“Trist, One-Punch Man is on fire right now, and Shonen Jump has entered every comic fan’s field of view.
We need to strike while the iron’s hot.
The magazine needs new comics to fill it out.” Andy laid it out over the phone, plain and honest.
And he was right.
No comic magazine on earth survived on a single serial; if that was the plan, you might as well skip the magazine entirely and just sell collected volumes.
“Mm.
This time I’ll draw two.” Trist thought it over for a moment and said it evenly.
“And Uncle Andy, adjust the layout while you’re at it.
Shrink One-Punch Man’s page share.
It’s not a long work anyway.” Andy’s voice jumped half an octave on the spot.
“*Two?* Won’t that be too much?
Take it slow, there’s no rush!” Because comic artists, as a species, were slow craftsmen.
One chapter a week was the industry average, and what Trist was proposing, running three titles at once, more than one chapter each, was a schedule that put artists in the ground.
“Relax, Uncle.
Do I look like a man who doesn’t want to live?” What Andy didn’t know was that Trist owned a divine artifact called the system, and between his past life’s trained fundamentals and tracing over the phantom projection, a finished chapter genuinely didn’t take him long at all.
“Besides,” Trist added, “I’ve got a comic empire to build.” Listening to that outrageous confidence come down the line, Andy just smiled to himself, because coming from this kid, it didn’t sound like arrogance.
It sounded like a schedule.
He extracted three separate promises that Trist would take care of his health, announced that he would come collect the finished pages in person, and only then let the call end.
Trist shook his head at the receiver, smiling, and hung up.
Beside him on the sofa, hamster-Gali sat with both cheeks packed full, jaw working steadily through a bag of snacks.
This was his newest scientific discovery: as long as Gali’s mouth never stopped moving, the gurgling never started.
Ergo, buy snacks in bulk and keep the pipeline full.
The townhouse now had a strategic reserve.
Gali looked up at him with her whole face full of happy anticipation.
“Trist, there’s going to be a new comic?
Really?” Because Gali, as it turned out, genuinely loved reading comics.
Every single person in them was weaker than she was, obviously, but the stories pulled at her anyway, and so did the characters, and she couldn’t entirely explain why.
*Comics are pretty interesting.
Heh.* “Mm.” Trist gave her the one syllable, and quietly called up the system interface, and began typing names into the search bar, and then, a moment later, deleted them.
Because the corner of his eye had caught the fan value counter: two hundred thousand points, and still scrolling upward.
He knew the curve, though.
The climb would slow soon enough.
One-Punch Man was a depth charge, the front wave of the whole tide, and the accounting behind it was simple: each reader who read it registered as fan value exactly once, and once counted, that reader would not count again until the next month came around.
And that accounting was precisely what shaped the strategy.
An ordinary comic magazine ran ten to twenty different serials, one chapter apiece per issue.
Trist could, if he wanted, dump a dozen titles into next week’s Jump and let them all crawl forward together.
But do that, and every one of those books would lose most of its force, because a wall of unfamiliar comics shoved in front of a reader all at once just gets skimmed, eyes glazing, pages turning, nothing landing.
What each book actually needed was time to ferment.
Each one had to arrive alone, become the industry’s whole topic of conversation for its moment, soak into the readership properly, and only then would the fan value those readers generated come through at full strength.
A comic that got overlooked would get tasted carelessly, judged inferior, and its value would sink accordingly.
So Shonen Jump was not going to carry a crowd.
The titles would go up one by one, slowly, each given its own stage.
Two new comics, right now, was exactly the correct number.
Which left only the genuinely hard question: two comics of *what*?
What kind of comic could actually mount a challenge against Captain America?
Only the classics.
Naruto.
Dragon Ball.
Books of that weight.
But their spans were enormous and their fires burned slow, and by the time a slow burn like that finished fermenting, God only knew what state the Marvel universe would be in.
There was Evangelion, too, a genuine milestone of the medium, and it even carried shadows of the Bible inside it, which ought to have suited this country; but the meanings of that era wouldn’t detonate here yet either.
It needed brewing.
They all needed brewing.
From where Andy sat, any hit was a good hit, and there was no hurry anywhere.
Trist knew better.
This was the Marvel universe, and the Marvel universe was *dangerous*, and what he needed was not a garden patiently cultivated but a bombing campaign: detonate the market fast, and keep the depth charges coming, one after another after another.
Why had One-Punch Man caught fire in the first place?
Because it overturned the standing definition of a superhero.
Because it hit the public’s worldview straight on, seized the maximum number of eyeballs, and dragged in the media behind them.
Its fire was the fire of a flashpoint.
So the next comics had to be flashpoints too: books that challenged how people saw the world, or struck something that resonated in the chest.
They could not be long-runners.
They could not be slow burns.
They absolutely could not be fog-and-riddles that made readers guess at meanings, not yet; all of those would wait until the day he judged his own ability to protect himself sufficient, and not one day sooner.
And given the current landscape, a market drowning in superheroes, the direction of mainstream taste, the pressure ordinary people were living under every day, the answer stood out plainly: violent comics were the best possible play, right now, in this exact America.
The new books had to seize the current heat and strike it hard, had to raise a brand-new wave of argument within their first three chapters.
Praise or flames, it genuinely didn’t matter which.
As long as they became the focal point, the fan value would come in like running water.
By the end of that thought, two comics had already surfaced in his mind, and they fit the requirements so exactly it was almost funny.
He typed them into the search bar at speed.
The virtual screen turned, and the pages bloomed open, and Trist laid the projection flat, picked up his pen, and set it scratching against the paper.
Both were mid-length works, like One-Punch Man.
And there the resemblance ended, because everything else about them was a different animal entirely.
Their material was the outsider’s kind, the strange kind.
Blood and violence.
Hard questions about what a human being is.
And girls you don’t forget.
“Eh?” Gali had drifted over at some point and watched the new pages take shape from the very first stroke, and her whole face was one large question mark.
“Trist, why are you drawing *this* kind?” Because One-Punch Man ran on cool, and fun, and jokes.
And the thing coming to life under his pen right now was nothing like it at all.
Trist reached over and stroked her soft purple hair, and the smile he wore had layers in it.
“Mm.
It has to sting.”