Minoru Toyoda's "Draw This, Die," which depicts the joys and pains of creating a work set in a high school manga study group, was selected for the "Manga Grand Prize," which selects the manga that bookstore clerks and others want to recommend the most.
The 16th Manga Awards are an award in which volunteers, mainly bookstore clerks, vote to select the works they most want to recommend to others, and are attracting attention as an award with great influence, such as movies and TV animations.
The award ceremony was held in Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo on the 27th, and from among the 11 nominated works, Minoru Toyota's "Draw This and Die" was selected as the grand prize this year.
This coming-of-age drama follows Sou Ankai, a high school student living on a remote island in Tokyo, who founded a manga study group with his friends and grew up sharing the joys and pains of drawing manga.
The author, Toyoda, is from Izu Oshima, which became the model for the island where the main character lives, and made his debut in 2002 with "Labroma," which depicts a life-size love affair between high school students.
At the award ceremony, Toyoda said, "The title is always the word I say to myself when I start serialization. There are many terrible things in the world, so I hope it will be a distraction."