram pages that were anime related that were like 500 ,000 plus so I was like wow you know I have a lot of eyes and so I was like I don't really like the deal I'm getting for making the entire project and then they take 50% of it just didn't really make sense to me instead of going with a lot of Indie Publishers I pulled out of those deals and decided to self-publish things on my own and I got some traction from that on Tik Tok I noticed that when I was publishing somnia I was getting a decent amount of traction but it was really this Monga competition that really jump started my career it was a competition called Shonen Jump tzuka 100 which happened in 20 I want to say 2020 it was their 100th Shonen Jump Tesa competition which is how you break into Shonen Jump the publisher of Naruto bleach one piece and the competition for the first time was open to the international world I decided to enter with a series called IUS Rising the submission went viral it got like several million readers on it we were actually the most read projects on Shon and jam Tesa 100 when the submissions closed which was pretty insane and there were a lot of people watching this competition because there were big judges on it there was cooi who does real slam dunk Vagabond there was also K horic Koshi who does my her Academia Akira torama who does Dragon Ball K KATU Who does Blue Exorcist these were just people who were going to read the Manga and obviously I knew that they weren't going to be reading every single manga in the competition but I did know that if we got to a fur far enough round that I might be able to have some of my Legends read my manga which is pretty crazy and we did we at least got through the second round review because they asked me for my address and for all this personal information they emailed me personally so that was pretty cool to know that my work was being read by some of my idol unfortunately we didn't win that competition shown into Tes but we went on to win the Kyoto International manga competition which was pretty exciting but the Shon in competition wasn't a waste of time because ultimately from all the attention that I got doing sh jump Tess there was actually a couple Publishers that noticed me because the videos I was making I was pushing it out super viral videos on Tik Tok at the time publisher noticed me and offered me an opportunity for serialization that was my first opportunity to actually serialize by now guys hopefully you've noticed that I've been working like 5 to 7 years before I got my first serialization opportunity so it was a super long time the serialization was called God game my first serialization and it it did pretty well it's getting a spin-off series got several million views it's got a lot of trans media opportunities that are coming out which is super cool God game was my first publishing opportunity and then from there guys getting your first civilization super hard but getting your second is a lot less hard cuz uh then got an opportunity with web to do just a goblin which is my next civilization which I think is even bigger than God game probably because web Tunes is a bigger platform I got the opportunity to do just a goblin and then samaro Tor now bandic King mad gate with voice me samot Tor double kill angel wings with webtune couple others that are happening and now I'm starting my own Studio because I'm doing too many projects at this point I'm not saying all that last part to brat the the thing is not to brag the thing is to say it took me so many years before I was able to get the first St realization which was God game for that I was doing everything for free I wasn't making money off of the projects I was doing really I was just working out of pure passion and at the same time I was going to school working in finance living normal life a lot of my free time is when I was doing all this writing my novels making manga entering competitions trying to get people to notice my talent and then once I hit the serial Edition I had an opportunity and I did not squander it I made sure to go all out in the God game writing and make it super engaging and super interesting and so people really enjoyed it and then I got my next opportunity and then my next opportunity and it became to Snowball the hardest part guys that a lot of firing manga cut need to realize is getting the first opportunity is the hardest thing from there things just go out of control and they just start to snowball if you make sure to grasp the opportunity that life will give you a lot of it is luck but obviously at some point it's like if you try hard enough and you put yourself out there enough luck is going to eventually come to you if you work hard enough that was my journey on how I eventually shifted to the full-time longan webtune career and how I got all these serializations down now I run the studio and I'm putting out a lot of projects the next goal of mine is obviously the anime adaptation which means that I have to create a series that is so large and so amazing and so interesting and has enough content that's like also a key thing it can be very popular but if it doesn't have enough content then a producer might not want to adapt it that's the next hurdle that I'm going to be tackling over the next couple years and I will be documenting it on this channel so hopefully you guys stay tuned hopefully you guys enjoyed my little life story that was my origin story it's probably somewhere out there on the internet but I wanted to put it here on my YouTube channel firsthand hopefully you guys enjoyed make sure to like make sure to comment any sort of other questions or any questions about my life or questions that you want answered about the M Wun industry feel free to do that and subscribe a lot of you guys are watching my videos but you haven't subscribed I'm seeing you also check out all my serializations all of them are linked in the description if you want to see how my work actually is once again thank you guys so much for watching I'll catch you guys on next week's episode Peace

Channel: Mangaka Brandon Chen

Views: 5,449

Keywords: animation, anime, anime art, anime fan, anime music videos, attack on titan, author, author tips, bakuman, books, comics, fan art, fanfiction, how to make comics, how to make manga, how to write a book, how to write manga, isekai, japanese, light novels, making manga, manga, manga art, manga author, manga publishers, manga reader, manga writer, mangaka, mangaka art, mangaka artist, novels, pixiv, seinen, shonen, shonen jump, shoujo, somnia, storyboarding, wattpad, writing, writing tips

Id: yxTC4wCIzc8

Length: 9min 55sec (595 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 17 2023