Misplaced Pages

#326673

39-402: The magazine was first published on 20 December 1947. The magazine under the editorship of Kenichi Katō motivated its readers in its unique "readers section" to send in their own comics to the magazine for competitions. Many new artists emerged due to this; for example Yoshihiro Tatsumi and Hideko Mizuno at a young age sent in manga to competitions of the magazine. Young artists published in

78-419: A chance to live at his home " dojo " with other aspiring manga artists, but Tatsumi postponed the offer until he graduated from high school. One of the members of Ōshiro's dojo showed Tatsumi's Children's Island to the publisher Tsuru Shobō, which ended up publishing it in 1954. Tatsumi eventually attended college instead of apprenticing with Ōshiro, studying for entrance exams , but purposefully didn't finish

117-489: A film-like experience. Manga scholar Mitsuhiro Asakawa points out the frequency of scenes showing train crossings in his early komaga that are meant to evoke an "excited feeling". Shea Hennum says his later style in works like Cigarette Girl is characterized by short-limbed characters with abstract faces resembling caricatures , as well as urban background drawings. Publishers Weekly wrote: "He tells stories without complicated dialogue, often getting everything out of

156-507: A gallery in Ginza created a solo exhibition of Matsumoto's work. Several galleries made solo exhibitions of his papercutting work. In the 2010s, he also gained international recognition: his work was featured in the exhibition Gekiga: Alternative Manga from Japan at The Cartoon Museum in London in 2014. His work was translated into English, French and Spanish. Cigarette Girl was nominated for

195-755: A number of European countries, and competition for the rights for Drawn & Quarterly. A full-length animated feature on the life and short stories of Yoshihiro Tatsumi was released in 2011. The film, Tatsumi , is directed by Eric Khoo and The Match Factory handled world sales. Tatsumi received the Japan Cartoonists Association Award in 1972. In 2009, he was awarded the Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize for his autobiography, A Drifting Life . The same work garnered him multiple Eisner awards (Best Reality-Based Work and Best U.S. Edition of International Material–Asia ) in 2010 and

234-625: A panel through something as simple as emotive, onomatopoeic sound effects." Manga scholar Ryan Holmberg credits Matsumoto as one of the pioneers of alternative manga through the development of komaga , but also says that it is a lesser-known term than Tatsumi's gekiga . Matsumoto was one of the first to use a consistent dramatic, rather than comic, story mode in his manga. Tatsumi was influenced by Matsumoto and they are considered to have been friendly rivals. Shōichi Sakurai, Tatsumi's brother and manga critic, called Matsumoto "the true innovator of gekiga and today's manga" in an article for Garo in

273-620: A prize for an oil painting in 1949. During this time, he also gained an interest in manga by discovering the works of Osamu Tezuka . He rented titles such as Nextworld from rental libraries . In 1951, Matsumoto visited Tezuka at his home in Takarazuka to get his autograph. Afterwards, he decided to become a manga artist himself. The first work he drew was the Tezuka-inspired science fiction manga Chikyū no Saigo ("When Worlds Collide") in 1952. While several publishers rejected this manga,

312-461: A story, and he pitched the idea of adapting Alexandre Dumas ' The Count of Monte Cristo into a ten-volume Japanese period piece, but his boss did not feel he was skilled enough or had enough time. The publisher put Tatsumi, Matsumoto, Takao Saito , and Kuroda in a "manga camp," an apartment in Tennōji-ku, Osaka . After his brother Okimasa's hospitalization, however, the 21-year-old Hiroshi left

351-454: Is a form of storytelling where the stories are retold for generations, unlike manga, and are humorous as opposed to gekiga , which drew Tatsumi to adapt the stories. Tatsumi attempted to combine the humor of the stories with the visual language of gekiga , two forms which he thought were incompatible, but he later realized that they both rely strongly on timing and that rakugo has much more depth and variety, forcing him to reevaluate

390-585: Is considered a precursor to the term gekiga ("dramatic pictures"), which fellow Hinomaru artist Yoshihiro Tatsumi created a year later. For one month in the summer of 1956, Hinomaru Bunko arranged for Matsumoto, Tatsumi and Takao Saito , to live together in Osaka in order to increase their productivity, and this became a space of artistic exchange between the artists. At the same time as other manga artists publishing at Hinomaru Bunko, Matsumoto moved to Tokyo in 1957. With Saito, Tatsumi, and five others, he founded

