What is Bakuman about?

Bakuman begins with a bargain. Mashiro, who can draw, promises his classmate Azuki, an aspiring voice actress, that they will marry when she voices the heroine of his manga's anime adaptation, and that they will not meet face to face until then. To get there, Mashiro and writer Takagi have to survive the real machinery of Weekly Shonen Jump: editor meetings, one-shot submissions, reader survey rankings, serialization conferences and cancellation.

The series is unusually frank about that machinery, and about its own creators. The duo's fictional series chart a career: Detective Trap, cancelled as its rankings sag; a gag manga they quit, which echoes both Obata's own gag-manga debut and Mashiro's uncle; Perfect Crime Party, a hit that can never be an anime; and Reversi, a dark battle manga that finally wins everything, standing in for Death Note itself.

The anime by J.C.Staff ran 75 episodes across three seasons on NHK Educational TV from October 2010 to March 2013, and a live-action film opened at number one at the Japanese box office in October 2015. For the film, Obata drew the manga manuscripts the actors are seen creating, pages later collected in their own illustration book.