Ken Ogino, the manga artist currently drawing The Ossan Newbie Adventurer, has shared a pretty revealing look back at his time making Lady Justice for Weekly Shonen Jump.
The short version: according to Ogino, his original idea was not “let’s make a fanservice manga.” He wanted to create a Japanese take on American superhero comics, with a strong female lead at the centre. But when the project was being developed for Shueisha’s legendary boys’ manga magazine, he says the direction changed because of editorial pressure.
Ogino explained on social media that his concept for Lady Justice was built around “American comics made in Japan.” Since he felt a very Japanese spin on that idea could involve moe-style appeal, he made the main hero a woman. In his mind, the sexier elements were supposed to be a small flavouring, not the whole meal.
But Ogino said the editors at the time told him that if the protagonist was female, the series would not be accepted unless it leaned into erotic content. So he ended up drawing it that way, even though that was not the main thing he wanted to do.
Why this matters now
The comments came after a fan looked back on Lady Justice, which launched 11 years ago, and suggested Ogino had gone into Jump mainly wanting to draw erotic material but was crushed by the competition. Ogino pushed back on that idea and clarified that his actual goal was to make a tough female superhero.
He also said he feels a bit envious of today’s manga creators, because Jump can now run female-led stories without needing that kind of fanservice angle. That part hits quite hard, honestly. For anime and manga fans in Malaysia and SEA, we’ve all seen the shift over the last decade: more fans now openly support female protagonists who are cool, messy, powerful, funny, or tragic without the story needing to sell them mainly through fanservice.
It also says a lot about how manga publishing has changed. Weekly Shonen Jump has always been a massive tastemaker — if something works there, it often shapes what anime fans across the world, including us here in Malaysia, end up watching, buying, cosplaying, and arguing about online. So when an artist says the industry mindset around female heroes used to be this narrow, it helps explain why certain older titles felt forced into specific tropes.
It wasn’t a My Hero Academia challenge
Ogino also cleared up another assumption: Lady Justice was not created to go head-to-head with My Hero Academia.
That comparison is easy to make because both deal with superheroes and both were in the Jump ecosystem. But Ogino said the one-shot version of Lady Justice actually appeared before My Hero Academia began serialization. By the time My Hero Academia started, he was already working on drafts for the serialized version of Lady Justice.
He recalled that he and his editor were basically caught off guard by the timing. So rather than some bold attempt to challenge Kohei Horikoshi’s superhero hit, it was apparently just unlucky overlap.
Lady Justice ran in Weekly Shonen Jump from May to September 2015 and was collected into two volumes by Shueisha. Ogino is now working as the artist for The Ossan Newbie Adventurer manga.
For fans here who follow the industry beyond just anime releases, this is a useful reminder: sometimes a manga’s final form is not simply what the creator wanted. Editorial pressure, magazine expectations, and market assumptions can shape a series before readers even see chapter one.
Source: Anime News Network