429-409: Is considered the first mystery manga magazine in the rental library market. His work became a catalyst for the manga movement komaga ("panel pictures") due to its innovation in importing visual motifs from cinema. The term komaga was conceptualized as a new form of comic in opposition to the term "manga" and started appearing on the covers of Matsumoto's books and short stories from 1956 on. Komaga

SECTION 10

#1733084922327

468-510: The regards sur le monde award in Angoulême International Comics Festival in 2012. Masahiko Matsumoto Masahiko Matsumoto ( 松本 正彦 , Matsumoto Masahiko , November 24, 1934 – February 14, 2005) was a Japanese manga artist . He is considered a pioneer of alternative manga through his incorporation of cinematic techniques into manga from the mid-1950s onward. His style known as komaga , together with

507-528: The Harvey Award for Best American Edition of Foreign Material). In 1970, Tatsumi published a number of stories that, according to him, "marked a breakthrough and rekindled [his] passion in gekiga ". His approach was to use a "bleak story" gekiga style without the gags and humor in mainstream manga. These stories, which were serialized in various manga magazines, including Weekly Shōnen Magazine and Garo , were translated and published as Abandon

546-493: The rental book market ; during this period he produced seventeen book-length manga and several volumes of short stories. Hinomaru Bunko's editor established a new monthly collection with its top authors titled Shadow ( 影 , Kage ) . Although influenced by Tezuka's cinematic style, Tatsumi and his colleagues were not interested in making comics for children. They wanted to make comics for adults that were more graphic and showed more violence. Tatsumi explained, "Part of that

585-453: The "manga camp." Back home, he experienced a burst of creativity and created the manga he wanted to, titled Black Blizzard . Black Blizzard was created during a boom in short story magazines, so Tatsumi tried to come up with new forms of expression, such as conveying movement realistically, though his art was rough and used a lot of diagonal lines. Published in November 1956, Black Blizzard

624-562: The Children's Manga Association. This led to a round-table discussion for the grade school edition of Mainichi Shimbun with pioneering manga artist Osamu Tezuka . Tatsumi formed a relationship with Tezuka, who encouraged him to try making longer stories. Another well-known manga artist, Noboru Ōshiro  [ ja ] , also gave Tatsumi feedback and advice. Ōshiro later asked to redraw and publish Tatsumi's immature work Happily Adrift , but did not end up doing so. Ōshiro offered Hiroshi

663-613: The Old in Tokyo , by Drawn & Quarterly in 2006. The collection won the 2007 Harvey Award for Best U.S. Edition of Foreign Material. Abandon the Old in Tokyo was also nominated for the 2007 Eisner Award for Best Archival Collection/Project – Comic Books. In 1971 and 1972, Tatsumi transitioned from rental comics to publishing in magazines. As a result, he started to tackle social issues in his gekiga work, and his editors gave him complete creative freedom. Due to Japan's political atmosphere at

702-593: The age of 79 on March 7, 2015. His work has been translated into many languages, and Canadian publisher Drawn & Quarterly took part in a project to publish an annual compendium of his works focusing each on the highlights of one year of his work (beginning with 1969) that produced three volumes, edited by American cartoonist Adrian Tomine . According to Tomine, this is one event in a seemingly coincidental rise to worldwide popularity along with: reissued collections of his stories in Japan, acquisition of translation rights in

741-492: The atelier Gekiga Kōbō in 1959. They started publishing the magazine Matenrō as a creative platform for the movement. Until 1962, he produced thousands of pages of gekiga . The atelier was short-lived; it disbanded in 1960 over internal divisions, but was important for the development of gekiga . In the mid-1960s, he slowed down his pace and shifted his career to seinen manga , publishing gag manga like Panda Love (1973) and more personal works. His last published manga

780-768: The early 1970s. Tatsumi published the autobiographical manga A Drifting Life from 1995 until 2004 recounting his manga career and the emergence of gekiga , also as a response to Matsumoto's Gekiga Bakatachi!! . From the beginning of the 2000s on, Matsumoto's work gained a new appreciation and was re-edited in Japan by publishers Shogakukan ( The Man Next Door ) and Seirinkogeisha ( Panda Love , Cigarette Girl , Gekiga Bakatachi!! ). The 2009 Shogakukan reprint of The Man Next Door published interviews with Matsumoto as well as testimonies by artists Yoshihiro Tatsumi, Takao Saito, Hayao Miyazaki , Shinji Mizushima , Shigeru Mizuki , Ryoichi Ikegami , Kazuo Umezu , Yoshiharu Tsuge , Noboru Kawasaki and Tatsuhiko Yamagami . In 2003,

