What is Studio Loud In School?

The assistants have their own band name, and their own best-selling side career.

Studio Loud In School is the collective name of Kazushi Hagiwara’s assistant team, the up-to-six artists who ink, tone, and background Bastard!! itself. Unusually for a commercial studio, it has a parallel life in doujinshi, Japan’s self-published scene: the studio regularly publishes a best-selling doujinshi series titled Wonderful Megadeth (the name is itself a two-band collision, Megadeth by way of the album Wonderful), alongside doujin books devoted to fighting games such as Dead or Alive, Virtua Fighter, and Capcom’s fighters.

The studio’s doujin output also serves the manga directly: collections of unreleased and alternate Bastard!! manuscripts, material that never ran in any magazine, have been published through the doujin channel, making the fan market the archive of last resort for Hagiwara’s cut pages. It is a neat loop: the doujin scene that raised a generation of Jump artists also preserves this one’s outtakes.

Bastard!! volume 4 cover — **THE STUDIO’S OWN SHELF**Volume 4, drawn in the years when Studio Loud In School, the assistants’ circle, was producing both the manga and its own doujinshi.

THE SIDE CATALOGUE

Doujin as a second shelf

Wonderful Megadeth

The studio’s flagship doujinshi: Bastard!!-adjacent art and material from the people who draw it, sold in the self-published market where it became a best-seller in its category.

Fighting-game books

Doujinshi on Dead or Alive, Virtua Fighter, and Capcom fighters: the studio’s other obsession, drawn with the same tone-heavy finish as the day job.

Manuscript collections

Unreleased Bastard!! pages and color work issued as doujin collections: for completists, part of the series’ real bibliography lives outside Shueisha entirely.

What is Studio Loud In School?

THE SIDE CATALOGUE

THE FIRST WORD