Bakuman

Moritaka Mashiro can draw; Akito Takagi can write. They agree to make manga together, with the stated aim of getting an animated adaptation, and the series follows them from school through submission, serialisation, cancellation and back.

It is a workplace procedural about an industry, published weekly inside that industry by the team that had just finished Death Note.

A manga about getting a manga serialised, running weekly in the magazine it is about.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

Editorial meetings, reader survey rankings, page rates, assistant management, storyboard revision and the mechanics of cancellation are all covered specifically.

This is the series' real value. Very little fiction explains a creative industry's actual economics this plainly, and the account is credible because the authors were living it.

The magazine's weekly reader survey determines placement and survival, and the series makes that ranking its principal source of tension.

It is an unusually pure competitive structure: the work is measured constantly, publicly and by an audience whose reasoning the creators can only guess at.

The division between writer and artist is examined closely — disagreements about direction, the difficulty of drawing someone else's idea, and the question of whose work it finally is.

The partnership is drawn with real attention, and the series is good on the specific friction of making something with another person over years.

The same meticulous realism as Death Note applied to people sitting at desks, and it is remarkable how much drama he extracts from deadlines, pen strokes and editorial conversations.

The manga-within-the-manga is drawn in distinct styles, which is a considerable technical undertaking and one of the series' quiet pleasures.

Mashiro's relationship with a classmate who wants to be a voice actor is conducted on the agreement that they will not meet properly until both ambitions are achieved.

The premise is deliberately absurd and the series treats it sincerely. Readers divide sharply, and it is the element most often described as unbearable.

Female characters are largely defined by their support of male ambition, and several passages about women in the industry have been widely criticised as dismissive.

This is a real problem with the work rather than a matter of interpretation, and it sits awkwardly against the seriousness of everything else.

The competing artists — particularly the erratic genius Niizuma Eiji — are given genuine respect, and the series is generous about talent it depicts as greater than its protagonists'.

The competition is treated as productive rather than hostile, which is a more interesting position than the format usually takes.

The series comments on its own magazine, its own editors and the commercial pressures it is subject to, and several arcs concern work being rejected for being too dark or too unusual.

The reflexivity is genuine but bounded: it critiques the system from inside and never seriously suggests the system is wrong.

Twenty volumes, with a consistent rhythm of pitch, rejection, revision and publication that some readers find repetitive.

The repetition is arguably accurate. The work being described is cyclical, and the series declines to pretend otherwise. Each cycle is shorter than the last as the pair get better, which is a quiet piece of structural craft that most readers do not consciously notice.

It functions as an introduction to how serialised comics are actually made, and is frequently recommended to people interested in the business rather than in the medium.

Several of its specifics are now dated — the magazine's position has changed considerably — but the structural account remains sound.

Readers curious about creative work as a job, and readers who liked Death Note's construction and want to see the same team apply it to something without a body count.

It is entirely self-contained at twenty volumes and needs no knowledge of the medium, though readers who know the magazine's history will get considerably more out of the industry material.