As a child Kojima’s family nicknamed him “Dekoppachi” because his…

Kojima said he could still draw Bakabon’s dad with his eyes closed. In junior high he filled the margins of his textbooks and notes with Maetel from Galaxy Express 999. In senior high he traced Cobra on the cover so many times that the edges of the tankobon turned black from the graphite of his pencil.

As head of a household, as a father, and as a person, Kojima aspired to be Akatsuka’s alter ego—Bakabon’s dad. He had already passed Bakabon’s dad’s age of forty-one and still felt unworthy of inheriting the name of “fool”: he wanted to reach a bare self in which genius and fool would no longer be opposites and where he could answer the world’s contradictions with the character’s “It’ll be fine.”

As a child, Kojima avoided weekly manga magazines because he hated their cheap paper and the red, green, orange, or yellow tints; he was especially repulsed by battered, discolored, finger‑smudged copies left in barbers, eateries, and hospital waiting rooms. He preferred to wait months to buy the single‑volume editions (tankobon), which were revised, neatly bound, and intended for permanent collection, and he said he maintained that preference into upper‑middle age.

Three pages of Umimachi Diary made Kojima cry: a girl (Suzu) cries alone for her father while the page composition isolates her with no background and then opens the framing to bring the four sisters together. Seeing how a hand on Suzu’s back and a handkerchief visually transformed solitude into belonging, Kojima thought that panel layouts were invented for that.

“There was a period, before my Father died, where I thought I'd become an artist, but my Father died very suddenly when I was 13. My family was full of artists, you see, and they hadn't been able to make a living off of it.”