How does Rumiko Takahashi make a chapter?

Her training explains the method. At Kazuo Koike’s Gekiga Sonjuku, the Lone Wolf and Cub writer drilled his students to build well-thought-out, interesting characters before anything else; Takahashi has said that influence shaped everything after. She also assisted horror artist Kazuo Umezu. Her series are built the Koike way: a cast whose traits are set in collision, so the stories generate themselves.

The weekly division of labor, in her own descriptions from 1990 and 1992: Takahashi creates the story and layout, and pencils and inks the characters; four assistants draw the backgrounds, panel lines and tone. All of her assistants were women, she explained that she did not use male assistants so the studio would work more seriously. A chapter began with the layout in the evening, finished by dawn; after a day’s rest the assistants completed it over two or three nights: about five days per chapter.

The early years of that system ran out of a roughly 150-square-foot apartment shared with two assistants, where Takahashi slept in a closet for lack of space, while carrying two serials at once.