Kazuki Takahashi

Kazuki Takahashi
English name	Kazuki Takahashi
Japanese name	高（たか）橋（はし） 和（かず）希（き）
Rōmaji name	Takahashi Kazuki
Birth	October 4, 1961
Death	July 4, 2022
Gender	Male
Occupation	Artist Writer Mangaka

Kazuki Takahashi (Japanese: 高（たか）橋（はし） 和（かず）希（き） Takahashi Kazuki; October 4, 1961 – July 4, 2022), born Kazuo Takahashi (高（たか）橋（はし） 一（かず）雅（お） Takahashi Kazuo), was the creator of the Yu-Gi-Oh! manga series.

The Yu-Gi-Oh! manga series has spawned a number of spinoff anime and manga series, including Yu-Gi-Oh! R, Yu-Gi-Oh! Capsule Monsters, Yu-Gi-Oh! GX, Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D's, Yu-Gi-Oh! ZEXAL, Yu-Gi-Oh! ARC-V, Yu-Gi-Oh! VRAINS, Yu-Gi-Oh! SEVENS, and Yu-Gi-Oh! GO RUSH!!. The manga and spinoffs themselves have a large number of video games, several card and tabletop games, including the Yu-Gi-Oh! Capsule Monsters Collectible Figure Game, Bandai's Official Card Game, Dungeon Dice Monsters, and the Official and Trading Card Games, and a huge array of merchandise.

Career

Prior to Yu-Gi-Oh!

As a child, Takahashi liked to draw, but did not start putting manga together until he was in high school.

When he was 19, one of Takahashi's manga stories won a contest in a shonen manga magazine. He considers that to be his debut, but for the next ten years he went through several publishers and had a lot of rejected stories.

Takahashi worked for a game company, but aspired to create manga. In 1990, he managed to create 100 pages of manga and 200 pages of sketches before bringing his first proposal to Weekly Shōnen Jump. The editor he met was bothered by the size of his submission, but read through all of it and understood that Takahashi wanted to do a battle story. In the end that manga idea was rejected.

His first work was Tokio no Tsuma, published in 1990. One of his earliest works was Tennenshokudanji Buray (天然色男児BURAY), which lasted for two volumes and was published from 1991 to 1992. Takahashi did not find success until 1996 when he created Yu-Gi-Oh!.

Yu-Gi-Oh! manga

Takahashi created Yu-Gi-Oh! as a manga and studied the history of games in preparation. He learned that games originated in Egypt around 5000 years earlier, so he traveled to Egypt for inspiration and incorporated elements of what he learned into the story. It took about a year from him first conceptualizing the idea to the series beginning serialization in the Weekly Shōnen Jump magazine.

While working on the manga, Takahashi had staff to work with him and admitted to having a messy desk at the time. His schedule consisted of:

• Monday: day off
• Tuesday: think about upcoming developments in the story and start work on the storyboards
• Wednesday: finish the storyboards, discuss them with his editor and if necessary change things based on the editor's suggestions
• Thursday: start penciling and work with his assistants
• Friday, Saturday, Sunday: finish the manga pages

He had to draw 20 new pages each week and found the weekly deadlines to be hard work. Consequently, he had to sacrifice being able to play the games that he liked and would not always get to design things as carefully as he would have preferred. He cited the appearance of "Gate Guardian" as one thing he wished he had more time to work on.

The story initially used an episodic format with a new game being played each week, which Dark Yugi would use to overcome an enemy. He found this to be a lot of work, given the originality required for each story.

The ninth and tenth chapters, featured a two-part story involving the card game, Magic & Wizards (later known as Duel Monsters). Initially there were no plans for the card game to have a large role in the overall series. However, Shueisha, the publisher of the Weekly Shōnen Jump magazine, received so many letters and fan-mail asking about the Magic & Wizards game that Takahashi was encouraged to extend it.

His favorite storyline to write was Death-T and considered the scene where "Exodia" clashed with "Blue-Eyes White Dragon" to be a defining moment in the style of Yu-Gi-Oh!.

Takahashi was ill at the time of writing the King's Memories arc. He ended up in the hospital and struggled to meet deadlines. As a result, he reluctantly cut short Seto and Kisara's story, which he regrets as it was to explain the relationship between Seto Kaiba and the "Blue-Eyes White Dragon". He also joked that the design of Zorc Necrophades was due to his grogginess at the time.

