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Anyone who loves manga has surely dreamed of the day they could quit their jobs and get paid to put the stories in their head on paper. Unfortunately for many of us, even drawing a simple rough-draft has proven nigh impossible, so we’re forced to admit that maybe we’ll need to come up with more realistic dreams. At least we can still read all the great stuff others produce, right?

However, creating stories isn’t the only great perk of being a manga artist–it turns out you also get to meet all those other really cool artists out there! Like up-and-coming artist Okushou who bumped into Hajime Isayama, creator of Attack on Titan, at the publisher’s office the other day and got a personalized sketch from the world-famous Isayama. Bet you wish you could draw now, don’t you?

Here’s the illustration that Okushou received and the tweet explaining it.

“I was at Kodansha with some rough outlines when I bumped into Isayama-sensei of Attack on Titan!! And then, all of a sudden, he drew this for me! I am so freaking happy! Mikasa is reading my work!”

https://twitter.com/okushou/status/466239784923312129/

If you’re wondering what Mikasa is reading, it looks like it’s Real Account, a monthly manga that Okushou writes about a high school boy who gets sucked into a social network “death game.”

real account

Real Account has already gotten some popularity, perhaps partly because of scenes like the one below. The manga text reads: “Look at this! They’re completely different! Gaaah!” The picture on the left is the person’s avatar, while the picture on the right is what she actually looks like. A cruel joke, but one that has apparently resonated with some Japanese netizens, as you can see in the tweet.

“I bet there’s a lot of cases like this on Twitter too…”

https://twitter.com/_miti_yan/status/466904848869257216/

Though the manga has yet to make big waves overseas, Real Account looks like it could be the next big thing. The main character, Ataru Kashiwagi, is an orphaned high school student who lives alone with his sister. Set in the near future, a social network called Real Account–a combination of Facebook and Twitter–has taken the country by storm. Feeling ostracized by his classmates for not participating, Ataru relents to peer pressure and joins. However, he ends up sucked into a “death game,” where falling to zero followers means instant death. Which kind of sounds like the plot to a certain American cartoon episode, if we’re not mistaken.

▼This makes a bit more sense…

edit1

All joking aside, though, it looks like an interesting comic–and it is clearly tackling real world issues like bullying in schools and unease about our lives in the digital age. We’d definitely recommend keeping an eye on this one if you want to stay ahead of the crowd!

Now, who wants to help us create the next big manga series so we can get more illustrations from Isayama??

Sources: Jin115, Naver Matome
Images: Twitter, Jin115, YouTube