To help promote the launch of Oh!Great's latest manga, Kaijin Fugeki , in France during Japan Expo Paris earlier in July 2025, Kaijin Fugeki , Crunchyroll News was able to site down with the noted author to discuss his work, the vision he has of his characters and the balance of his style. Read on for the interview! Your work has never shied away from featuring strong female characters (without hiding their moments of weakness). Is this something you'd like to see in more of your work? Oh!Great : I have my own concept for female characters, but I don't want to impose it on other authors, so each author can do whatever suits them. But for myself, I'm interested in showing characters who don't hide their weaknesses, because that's what being human is all about. Very human characters like that, who have both a strong and a weak side, add a lot of depth. I always try to create characters with these two sides. After that, it's quite complicated to put two very opposite sides into a story, because in a way it takes away a kind of coherence since they have two opposite sides, and so it makes the work more complex. Even though I've been working as a mangaka for a long time, I still find it very difficult to portray characters with two sides, because it's hard to have them and still keep the story coherent. The theme of opposition (good/evil, light/dark, modernity/tradition, etc.) is central to your work, both in the plot and in your drawings. How do you maintain this style, and how do you make it evolve with the times? Oh!Great : Of course, for me, the opposition is essential, technically speaking. I really tried to put the opposition in all the boxes, for example. In each square, there's the very detailed part, and then there's the empty part. There's something very fast, and at the same time, next to it, there's almost a halt in time, as if time has stopped. I try to do this in every image. Say for a character, if the shoulders are moving, I make sure that the hips don't move, which really highlights the movement of the shoulders. And I don't just show the lit part, I always add the dark part. I play a lot with lighting, but in any case, what I try to do is to cohabit the dark part and the light part. In fact, it's really a game of light and shadow. Oh!Great: This opposition, which I've talked about on a technical level, can be said to be the same for themes such as good and evil. Defining good and evil is another matter. Is “evil” really something “bad”? Is “good” really something “good”? I don't know, let's put that aside, but let's imagine that bad or dark things are evil. If we only portrayed evil, obviously, it would be too sad and depressing, and readers wouldn't like it. And if I talk a lot about the bright things, readers will get bored. So I always try to show, to find, the right balance between brightness and darkness. And it's the same with storytelling. If I only elaborate on things going well, readers will get bored. Light and shadow is a question I think about all the time, and I apply this approach not only to each panel but to the whole series. I always thought about this when I started manga, it became my style, and if I'm still able to make manga today, it's surely thanks to this concept. [Your question] is an extremely difficult one. It's a theme that's very closely linked to religion, but unfortunately, we can't answer it in just a few minutes because it's also about the essence of human beings, so we'd have to stay up all night to talk about it. I've answered as best I can.