Other Yu-Gi-Oh! work

An offer was made by Toei Animation to work on a Yu-Gi-Oh! anime. Takahashi was half excited and half afraid. He was worried about handing his work over to somebody else and whether or not his themes would be accurately represented on screen, but was relieved by the performance of the voice actors in the post-recording session. There were times when he looked at the show and thought "Oh, that's what it looks like in color".

When the Yu-Gi-Oh! Carddass came out, Takahashi got some of the cards to bring home to show to his family. To his surprise, his father already had some, having taken a bus to the next town just to get them from a dispenser.

Takahashi had promised himself that Yu-Gi-Oh! GX would be the last Yu-Gi-Oh! series. However, he was approached at the end of 2006 with the idea for Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D's. The production staff and TV board were long-time associates and friends, who had spread Yu-Gi-Oh! to many people in the world, so Takahashi agreed, under the condition that this would be the last Yu-Gi-Oh! series. Despite this, several subsequent series have been made.

Takahashi compiled various Yu-Gi-Oh! illustrations he had drawn into the book Duel Art which was published on December 16, 2011.

Takasahi wrote the script for the movie Yu-Gi-Oh! The Dark Side of Dimensions and worked on new character and monster designs.

Other projects

After Yu-Gi-Oh!, Takahashi created Advent Heroes, a comic and card game, influenced by American comics.

Takahashi designed a new game which he showcased in a one-part story, Drump, published in Weekly Shōnen Jump on November 2, 2013.

Takahashi wrote and illustrated a seven-chapter manga series, The Comiq, which was published in Weekly Shōnen Jump from October 15 to November 26, 2018.

For the Marvel × Shōnen Jump+ Super Collaboration, Kazuki Takahashi wrote the two-part Secret Reverse comic, released September 4 and November 27, 2019. The story featured Spider-Man and Iron Man teaming up to battle his original character, Kaioh. The comic incorporated some elements from Yu-Gi-Oh! including cameos from Mai Kujaku and Katsuya Jonouchi, as well as Kaioh's technology, which materialized monsters from cards, similar to Solid Vision.

Influences

Takahashi has mentioned a number of things which may have inspired him to become a mangaka. One of them was a kamishibai he used to enjoy going to when he attended elementary school. During the show, he would wonder if the old man hosting it, drew all the pictures himself. Another was an event that occurred in his first year of high school. An unfriendly teacher compared him to a defecating machine in front of the class. His classmates laughed, but Takahashi clenched and fist and thought to himself that a defecating machine could not create comics.

Takahashi decided to use battle as his primary theme. However there had been so much "fighting" manga, he found it difficult to come up with something original. He decided to create a fighting manga, where the main character does not hit anybody, but struggled with that limitation. However when the word "game" came to mind, he found it much easier to work with.

Takahashi had always been interested in games. He claims to have been obsessed as a kid and that the fascination continued throughout adulthood. In the games, he considered the player to become a hero. He decided to base the Yu-Gi-Oh! series around such games and used this idea as the premises; Yugi was a weak childish boy, who became a hero when he played games.

He admits that it is difficult to come up with many unique monsters. He tries to fit the player's characteristics into the creature he is creating, such as giving Seto Kaiba vicious cards to suit his personality.

With friendship being one of the major themes of Yu-Gi-Oh!, he based the names of the two major characters "Yūgi" and "Jōnouchi" on the word yūjō (友情), which means "friendship". Henshin, the ability to turn into something or someone else, is something Takahashi believed all children dreamed of. He considered Yugi's henshin Yami Yugi, a savvy, invincible games player, to be a big appeal to children. The character Seto Kaiba is partly based on an arrogant collectible card game player Takashashi heard of.

Sometime during the original run of the pre-Trading Card manga, Takahashi had his handbag stolen by a thief during a night when he played pachinko. The thief was not caught and included in his bag were further ideas for stories for the originating manga; he expressed some desire to recall and remember the ideas that were lost since.

He credits his unmet expectations from seeing Mazinger Z Vs. Devilman in his childhood as an inspiration for the film Yu-Gi-Oh! VS. GX. Although the film wasn't made, elements from it were used in the second season of Yu-Gi-Oh! GX.

