Time Paradox Ghostwriter by Ichima Kenji is a short-lived manga series, only fourteen chapters long, that in all actuality is not really all that memorable. I finished this manga the week the last chapter was released in the Shounen Jump app, so it has been a little while and honestly it has taken me a long time to get the motivation to write this review. Just like Guardian of the Witch by Sakano Asahi, this was a very short story that the mangaka could've played around with more and extended the story. The story was very plain and basic, but if you're looking for a quick read, this is something you might enjoy.
The series revolves around Sasaki Teppei, an aspiring mangaka who wants to have his work published in Shounen Jump. He has been working as an assistant for many years now, many of his storyboards being rejected and such. His goal is to create a manga that all of humanity can enjoy and right now he is not able to write it. One day, lightning strikes his apartment and his childhood gift of a robot fuses with his microwave and it spits out a Shounen Jump magazine from ten years into the future! He reads what he calls to be the best manga ever published, then he gets an idea...
(SPOILER WARNING! START)
Teppei decides to basically plagiarize and redraw the whole manga, White Knight, under himself, in his own style, and submit it to Shounen Jump. They love it and publish it for real in their magazine. And every week he receives a new copy of the magazine from the future and continues drawing it. Unfortunately, White Knight is seen by Aino Itsuki, the original mangaka who publishes White Knight ten years into the future. At this current moment in time, she is a 17-year-old high school student, working on writing White Knight.
She ends up hunting down Teppei and is all excited while he becomes a nervous wreck. Itsuki thinks she's found someone who is of kin with her, both wanting to make a manga that all of humanity would enjoy, leading him to have the same story idea as her, not suspicious of him at all. Eventually she becomes one of his manga assistants and helps out with the production of it. The series gets greenlit to become an anime and the pressure that Teppei feels before is intensified. He has been worrying that he hasn't helped the series be the best it can be and that he's making the story bad.
At some point, Itsuki is writing a different manga series and has been approved for serialization, so she leaves the team. The magic robot also gives Teppei a goal of beating Itsuki's series or she will die, it's a bit dramatic for my taste considering the story line so far, but I digress. The microwave stops producing the future magazine because she dies in the future and so Teppei has to actually make the story his own.
Things go downhill from here. Teppei's series loses to Itsuki's and she becomes a workaholic. She fires all her assistants and doesn't meet face-to-face with her editor anymore, much preferring to mail her manuscripts. Itsuki ends up dying anyways because of her workaholic habits. Teppei finds this out and ends up being very frustrated and mad, rushing back to his apartment to yell abuse at the melted robot that was still infused with the top of his microwave.
It brings him into another plane of existence outside of time and space. They negotiate and Teppei is thrown back to reality, but time is stopped. He works on White Knight during this time while everything is frozen, to improve it and himself, to try and save Itsuki again because he was taken back to before she died. He works on the manga until he is satisfied with his work and it is complete. Once it is, time moves again and he confronts Itsuki with it, letting her read it before he turns it in to his editor.
Itsuki becomes emotional when she finishes reading it, finding her reason for drawing manga in the first place. It was because she enjoyed it, instead of trying to please the world with it. Teppei also rediscovered the joy of drawing manga he enjoys to draw while he finished White Knight. The manga ends with a flash forward, showing the both of them enjoying their drawing and having fun with it.
(SPOILER WARNING! END)
This series wasn't bad but it wasn't memorable either. It had a nice message, but it was quite boring with weird sci-fi time aspects thrown into it for convenience. I thought it would focus more on the time aspects of the story but it didn't. The title is extremely misleading and completely not what I was expecting. Fortunately, the series is really short so it is a quick read should you choose to pick it up, but I don't really recommend it.
Thank you for reading once again and I hope to see you guys comment down below your thoughts! See you all next week!
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