I thought most popular anime and manga series are being created digitally nowadays. But it seems like the creator of Azumanga Daioh – Azuma Kiyohiko has not switch to digital yet.

Canned Dogs spotted an entry on Azuma Kiyohiko’s blog that talks about how time-consuming it is to create manga without the help of digital technology:

He talks about how when he wants to change the eyes of a character, he’ll have to use white correction ink to color it over and draw on top of it. Then if he feels that the mouth needs to be corrected too, he’ll have to erase it with the same method. Then when he starts finding more and more spots that he wants to change, the whole panel becomes filled with white correction ink. Which had actually happened.

At times like this he entirely cuts out the parts of the pages that he wants to change, and transplants a piece of paper cut in the same size onto the original page. Then he draws on the newly planted piece of paper.

He says it’s a lot of trouble and he thinks it should be about time he used a digital method for the finishing for the manga.

Source: Canned Dogs

So does that mean he also just uses pen and paper to draw Yotsuba&! manga series? No wonder its taking him so long to release new chapters.

I have seen a documentary video on how they created manga before digital technology came about, it require alot of post-processing work and just takes too much time!