Detective Conan is one of the longest running anime and manga and is widely popular, but creator Gosho Aoyama almost ended it all...
Detective Conan is one of the most beloved and well-known shows and manga worldwide. It has enjoyed a long tenure and its length can only be rivaled by shows and manga like One Piece.
But in another universe things could have been quite different. Manga artist, Gosho Aoyama, has revealed that the manga could have ended almost 30 years ago already, way before it has hit the mainstream popularity it enjoys today. But what could the reasons for this early end have been?
Detective Conan Artist Almost Ended Manga Early
In Gosho Aoyama's 30th Anniversary Book, the artist revealed that there were two reasons why he almost ended Detective Conan way early, before it had its huge success.
One of the reasons he revealed was that coming up with new mysteries every single week was exhausting and "extremely hard". Understandable, who could come up with new detective cases on a weekly basis for your protagonist to solve, right?
The second reason was that he hated the fact that his editing staff and managers got too involved in his craft and kept telling him what to do, which infuriated Aoyama.
One example of this came from manga artist Kazuhiko Shimamoto, who revealed that while Aoyama was working on Yaiba – a manga released even before Detective Conan – one of the editors criticized the main character's expression in a panel. When Aoyama asked how he wanted the character to actually look, the editor simply took the paper and burned it, even throwing it at the artist – and I thought my boss was bad, eh?
This type of behavior made the artist want to end Conan early, and the manga could have been finished 27 years ago already. Thankfully, Aoyama decided to take an elongated break in 1997 – something which at the time he hadn't really done yet.
While he was on vacation, he actually had decided to end Detective Conan, but then his editor called him and asked whether he wanted to work on a Detective Conan anime movie ? Since Aoyama was a huge anime fan, he decided to move on with the project, and thus kept drawing and creating new cases for Conan to solve.