Believers (Manga)

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Believers ( Japaneseビ リ ー バ ー ズbirībāzu ) is a completed manga series by the Japanese draftsman Naoki Yamamoto , which belongs to his genre and describes the life of three sect members on a desert island with partly pornographic elements ( hentai ). The comic, first published in 1999, has over 400 pages.

action

Three members - two men and one woman - of a modern Japanese sect participate in a special program. They must survive on a secluded island while still following the instructions of their guide. In order for them to gain enlightenment, nothing must be done without the approval of the guide. The three are not allowed to keep anything secret from each other, they tell each other about their dreams every day. But two of the three cut off from the outside world finally give in to human needs.

Emergence

Naoki Yamamoto, who did without the help of assistants at Believers and drew the complete manga by himself, came up with the idea for the comic after the poison gas attacks on Tokyo subways in 1995. The attack aroused his interest in the Ōmu Shinrikyō sect and the Japanese terrorist organization Red Army . After researching the two groups, he wondered what would happen if a small group of such fanatics had to live on a remote island.

The model for the island was Yamamoto Second Sea Fortress , an artificially created island near Tokyo Bay in the 1910s , which was destroyed in the Great Kanto earthquake in 1923. He saw pictures of the island, which had hardly been changed since its destruction, in the big comic magazine 100 Ruins . Through his relationship with the Shogakukan publishing house, he was able to borrow these pictures. Later, when he had already drawn halfway through Believers , he traveled to the island himself, together with a model and others. There he arranged nude photos and made landscape shots, some of which he incorporated directly into the manga in drawn form.

Publications

Believers appeared in Japan from May 1999 to November 1999 in individual chapters in the manga magazine Big Comic Spirits , in which, among other things, Oishinbo by Akira Hanasaki and Tetsu Kariya and Ii Hito by Shin Takahashi have appeared. The Shogakukan- Verlag published these individual chapters in December 1999 and January 2000 in the form of two edited volumes.

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