Drawing the Excitement of Bicycle Racing

Sports manga is a major genre that boasts many masterpieces. Nowadays, the genre covers a truly diverse range of competitions. Of these, one current representative work that has made fans of many readers is Yowamushi Pedal [Weakling Pedal] (Akita Shoten, starting in 2008) . Yowamushi Pedal is a big hit work which is about high school students who compete in bicycle road races. Wataru Watanabe, the artist, competes in amateur bicycle races himself, and he depicts how much his bicycle experiences have impressed and excited him in his work. 

 Yowamushi Pedal is a big hit work which is about high school students who compete in bicycle road races. Wataru Watanabe, the artist, competes in amateur bicycle races himself, and he depicts how much his bicycle experiences have impressed and excited him in his work.  But what does Watanabe have to say about what goes on behind the scenes of Yowamushi Pedal and what it really means to draw manga? (July 2020 interview).

As a reader, I originally liked supernatural battle manga such as Dragon Ball (Shueisha), and sports manga wasn’t really my genre. That said, I had a blast reading Slam Dunk (Shueisha). That seemed odd to me, and I wondered what I liked so much about it, but then I realized that Slam Dunk is actually a character manga in which the key point is tenacity (a story about the protagonist putting every ounce of his effort and guts into a sport). A lot of characters appear in the work, and they compete with each other. The outcome of each game is less important than what the characters do. I thought Dokaben (Akita Shoten) was similarly entertaining. Although it’s only my opinion on genre classification, I think Yowamushi Pedal is a character manga like Slam Dunk.    

In a typical sports manga, a protagonist who is determined and focused on being the best is preferred. But I don’t like sports all that much, so I wanted to create the sort of protagonist who would let his opponent win if challenged. When I thought about what kinds of characters are liked, it occurred to be that I couldn’t personally like a bellicose character who denies the value of other people. 

Also, although it’s important to draw the complexes faced by different characters, it’s also important to get them to act instead of just letting them sit around and struggle.

As an example of creating a character, let’s say the character resolves to make the world a better place by getting up early every morning to clean up around the station. It’s only when the character actually does the cleaning or doesn’t that we first see who the character really is. In actuality, the kinds of characters who can’t clean up because they oversleep are loved as well. Naturally, characters who clean up just like they resolved to are also loved. However, we can’t tell who a character is based on their thoughts alone. What’s important is the action they take.

Sakamichi starts out with no friends, and he does things like handing out fliers to make an anime club. However, this doesn’t go well. That’s when he encounters Shunsuke Imaizumi, one of his fellow students, and races him to try to get him to become a member of the anime club, which ends up resulting in Sakamichi getting involved in bicycles instead. Getting characters to take action quickly reveals their beliefs as well as what they refuse to compromise on. It’s a bit like creating a sculpture.

The structure of the story—which involves the protagonist, Sakamichi, experiencing the world of bicycle racing for the first time—is aimed at getting readers who are not familiar with bicycle racing to see how fun it can be.    

In Japan, there’s a high percentage of bicycle ownership, and a lot of people ride city bicycles, but bicycle racing is a fairly minor sport. That’s why I decided on a rule for this work with my editor: to make a bicycle manga that can be read even by people who ride city bicycles.    

I also had to do something about drafting, an expression specific to bicycle racing. In an actual bicycle race, a racer who comes up behind another one stays close to the leading racer to use them as a windbreak, which is called drafting. However, to readers who don’t know much about bicycle racing, a drafting racer doesn’t really look like they’ve caught up, so I drew the racers side by side instead. Although this differs a bit from actual races, I think it’s most important for readers to have fun reading the work.

I drew the Inter-High School Championships as a three-day stage race, and—starting on the second day—the racers start at different times depending on their goal time on the previous day. This is another approach specially designed for Pedal. In the actual Tour de France and other major road races, everyone starts at the same time on the second and subsequent days as well, so there are cases where the racer with the number 1 total time is not actually riding in the lead. Visually speaking, this makes the race really tough to understand. 

