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 a child Kojima’s family nicknamed him “Dekoppachi” because his forehead was prominent like Ataro’s younger brother; he did not entirely like the nickname but did not hate it either. He went on to draw Akatsuka’s characters everywhere, and from around third grade he drew Bakabon’s dad repeatedly—in notebooks, textbooks, his diary, on desks and on school walls; he learned to draw the character with his eyes closed, continued adding the dad to some autograph boards, and believed it was the character he had drawn more times than any other.
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.”
“He'd say, 'Watch me carefully, Hideo,' and take a magic marker and paint the connecting pieces in the stone walls around the castle, then wipe them with paint thinner from the top. 'You should always make these fine lines black like this,' he'd say.”
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.