Where are these Famous Characters Now!?

Frontispiece for story, featuring the Osomatsu-kun cast

**Where are these Famous Characters Now!?** (あの有名キャラクターはいま!? ) is a one-shot by Fujio Akatsuka and Fujio Pro, made to commemorate the 30th anniversary of Weekly Shonen Sunday in 1989.

It infamously presents an idea where the entire main cast of Osomatsu-kun, save for Chibita, have long since died by that time.

## Overview

Weekly Shonen Sunday's anniversary features for the year would include certain classic manga-ka revisiting their series that had run in the magazine; Fujiko Fujio A wrote a new story for *Pro Golfer Saru*, while Mitsutoshi Furuya released a new one-shot looking back on his long run of *No-Good Father*.

Yet when it came to Akatsuka wanting to backtrack to the days of -kun, fans received a shocking, dark-humored work with a punchline that felt uncomfortable for those who had grown up with the cast, the opposite of nostalgia. Various fans would also memorably mistake this one-shot as the "ending to the series", with such a claim being repeated in urban legends that would persist for decades after the one-shot's release. In fact, *Osomatsu-kun* itself had already been running in a revived format in both Kodansha's Comic BomBom and TV Magazine, and the Studio Pierrot anime adaptation had given it a popular new lease on life.

In the events of the one-shot, a man has spent 27 years in a coma at a hospital only to awake and find out how the world has changed. He meets Chibita of the -kun series, a manga he had loved in his childhood, and they both wonder whatever had happened to the rest of the cast. The narration reveals that over the missing time, various cast members have died, each death becoming more bizarre than the last:

* On March 6, 1970, the entire Matsuno family all died of fugu poisoning after eating the dish for the very first time.
* On January 8, 1971, Iyami died of pyorrhea
* On December 8, 1975, Dayon attempted to challenge the Guiness Book of World Records' record for swallowing large objects, but suffocated to death.
* The very next day on December 9th, Hatabo was electrocuted to death by lightning when a bolt hit his flagpole.
* By April 1, 1978, Totoko died of anorexia nervosa, only weighing 3kg.
* Dekapan died on August 6, 1980, after he had switched to wearing memory foam boxers that wore down his testicles and caused him to contract tetanus.

This continues right down to the punchline where Fujio Akatsuka himself is revealed to have committed suicide from the pressure of deadlines and his alcoholism. Of course, readers would know the real Akatsuka did not give up then, but continued making new works into the 1990s even if his output eventually became more sporadic.

With this bleak outlook for the cast, it was not necessarily Akatsuka's way on closing the door on -kun (as it continued to run regularly until 1990) but meant to be his way of commemorating the "death" of the Showa era and the leap forward to Heisei. Yet there is also the less charitable interpretation among some readers and assistants that he had truly wanted to end -kun around that time, due to being short on ideas and his own gag interests clashing with the childrens' trends of the 1980s, but still had to keep a synergy going with the release of the anime.

In any case, it is not necessary to treat the work as being directly connected to -kun and to remember his usage of the Star System; it is only one of many possible outcomes for the characters (-kun itself had already experimented with different time-skip ideas via "Osomatsu-kun in 30 Years" and "Osomatsu-kun in 20 Years", and would have a "40 Years" chapter later in the TV Magazine run). There are also various chapters in the series itself where characters may die or be put in settings that are rather unusual to the "norm" that readers may expect, only for such details to be reset by the next story.

### Influence on "Osomatsu-san" fans

The impact of the one-shot and the urban legend it spawned as being misconstrued as a series finale would be revisited in 2015, coincidentally 27 years after the last -kun adaptation itself. The *Osomatsu-san* anime's stylistic choice of blue lineart gave way to a "World of Dead" theory, where this one-shot was used as a dark idea that the characters had all actually died of their given fates and the remade world in -san was simply a limbo they were consigned to.

The character designer Naoyuki Asano as well as other cast members would be made aware of such a conspiracy and poke fun at it in interviews, acknowledging the death idea. Ultimately, the blue lineart was indeed a mere stylistic device.

## Reprints

* Shogakukan: Appears as part of the "1980s" DVD-ROM set in the Fujio Akatsuka Complete Works collection, and the print-on-demand version later released through ComicPark.

## External Links

* Write-up on the one-shot at the Fujio Akatsuka Preservation Society (Japanese)