Manga in Theory and Practice: How to Create Villains
Created by Hirohiko Araki

Manga in Theory and Practice: How to Create Villains gives you a front-row seat as Hirohiko Araki, creator of the globally popular manga JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, shares the techniques of making a great villain, examines his own work, and breaks down the four basic structures of manga. With commentary from his editor, investigations of characters like DIO, and a study of the panel layout of The JOJOLands, this book will be a crucial part of your manga development.

Read an excerpt from Manga in Theory and Practice: How to Create Villains, the next step towards creating unforgettable manga.

Villains are one of the most vital elements to making a manga a hit. When an editor says, “This manga is missing something,” more than 90 percent of the time, it’s because the role of the villain isn’t functioning. My own meetings with my editors almost always center on the enemy characters. My editor might say, “The story is good, but don’t you think this villain is a little soft?” or “The villain is too plain and weak.” Popular manga always have strong, intense villains. An appealing villain could be considered an indispensable element to the most beloved manga because all stories have a “protagonist versus antagonist” structure.

In reality, battles versus evil or versus enemies are happening around us all the time, even if we don’t realize it. In modern society, violence is at least supposedly wrong, and we may not have that many opportunities to resolve conflicts in hand-to-hand combat. But even in matters like love or marriage, there are battles of a different sort, with psychological give-and-takes and competing value systems. Sometimes, like when I’m watching a documentary, I think that the structure of society or the legal system can become an enemy. Everyone’s running up against some kind of hardship in life. Day in and day out, we experience battles, great and small, and there’s always some enemy we’re trying to defeat.

Looking at it that way, even if the battles take a less overt form, a villain is an indispensable element of a story. A romance manga where the heroine gets the boy of her dreams without any hardship at all would just not be very interesting no matter how cute the girl is. A narrative structure with an antagonist who creates problems for the protagonist to encounter is what makes a vibrant story that readers will want to read to the conclusion.

Get your copy of Manga in Theory and Practice: How to Create Villains today.