Izumi Tsubaki (born December 11, 1986) is a mangaka writing for the Shōjo Demographic... For the most part. She made her debut in her first year of high school after winning an honorable mention in a manga contest. Now doesn't that sound familiar? Almost all of her works have been published in Hana to Yume, with the exceptions of Monthly Girls' Nozaki-kun, published in GanGan Online, and the one shot A Gentle Time, published in Young Animal ZERO. The fact that both of these are sources targeted at men should tell you just how "girly" her works usually are.
Fellow mangaka Yoshiki Koga is her twin sister. She cites Yoshihiro Togashi as her inspiration... Though how she made the jump from reading shonen action to writing shoujo comedy isn't clear.
Serialized manga by Izumi Tsubaki:
- Oyayubi kara Romance (Lit. Romance From the Thumb, officially localized as The Magic Touch)
- Ore-sama Teacher
- Monthly Girls' Nozaki-kun
One shots by Izumi Tsubaki:
- Don't Hate Me
- Chijimete Distance (Lit. Shorten the Distance)
- Tell Me, Prince
- You Like Me, Don't You?!
- A Gentle Time
Tropes commonly featured in Tsubaki's works:
- Creator Thumbprint: She has a few:
- Heroines who are dramatically shorter than their love interests, either because she's abnormally short, he's abnormally tall, or both.
- Sustained Misunderstandings, stretched out across at least a full chapter and often as the basis of an entire arc.
- Heroines who are obsessed with one topic (Chiaki from The Magic Touch: massages, Mafuyu from Ore-sama Teacher: cute girls, Chiyo from Nozaki-kun: Nozaki, Nahoko from You Like Me: getting a boyfriend, Akari from A Gentle Time: sweet breads, etc.). The girls have something preventing them from getting what they want (often just their own personalities), which results in them being easily manipulated by their desires. They can also be expected to turn into total Motor Mouths when their obsessions come up.
- Playing around with gender and gender roles.
- Denser and Wackier: A shoujo writer more dedicated to nonsense you'll not find.
- Multiple Demographic Appeal: Many of her works have legions of male fans. Tsubaki's had works with nearly identical tones and writing styles run in shoujo, shonen, and seinen books, so it's debatable who's even the target and who's the
periphery anymore. - Poor Communication Kills: Her works would be 90% shorter and 100% less entertaining if any of her characters were capable of just talking like normal people.
- Reused Character Design: Common. All three of her serialized works feature the exact same extremely tall, black haired hunk design as their male leads, while Ore-sama Teacher went so far as to use the same design for unrelated characters in the same work.
- World of Ham: Tsubaki is very good at drawing extremely dramatic facial expressions and writing unnecessarily dramatic dialogue.
