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Oh!great has been using digital applications for illustration since around 2017, and his current manga creation process is mainly digital.
The art work illustrated in Oh! great Art Collection & Blast, a collection released in August 2021, was created using a tablet.
Is it a woman or a machine that's looking at us?
She has flowing red hair. Her eyes are a somber green. Her soft, pink lips shine with gloss. A glimpse of her nipple is visible from under her chiffon scarf. From these features alone, she appears to be a living, breathing woman.
But from her ribs down, her body is a machine of black steel with countless gun barrels that spread out like a skirt in the wind. These guns are not laser cannons. Judging by the hanging ammunition belts, these are guns that shoot bullets. Wisps of reddish smoke can be seen flowing in the wind, indicating that shots may have just been fired.
The figure depicted here is reminiscent of Marilyn Monroe in a well-known scene from The Seven Year Itch. The scene captures Marilyn's white skirt being blown up by the wind from a subway grate. Unlike Marilyn, however, this woman/ machine lifts and spreads wide her own skirt made of guns, inspiring simultaneously both arousal and intimidation.
*Signature on prints (handwritten)
Oh!great made his debut in 1995 with SEPTEMBER KISS, which appeared in Manga Hot Milk (Byakuya-Shobo).
He has serialized Tenjho Tenge and Biorg Trinity (co-created with Otaro Maijo) in Ultra Jump (Shueisha), and Air Gear in Weekly Shonen Magazine (Kodansha). He won the 30th Kodansha Manga Award in the shonen category for Air Gear.
He has also designed numerous characters for anime and games. He is currently serializing Bakemonogatari (original story by Ishin Nishio) in Weekly Shonen Magazine.
アーカイヴァル インクジェット プリント
Shueisha Manga-Art Heritage has entered into a business partnership with Epson, entrusting them with color management support and printing. The pigment inks used in the company’s inkjet printers are lightfast, preserving the original colors even under lighting that would cause the dye-based color inks used in the original artwork to fade.
On the other hand, original manga artwork is highly prone to fading, especially when it comes to color illustrations created using dye-based markers. Illustrations created for the covers of manga magazines, frontispieces, and comic book covers were not originally intended to be displayed or appreciated as works of art. They were designed to be printed and viewed by readers in magazines and comic books. Illustrations were often colored over copied line art, and in some cases, the characters and backgrounds were cut out and pasted in separately. To transform such illustrations into manga-art, they need to be retouched, such as by correcting discolored areas.
Since 2008, Shueisha has been working to digitally archive manga. Initially, we captured color originals using the EverSmart Supreme II, a high-precision scanner, and in 2015, we began using the Phase One IQ180, a high-resolution digital camera. Since 2020, we have been using Phase One’s Cultural Heritage series. This has allowed us to capture and preserve colors beyond the reproducible range of commercial printing, while also retaining the texture of the paper on which the illustrations were created.
Using this digitally archived data and imaging equipment, we retouch the artwork, restoring the original colors as they were when the illustrations were created. To produce the final print, color is carefully managed at each stage, from the original artwork to the captured data and printing.
For illustrations that were created digitally, we perform color management and printing in the wider-gamut Adobe RGB color space, instead of the sRGB space typically used in commercial printing, resulting in deeper and more vibrant colors.
