Hiro Mashima: At first, I thought you had to go to school to learn how to draw manga,
so I went to an art school after high school. But it just didn't sit well with me, so I
ended up teaching myself.
Q5: How did you become a professional manga artist?
Hiro Mashima: I created a 60 page original work that I took into editors to review.
Then I won an amateur manga artists' competition. After a year, I made my official
debut in 1999.
Q6: What kind of environment do you work in while you're drawing your manga?
Hiro Mashima: I work in an 8,000 sq. feet area with seven desks with a sofa and TV
where I can play video games with my assistants.
Q7: What was the initial inspiration for Fairy Tail -- was there a movie you saw, or a
book you read that made you think it would be cool to do a story about a guild of
wizards?
Hiro Mashima: There weren't any books or movies, but I've always love magicians and
wizards. So I thought it would be interesting to do a story about a group of wizards. I
might be getting older, but I still like hanging out with my friends, I still play video
games with friends until the early morning hours. So just the idea was to draw a
community of friends, and how my friends and I would be if we were magicians.
Q8: When you started to work on Fairy Tail, was there something that you really
wanted to try to accomplish with this series, or a different approach that you wanted
to try compared to your work with Rave Master?
Hiro Mashima: Towards the end of Rave Master, the story was a little sentimental, a
little sad. So I wanted to make this new story a lot of fun. The main difference is that
in Rave Master, the goal was to save the world. In Fairy Tail, it's all about this guild of
wizards, and the jobs they have to do. It's about their everyday lives. Over time, this