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Legendary mangaka Rumiko Takahashi, the creator of Ranma ½, Urusei Yatsura, and Inuyasha, opened a Twitter account on June 1st, 2021 with the help of her editorial staff. The first question that the manga creator answered in the questionnaire she provided was what her usual schedule looked like, which revealed it’s as busy as any creator as popular as Takahashi.
According the tweet shared:
During production time,
In the morning – Pencil in 7 to 8 character sheets
12 PM – Lunch and Housework
4 PM – Reading and Housework
7 PM – Dinner and Housework
9 PM – Drawing
The next day
9 AM – Finish drawing, go to bed
12 PM – Lunch and Housework
4 PM – Drawing
7 PM – Break or Dinner
8 PM – Resume Drawing
The next day
9 AM – Finish work
As per the post, it seems like the 63-year-old Takahashi sensei runs on a sort of three-day schedule during production time, where she only sleeps for a few hours on the second day and keeps drawing all night long.
On June 2nd, she posted another tweet answering how many days it takes to complete one chapter of a manga. To this, she replied:
It starts with a meeting with her current editor. After various chitchat and any merchandising topics they need to discuss, Takahashi lays out where the manga’s plot is going to go in its next chapter. The meeting usually takes about three to four hours.
Next, Takahashi starts with the “name,” as the manga industry calls preliminary storyboards. She says she can produce about six pages of the storyboard in a day that she starts at 11 p.m., and finishes work for the day at around 6 o’clock the next morning! Later that day, she has another brief meeting with her editor about the storyboard on the progress so far, and the process repeats for three days until the name is decided.
Then the process of drawing the actual art for the chapter starts. For a single page, Takahashi spends about 30 to 40 minutes sketching, and another 20 minutes inking the characters, for a total of about one hour drawing per page.
Like many manga creators, Takahashi has a team of assistants supporting her, and once she’s done with character inking she hands the page off to one of them to handle the background and any other finishing touches. Sometimes, though, Takahashi is drawing at a pace so quick that she has nothing left to do, and at those times she joins in with the assistants, drawing backgrounds and applying screentone.
In other words, she takes about 5-6days to complete one chapter of the manga.
As a matter of fact, a fan shared a comment from Tokyo Vampire mangaka Hanako Mejiro in reply to Takahashi’s work schedule in which she described the legendary creator as “Shigoto no Oni(lit: Work Monster)“.
According to the comment, Takahashi is known for her professionalism and quick writing. Mejiro states that Takahashi has completed the draft of “Urusei Yatsura” in 27hours, during Ranma 1/2 she inked 16 pages every 2 days and when “Inuyasha” was serialized she used to complete drawing the drafts and inking them within 2 days, 1 hour per page.
Moriken, her editor in charge, also said in his twitter account he has opened Takahashi Rumiko’s twitter account(@@rumicworld1010) to share the latest information about her works and her life events through the questionnaire provided till 15th June, 2021.
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