Trigun Art Book (1999) - Nightow Yasuhiro Interview

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Trigun Art Book (1999), page 71-73 https://archive.org/details/artbook-Trigun_Art_Book/page/n65/mode/2up

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<aside> ❤️ Commissioned by xoxo-otome! Thank you! 🤞 原文文字数（改行無・空白有）：6519文字 Translation word count: 2776 words

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[Profile] A mangaka. Author of Trigun Maximum, currently being serialized in Young King OURS. “This summer, I’m going to the Comic Convention in San Diego. I’m also chuckling to myself over ‘BIG GYU’ getting an animation and toy adaptation. Just as I thought I was finished with the disc jacket cover, now I have the DVD to work on. As for the Vash figurine by Kaiyodo, all that’s left is the painting. It seems like a lot is happening, but I haven’t left the house much. Oh well….”

Interviewer: I read your story about how the Trigun anime came to be in the postscript of Maximum volume 2.

Nightow: What’s in there is all entirely true. Even if I talked about it here, it’ll just be a copy of what I wrote there (lol).

Interviewer: When did the anime production project get finally confirmed?

Nightow: It was after Monthly Shonen Captain ended. I thought those plans might get cancelled too because of that, but it turned out alright.

Interviewer: Trigun has really had some ups and downs. First, the serialization stopped due to the sudden end of Captain, and then Maximum began anew in Young King OURS, and after that, the original Trigun’s finale*[1]* was written to be the “final completed form”. With the anime adaption amid all this, there seems to be quite an interaction between the original and the anime.

[1] T/N: Trigun chapters 14 – 20, first released as volume 3 by Tokuma Shoten.

Nightow: That’s right. That first meeting we had for 12 hours straight was around May of ‘97, I think, between the cancellation of Captain and the start of Maximum.

Interviewer: That was before “final completed form” was a thing at all.

Nightow: Yes, way before. I wrote the “final completed form” after the first volume of Maximum came out.

Interviewer: I assume there many things that needed to be cleared up, like the Fifth Moon Incident and Knives’s fate.

Nightow: I had ideas stocked up, but this was before I gave any of them real form. After all, I hadn’t even written the ending to the original Trigun (lol). The anime had to be summed up in 26 episodes, so Kuroda-san, who’s in charge of series composition, wrote us a general plot. There were quite a few edits done to it afterwards, but the final product ended up being relatively faithful to that initial plot.

Interviewer: So the anime had a clear flow from the beginning of production.

Nightow: It did. Kuroda-san had a good idea of the composition, and the director had a very clear stance about the anime’s worldview. So from the beginning, our meetings could have very in-depth discussions.

Interviewer: Out of the Gung-Ho-Guns, only Monev, Mine, and Dominique had appeared at that time.

Nightow: At that point, we had only discussed that the Gung-Ho-Guns’ names represented their abilities. I only had a very rough idea of things. But I remember that only Dominique’s ability was set in stone and I told Kuroda-san about it early on.

Interviewer: Why was an original character, Caine, added to the Gung-Ho-Guns in the anime?