Creations

Takahashi's Drawing of Yuma

Takahashi personally created, among other monsters, "Dark Magician", the "Elemental HERO" archetype, "Junk Synchron", "Stardust Dragon", "Red Dragon Archfiend" (another of his Hellraiser inspirations besides "Jinzo"), and "Number 39: Utopia". As expected, he also created and hand drew the Yu-Gi-Oh! protagonists (Yugi Muto, Yami Yugi, Jaden Yuki, Yusei Fudo, Yuma Tsukumo) as well as several key characters.

Over the years, he has also drawn official card artwork for numerous cards, both pre-existing and original, all of which bear his signature (except for "Tyler the Great Warrior") and have no artwork border (except for "Tyler" and some "Dark Magician Girl" cards).

• "Ankuriboh" (OCG-exclusive)
• "Blue-Eyes Alternative Ultimate Dragon" (only artwork)
• "Blue-Eyes White Dragon" (5th, 6th, and 7th OCG artwork; 7th OCG-exclusive)
• "Buster Blader"
• "Celtic Guardian"
• "Dark Magician"
• "Dark Magician Girl"
• "Exodia, the Legendary Defender"
• "Gyakutenno Megami"
• "Holactie the Creator of Light" (OCG-exclusive)
• "Jinzo"
• "Magi Magi ☆ Magician Gal" (OCG-exclusive)
• "Magician of Black Chaos MAX" (only artwork)
• "Neo Kaiser Glider" (only artwork)
• "Obelisk the Tormentor"
• "Palladium Oracle Mana" (only artwork)
• "Red-Eyes Alternative Black Dragon" (only artwork)
• "Red-Eyes B. Dragon"
• "Shiba Warrior Taro" (only artwork)
• "Slifer the Sky Dragon"
• "Summoned Skull"
• "The Winged Dragon of Ra"
• "True Exodia" (OCG-exclusive)
• "Tyler the Great Warrior" (TCG-exclusive)

Personal life

Takahashi liked to play games, such as shogi, mahjong, card games, and tabletop role-playing games.

Takahashi considered himself to be a procrastinator. He didn't work until close to a deadline, at which point he always asked himself why he didn't start working earlier.

Takahashi and Mike Mignola, the creator of the Hellboy comic book series, once participated in an art exchange. Takahashi, who was a fan of American comics, drew a picture of Hellboy with Yugi's hairdo, the Millennium Puzzle, and a Duel Disk. Mignola drew a picture of Hellboy wearing the Millennium Puzzle and a Yugi t-shirt, and the two exchanged their artworks. He also collaborated with Yosh Sawai by sending him a picture of Yugi that was used in the manga Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo (Bobobo makes Yugi come out of his Afro). In return, Takahashi included the 'nu' handkerchief in one of the panels in Yu-Gi-Oh! during the Egypt arc.

Takahashi told Eric Stuart that he considered Stuart's portrayal of Seto Kaiba to be his favorite one.

Death

On July 4, 2022, Kazuki Takahashi died attempting to save the lives of a mother and her 11-year-old daughter from a riptide. On July 6, 2022, his body was found wearing snorkeling equipment, floating off the coast of Nago City in Okinawa Prefecture. His identity was confirmed the next day. An investigation found that the cause of death was drowning; his body had also been scavenged by a shark.

Tributes were paid on official social media accounts for Jump's Editorial Departments, Yu-Gi-Oh!, Konami, and the Yu-Gi-Oh! Trading Card Game; as well as in the games Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel and Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Links. Bridge paid tribute at the end of Yu-Gi-Oh! GO RUSH!! episode 01515: "The Devil Wears Jersey". The 2022 #34, #35, and #47 issues of Weekly Shōnen Jump featured segments where the authors of its ongoing series shared their condolences on his passing.

Many voice actors, animators, and theme song artists from Toei's Yu-Gi-Oh! and the Duel Monsters anime series that adapted Takahashi's manga also paid tribute, such as Megumi Ogata (Yugi Mutou and Dark Yugi's Toei VA), Yumi Kakazu (Anzu Mazaki's Toei VA), Ryotaro Okiayu (Hiroto Honda's Toei VA), Takahiro Kagami (Duel Monsters animator), Tetsuya Iwanaga (Marik Ishtar's VA), Haruhi Nanao (Mai Kujaku's VA), and KIMERU ("OVERLAP" performer).

External links

• studio-dice.com Official website (Japanese)
• Kazuki Takahashi on Instagram (Japanese)