I’ve long believed that social media is a suck, and if I didn’t have to use it for my job, I wouldn’t. If it isn’t showing you long paragraphs of hot garbage cosplaying as Socrates from folks who should know better than to put screenshots of discourse on your timeline, it’s some other bullshit. But what doesn’t suck—and honestly feels downright aspirational—is mangaka author comments, which should be the blueprint for how to use social media.
Back in the day, when Borders bookstores were still around, you could flip to the inside cover of a manga volume and read an anecdotal paragraph from creators, like Dragon Ball’s Akira Toriyama writing about spoiling his kids and trying not to get bored making manga. While you can still read lengthier ramblings today, like Chainsaw Man creator Tatsuki Fujimoto recollecting how he ate his girlfriend’s pet fish instead of telling her he killed it, you can also read what a collective of mangaka has to say about their weeks like a curated, pseudo social media feed.
In the modern digital age, authors’ comments are still going strong, preserved online in blog posts where Weekly Shonen Jump’s rotating roster of creators drop diary entries with the same energy as NBA players in a post‑game interview—hands on their hips while on the court, still catching their breath, saying whatever stray thought about their week pops into their heads. Shonen Jump’s author comments, stylized as mangaka musings, are exactly that: a collection of off‑the‑cuff messages from creators published in Weekly Shonen Jump, giving fans a quick peek into their day‑to‑day lives.
Sometimes, author comments are about the chapter they slaved away on in the meat grinder that is weekly manga production, congratulating a creator for finishing their series, or sharing updates about a live-action or anime adaptation. But more often than not, it’s just them posting about random occurrences in their lives and their thoughts about them. Those thoughts can range from One Piece creator Eiichiro Oda praising a very bad variety show as “the pinnacle of human achievement,” Sakamoto Days’ creator updating readers on his progress in Nightreign, everyone’s obsession with butter caramel Pringles, or the emotional arcs of their procurement and piecemeal consumption of choco eggs.
The beauty of the grab-bag randomness of mangaka musings is that they’re oh so brief. They’re unfiltered, shower thoughts-level of relatable, and they paint enough of a picture that you feel better having taken the time to read them. Here are a handful of authors’ comments I like that would go triple platinum as social media posts:
Sure, a lot of these comments read like exasperated asides blurted out because they had to write something on top of drawing 21 pages of their ongoing manga for reader enjoyment. But it's that exact “I’m not gonna hold you” brevity that makes them worth checking out every week. Sometimes it’s just nice to see what someone found worth mentioning, no matter how superfluous it is.
Manga author notes should be the aspiration for how we use social media, because the smallest, most offhand thing is more human than any algorithm-optimized screed rewarding ragebaiting, forced discourse, and low-effort engagement farming sludge we doomscroll past on the daily. So next time you’re about to full-send a post, think to yourself: Do I sound like a manga author comment? If not, delete that shit expeditiously.
