There is a certain futility that comes with deciding which mangaka is the greatest. The metrics of deciding that are ultimately arbitrary and biased. It says more about the critic than the artist, revealing more about the self than saying anything about the art. That being said, a bit of self-indulgence is allowable when trying to figure out a personal curiosity. What I’m trying to say is that this series is more for me to understand who I think the greatest mangaka is in my eyes, rather than being a definitive authoritarian statement on greatness.
Without getting of myself too much, this series will look through the available body of work a mangaka has to determine their prestige and stature in my eyes. It will take a variety of factors into account like how prolific the mangaka is, the quality of individual works, the weighted average of the mangaka’s works, and the creative merits of the manga. A mangaka with 2 works might end up higher than a mangaka with 15 works if the former’s manga are that much more potent, but it will still be easier for mangaka with more works to rank higher if their quality is consistently good.
The worst aspect of this series will have to be assigning scores for each manga. Numerical scores are too vague and cannot communicate my broader feelings. Instead, I will incorporate a brief description of my feelings with the score. This will allow me to maintain a numerical system that will be needed when collating and ranking the mangaka’s overall score. It also gives me the capacity give the rating more texture, adding some nuance to an otherwise blank ranking system. The score for each manga will come with a few paragraphs explaining my thoughts. It will be a miniature review of the work, but I’ll allow myself the flexibility to write longer entries if needed.
Hopefully, if any of the readers can get anything out of this series, it is a serendipitous chancing with some title or mangaka that resonates with oneself. Maybe a mangaka has a body of work that speaks to you, but you weren’t sure of how consistent they were. It could give a reader incentive to check out the full breath of an mangaka’s output. There are many mangaka out there with exciting and beautiful works.
sleepypanels 