Therefore, I opted to have racers start at different times so the manga drawings would make it clear who was in first place. That said, I agonized right up until the last minute because I was worried about drawing something that’s actually a lie. However—in the Hammer Series, a new international road race event started in 2017—they chose to have racers start at different times.

I have given each character variation in terms of how they ride their bicycle. My basis for designing these riding styles is whether I think readers would want to try to imitate the characters and ride similarly. Yūsuke Makishima’s “dancing”—during which he sways dramatically to the left and right—makes it extremely difficult to ride fast in mechanical terms, but some readers decide to try it out anyway.

However, there’s also a scene where Midōsuji’s chin scrapes against the ground as he turns a corner. This definitely isn’t possible in reality. (Laughter) Still, it looks fairly convincing as a picture. For this scene, I basically prioritized the need to depict the intensity of a brutal race. It was intended to portray the instant when all the piled up characters finally explode.

There’s also a scene where Midōsuji bends down extremely low as he descends a hill, but someone commented on a video of Chris Froome—a racer who has won the Tour de France many times—racing in a similar position that he is the “real Midōsuji.” I was actually trying to draw a special move that bordered on impossible, so I was glad that a reader discovered something similar in an actual race.

I don’t think people who work single-mindedly for just one goal actually exist. Or if they do, they’re definitely a rare exception. Therefore, while Pedal is a coming-of-age story for its characters, there’s no one clear goal in it, such as growth being equal to winning. After all, if Sakamichi suddenly shouted that he would win no matter what, the readers would just recoil. (Laughter)

The weekly serialization of Yowamushi Pedal is live. More specifically, although I prepare a general plot development blueprint in advance, the actual outcomes of the races differ depending on the choices made while drawing them. For example, during the sprint-point race between Hayato Shinkai and Midōsuji, Shinkai overcame his past trauma, which made it seem like he would probably win. But then Midōsuji won. Having Midōsuji win this race gave me a way to vividly depict his creepiness, and this also enabled me to show that—even if Shinkai was losing at the halfway point of a road race—he could make one comeback after another as long as he had the support of his companions.    

As the racers battled to reach the goal on the second day of the second Inter-High, I fired off flashbacks of Imaizumi, Midōsuji, and Yūto Shinkai, one after another. It is precisely because racing scenes are the best opportunity to demonstrate the individuality of characters that I incorporate flashback scenes.  

 Their purpose is to draw the harsh trials that characters have overcome, the relationships of trust they have with their companions, and their other feelings. That said, I believe that the weight of the flashbacks I draw and the strength of the characters’ determination are not the same thing as the race result. People often say that whoever has more heart wins, but the reality of competition hardly follows this maxim. I’ll be happy if I can do a good job of depicting this.    

I minimize the amount of work I have my assistants do and draw even the backgrounds myself, and this helps prevent me from losing my focus while drawing. Whenever a member of the staff asks me to check their work, it breaks my concentration, and then I have to get back into the groove, but my approach reduces how often this happens.

I also draw the backgrounds in detail during the storyboard (a plan that shows the frame layout and lines) stage. When drawing based on this, I might suddenly decide to add a tree to the foreground. I’m the only one who can really draw the image inside my head. Taking an ad-lib approach to drawing also helps me to make my drawings more consistent with what I imagine. This is really satisfying.

The people aren’t the only characters in Yowamushi Pedal... The bicycles they ride and even the ground itself are characters as well. To depict the speed of a bicycle flying down the road, instead of simply expressing the speed as a number, I draw the sense of speed. To achieve this, even the way the tires touch the ground is important.

To help convey a sense of speed or moving fast, I generally draw concentrated lines, bicycle tires, and the like by hand. Of course, I also tighten up my drawings as necessary by using a ruler to draw lines, but drawing by hand enables me to more effectively draw bicycles as I imagine them. Tires are actually perfect circles, but they don’t look like it when they’re revolving at high speeds. Our eyes always see things as being distorted. Drawing manga means drawing things the way only people see them.