In the manga world, Masashi Kishimoto is deemed a legend. Most of his fame and popularity came from his magnum opus, Naruto, which stands as a pillar of the Shonen Jump manga community. The series and the manga creator have inspired many other mangakas and truly prospered the name of the Shonen genre all over the world.
However, many Kishimoto and Naruto fans won’t know this, but the manga creator initially rejected the Shonen Jump, and because of this, he decided to shift over to the Seinen genre. The Seinen genre is focused on young adult men between eighteen and forty. Rather than fantasy and magic, the Seinen genre focuses on real-world topics like politics and philosophy.
Kishimoto even wrote a rough draft for his one-shot manga, Mario, and decided to cater to a mature audience with his work. He even wrote almost one hundred and fifty pages of the manga, but later on, he stopped when his editor asked him to give Naruto one more chance.
Masashi Kishimoto’s Mature Project That Was Planned Before Naruto
In 2013, Viz Media interviewed Kishimoto and asked him about his early works before he started creating Naruto. The manga creator revealed that when he was planning to make his debut in Shonen Jump, he pitched a lot of different storylines, but all of them were rejected instantly. This is why he decided to create Mario.
Kishimoto stated:
Before I made my debut in Shonen Jump, I pitched a bunch of different ideas, but none of them really went over too well. That was a period of time when I started to think that I wasn’t cut out for shonen manga. So Mario was a draft of a manga aimed at an older seinen crowd.
The mangaka also revealed that when his ideas were rejected by Shonen Jump, he was disappointed and started thinking that he might not make it in the Shonen genre and thus decided to change genres. He drew a rough draft of the story of Mario and made it a little bit more mature than the Shonen genre.
Mario was a Secret Project by Masashi Kishimoto
Talking about Mario, Masashi Kishimoto revealed that he had no intention of publishing his work in the Shonen Jump; thus, he included adult themes that would run perfectly with an older Seinen audience. He even decided to publish it in a magazine called Super Jump but kept it a secret from his editor at the time, Kosuke Yahagi.
Kishimoto explained:
I created it with the intention of pitching it to a magazine targeting an older seinen audience. There used to be a magazine called Super Jump, and I planned on submitting it there. That’s why I included more mature themes that might not fly in Shonen Jump. I wasn’t planning for it to run in Shonen Jump, so I didn’t even tell my editor at the time. I just worked on it in secret at my own pace.
According to Kishimoto, because it was a secret project, he decided to keep it at his own pace and include whatever he thought would make the manga interesting.
He didn’t worry about the page count, and eventually, it became ridiculously long. He eventually did release the manga, but as a one-shot, and it was not as successful as he thought it would be.
You can read Naruto and Mario on Viz Media.
