Black Clover Author Yuki Tabata Says He Gave Asta a Happy-Go-Lucky Personality After His Failure With Hungry Joker’s Quiet Hero

Yuki Tabata’s Black Clover became one of the defining modern shonen manga, but the series was shaped in part by a major failure earlier in the creator’s career. Before Asta and the Magic Knights, Tabata serialized Hungry Joker in Weekly Shonen Jump. The series lasted only 24 chapters before ending in 2013, and Tabata later identified the personality of its protagonist as an important lesson he carried into Black Clover. In a resurfaced 2017 interview with Shonen Jump, Tabata explained…