How is a weekly manga made, and what does an editor actually do?

A weekly manga is made by a small team. Creating manga professionally is rarely done alone. The artist, or mangaka, typically works with a few assistants in a small studio and is associated with a creative editor from a publishing company. The pages then run in a magazine such as Weekly Shōnen Jump, a weekly shōnen manga anthology published by Shueisha since 11 July 1968.

Manga are usually serialized in large manga magazines, each story presented in a single episode to be continued in the next issue. Manga is typically printed in black and white because of time constraints, artistic reasons and printing costs. Chapters from Weekly Shōnen Jump are later collected in tankōbon volumes every two to three months.

The assistants are the studio's hands. Most manga artists have assistants, typically at least three, who help complete the work in a clean and timely manner. They are commonly used for inking, lettering and shading, and it is more common for assistants to deal with backgrounds and cameo art, leaving the artist to focus on drawing and inking the characters. Because manga is mostly black and white, a studio rarely employs a colorist.

The editor is the other half. The editor supervises series production, giving advice on layout and art, vetting the story direction and pace, and ensuring deadlines are met. The artist Naoki Urasawa compared the relationship to that of a music producer and a recording artist, citing George Martin and The Beatles. All of this stands behind a magazine that has sold over 7.5 billion copies since 1968.