Hidenori Kusaka tweets regarding Mato’s departure translated!
Hi all. These are some tweets from Hidenori Kusaka, the writer for Pokémon Adventures (Pokemon Special as most people prefer to call it) regarding why Mato left and what he was generally going through before Satoshi Yamamoto took over as the artist for nearly 15 years!
Here is a small excerpt from 2011.
As sure as everyone knows, around the end of 2000, The first artist, Ms. Mato-sensei, who I created the work “Pocket Monster SPECIAL” with, got ill* (her body was not in good shape).
I’m no doctor, but it looked like to me that she was exhausted. There was a proposal from her to “step down from illustrating,” and around the end of the fiscal year, there was a decision made to accept that proposal. […] Of course, there were various conflicts among various people before this decision was made. […] However, near the end of the year 2000, Mato-sensei’s inevitable departure was decided, I think that the reaction that I was overwhelmed myself came in no small numbers to me. “Do I end this work? Or do I continue it? Do I need a new artist…? What are you looking for as they’re illustrating? Do you have them draw a completely new Pokemon manga or do you have them continue [where Mato-sensei left off]?” Tons of people have said a lot of things, and as I responded to each one, I felt oddly composed.
[…] I was only concerned about the readers. […] When I picked up a magazine that I’m looking forward to and it doesn’t have the manga that I wanted, I thought about the [reader’s] face… and I felt like I was wandering in darkness.
“Why did this happen?” When I thought of that, something suddenly came out, tears and tears came out. I was at the editorial departments, in front of my peers, but the tears never stopped, and I was crying for a long time along with the sun rising.
