It's not as if Naruto wasn't a complete shitshow for the last 10 years of it's run. A successful one, sure, but mostly on the pure momentum of its first few years. It's little surprise Kishi's next series didn't land.
Whatever Horikoshi does after he rushes MHA to a conclusion in the next three months probably won't land either.
And the series the Kenshin author did after Kenshin didn't win anyone over. No one cares about Buso Renkin.
It's actually really rare that manga authors get multiple long running hits. Takehashi is the only one I can think of with multiple major successes under her belt and even she hasn't had a big hit since Inu Yasha. Rin-Ne ran for 10 years and no one cares. I haven't heard a single thing about Mao. Toriyama had Dr. SLump and Dragonball and since then he's done nothing but shorts. Togashi did YYH and HxH. Akamatsu had Love Hina and Negima but you never hear about any of his other five series. Can you name anything else the Sailor Moon creator did? Takeuchi has worked on 11 different series, 7 of them after Sailor moon.
Two big hits are about all any author ever gets, and even that's rare.
Not just even within manga, in the novel world as well. J.K. Rowling is the best selling author n the planet but no one cares at all about the TEN books she wrote after Harry Potter. You didn't even know she'd written more than like 2 books after Harry Potter, right? But she's written TEN books since 2012 that aren't HP related and people stopped reporting them after the first like, two.
So "It was a successful author before and they aren't nailing it now" doesn't mean much. Hitting it twice is pretty rare.
@Daz:
I just don't get the instinct to lump all of the "fault" entirely on either the author or the editor, given that we'll never ever know for sure who suggested what.
I am relatively confident it wasn't the editor that told him to put into the story a fourth wall breaking rant that directly insulted the readers for not liking the direction of the story.
Any number of the bad decisions might have been the editor, but that one, the worst one, is almost certainly on the writer. As is the lack of characterization or making any of the characters interesting.
If the editor suggested "do a training arc" or "add more powers" and that clashed with what the writer wanted and he couldn't pull it off, that's sort of on both of them. If the editor said "You should insert a big muscle woman that controls fire because I have a fetish", that's the editor's fault.
But regardless of if the editor's advice was good or bad, the series was tanking and due to be cancelled before the obvious sudden shifts occurred. If they didn't try anything to course correct, that would have been a failing on the editor's part too.
I mean, we were all able to spot the sudden direction shift and comment on it before he broke the fourth wall, it was pretty obvious.
So you're saying that for japanese readers this would absolutely read as bitter unprofessionalism…and yet it somehow made it to publication? Everyone can pick up on the hidden signals except the people publishing his manga?
He phrased it nicely.
He didn't say "My editor ruined the manga." He said "I had planned to go in a different direction but then things changed."
It's NOT bad or harmful on its own, especially months apart from the other statements.
If that was the first thing ever said on the subject, wouldn't read anything into it at all.
But right here on a message board, where there is nothing inbetween and statements are practically back to back, it stands out a lot more.