Exclusive Content: FGO Jalter Storyboards – Part 1 (2/2) (Patreon)

When collaborating with another artist on a doujinshi, my responsibilities went beyond storyboarding and writing dialogue—I was also in charge of the screentone work and background processing.

During the production of this book, we ran into a very serious problem: both characters were dressed entirely in black—almost pure black.This meant that the appeal we usually bring out through linework didn’t function very well, and standard screentones couldn’t convey a sense of volume. When the two characters overlapped, it even became possible to completely lose sight of their accessories.

That’s when we immediately realized something painfully obvious: why Jalter is so popular, yet has so few manga works.

This wasn’t just a matter of character design or drawing style. We were constantly running into what felt like the ultimate question of the black-and-white manga medium itself:“How far can you push visual expression using only black, white, and gray—without color?”

Yes, I know that discussing this in the context of an R18 doujinshi might sound like overthinking things, but honestly, if we couldn’t overcome this issue, the book simply couldn’t be drawn.

So while working on the storyboards, I kept testing different screentone patterns and black fill methods. To be frank, it was extremely frustrating.

I tried referencing older manga with heavier use of black, but it didn’t help much. In those works, even if the clothes were black, the characters usually just exchanged punches and kicks and quickly separated—nothing like what we needed, where the characters are tangled together almost like wrestling holds.

How do you make two pitch-black people stick together and still be distinguishable from each other? That problem really made us rack our brains.

In the end, the solution came from an accident during endless trial and error. I accidentally turned off (or maybe turned on) several layers, and suddenly the characters split into a “black-background” and “white-background” version—yet visually, both could still be interpreted as “black.”

One was clearly black, the other white, but within the language of black-and-white manga, both counted as “black.”

It was incredible.

Thanks to this godsend accident, we were finally able to complete the book. And this way of interpreting “black” became the most defining feature of my style from that point on.

People often tell me that my use of black and white feels different from others. Whenever I hear that, I feel a bit guilty—I’m always too embarrassed to tell them:“Honestly… Jalter taught me that.”