Search results for ""Author Ryan Holmberg""

A classic character of Japanese literature is reimagined as a mischievous, shapeshifting adventurer in this zany, Pop Art–esque gag manga by a titan of the genre.In the early 1960s, the Japanese manga artist Shigeru Sugiura took the well-loved literary character Ninja Sarutobi Sasuke and made him his own.In this legendary gag manga, Ninja Sarutobi Sasuke, Shigeru sends the famous Ninja on a wild, eye-popping adventure: Sarutobi encounters cowboys and aliens, spaceships and sailing ships, mid-60s celebrity cameos, mushroom clouds, detectives with squirt guns, and more in a delightful and ever-surprising world.Available for the first time in English and with a new essay by Ryan Holmberg, Ninja Sarutobi Sasuke is a must-read of trippy visuals and silly storytelling.

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Nejishiki unveils the most iconic scenes from Yoshiharu Tsuge s highly respected body of work alongside his most beloved stories. A cornerstone of Japan s legendary 1960s counterculture that galvanized avant-garde manga and comics criticism, the title story follows an injured young man as he wanders through a village of strangers in search of emotional and physical release. Other stories in this collection follow a series of weary travelers who while away sultry nights and face menacing doppelgangers. Even banal activities like afternoon strolls uncover unsavory impulses. The emotionally and erotically charged imagery collected in this third volume remains as shocking and vivid today as it did upon its debut fifty years ago. Tsuge s stories push boundaries, abruptly crossing the threshold of conventional storytelling. Unassuming protagonists venture further into eerie symbolism against a shadowy, perceptibly dreamlike landscape easily mistaken for the real world. The angst that pervades postwar Japanese society threatens to devour his characters and their pastoral sensibilities as each protagonist s wanderlust turns surreal.

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The wife of Japan s most lauded manga-ka documents a year in their lives with her own artistry. In 1981, Fujiwara Maki began a picture diary about daily life with her son and husband, the legendary manga author Tsuge Yoshiharu. Publishing was not her original intention. I wanted to record our family s daily life while our son, Shosuke, was small. But as 8mm cameras were too expensive and we were poor, I decided on the picture diary format instead. I figured Shosuke would enjoy reading it when he got older. Drawn in a simple, personable style, and covering the same years fictionalized in Tsuge s final masterpiece The Man Without Talent, Fujiwara s journal focuses on the joys of daily life amidst the stresses of childrearing, housekeeping, and managing a depressed husband. A touching and inspiring testimony of one Japanese woman's resilience, My Picture Diary is also an important glimpse of the enigma that is Tsuge. Fujiwara s diary is unsparing. It provides a stark picture of the gender divide in their household: Tsuge sleeps until noon and does practically nothing. He never compliments her cooking, and dictates how money is spent. Not once is he shown drawing. And yet Fujiwara remains surprisingly empathetic toward her mercurial husband. Translated by Ryan Holmberg, this edition sheds light on Fujiwara's life, her own career in art, writing, and underground theater, and her extensive influence upon her husband's celebrated manga.

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A celebrated masterwork shimmering with vulnerability from one of alt-manga's most important female artists. 'Now that we ve woken from the dream, what are we going to do?' Chiharu thinks to herself, rubbing her husband s head affectionately. Set in an apartment complex on the outskirts of Tokyo, Yamada Murasaki's Talk To My Back (1981 84) explores the fraying of Japan's suburban middle-class dreams through a woman's relationship with her two daughters as they mature and assert their independence, and with her husband, who works late and sees his wife as little more than a domestic servant. While engaging frankly with the compromises of marriage and motherhood, Yamada remains generous with the characters who fetter her protagonist. When her husband has an affair, Chiharu feels that she, too, has broken the marital contract by straying from the template of the happy housewife. Yamada saves her harshest criticisms for society at large, particularly its false promises of eternal satisfaction within the nuclear family as fears of having been 'thrown away inside that empty vessel called the household' gnaw at Chiharu s soul. Yamada was the first cartoonist in Japan to use the expressive freedoms of alt-manga to address domesticity and womanhood in a realistic, critical, and sustained way. A watershed work of literary manga, Talk To My Back was serialized in the influential magazine Garo in the early 1980s, and is translated by Eisner nominated Ryan Holmberg.

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