819-504: The early stages of his career as a cartoonist. It was released in Japan as two bound volumes on November 20, 2008, and published as an 840-page single volume by Drawn & Quarterly in 2009. The book earned Tatsumi the Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize , and won two Eisner Awards . One of Tatsumi's last major works was Fallen Words ( 劇画寄席 芝浜 , Gekiga Yose: Shibahama ) , a collection of rakugo short stories published in 2009 by Basilico. Rakugo (literally "Fallen Words")

SECTION 20

#1733084922327

858-405: The exam. He met with the publisher Kenbunsha, which commissioned him to create a detective story similar to the fictional French thief Arsène Lupin , but the company reduced its payment offer so instead he published Thirteen Eyes with Hinomaru Bunko  [ ja ] , with whom he would go on to publish many works. At this point, Tatsumi embarked on a three-year period of producing manga for

897-454: The form and see that it was closer to gekiga than he thought. Publishers Weekly complimented the humor and relatable nature of the fables, concluding that Tatsumi's "flat yet expressive drawings" help move the stories smoothly. Garrett Martin of Paste called the manga "a slight work, but fascinating as a historical and cultural artifact", comparing it to as if Robert Crumb adapted traditional folk songs. Tatsumi died of cancer at

936-447: The magazine were often contacted by other publishers for commissions. Shotaro Ishinomori , Fujiko Fujio , Jirō Tsunoda and Leiji Matsumoto started their professional careers in the magazine. Tezuka founded his magazine COM in 1967 with the intention to give space for new manga artists to experiment, like Manga Shōnen had been during its existence. The magazine managed to capture the new graphic developments of story manga, as it

975-489: The manga industry. In a 2007 interview, Tasumi described Gekiga Young as an erotic "third-rate magazine" with low pay, which gave him freedom with the types of work he could create. Sixteen of the stories Tatsumi produced during this period were published in the 2005 Drawn & Quarterly collection The Push Man and Other Stories (which was later nominated for the Ignatz Award for Outstanding Anthology or Collection and

1014-506: The manga of Yoshihiro Tatsumi and Takao Saito , was the catalyst of the gekiga movement. Matsumoto was born in 1934 in Osaka , Japan. Growing up, his father, who died in 1943, forbid him to read manga. In 1945, during the end of World War II , his family fled to Kobe . After the war, he subscribed to the magazine Shōnen Club and was interested in its illustrations, prose, and science sections. He began drawing during middle school and won

1053-709: The rental library publisher Tōyō Shuppansha proposed for him to draw another work, as they saw that science fiction manga were not selling as well anymore. This led to Matsumoto's debut work as a manga artist, the schoolhouse comedy Botchan Sensei , which was published in October 1953. After creating several more comedies, he published his first non-humoristic work in March 1954, Botchan Tantei ("Kid Detective"), with publisher Hinomaru Bunko. He drew both full-length books as well as short stories for Hinomaru Bunko's mystery anthology Kage ("Shadow") from its first issue in March 1956. Kage

1092-523: The term komaga ("panel pictures") to describe his style in opposition to mainstream manga ( lit. "whimsical pictures"). Matsumoto imported visual motifs from cinema, especially film noir , and drew inspiration from crime literature by Edogawa Ranpo , Seishi Yokomizo , and the Tarao Bannai series for his detective and mystery manga. He used low-angle shots , metered breakdown , metered montage , and chronoscopia ("time-watching") in order to provide

1131-459: The time, Tatsumi felt disillusioned by his country's fascination with its own economic growth. One of his stories, "Hell," was inspired by a photograph Tatsumi saw of a shadow burnt into a wall by radiation heat of the nuclear bomb. "Hell" was published in the Japanese Playboy , which (happily) surprised Tatsumi because the usual manga publishers would not put out that kind of subject matter at

1170-456: The time. Nine of the stories he worked on during this period — which were created without assistants — were published in 2008 by Drawn & Quarterly in the collection Good-Bye , which was nominated for the 2009 Eisner Award for Best Archival Collection/Project—Comic Books. Tatsumi spent 11 years working on A Drifting Life ( 劇画漂流 , Gekiga Hyōryū ) , a thinly veiled autobiographical manga that chronicled his life from 1945 to 1960,

1209-614: Was a Japanese manga artist whose work was first published in his teens, and continued through the rest of his life. He is widely credited with starting the gekiga style of alternative manga in Japan, having allegedly coined the term in 1957. His work frequently illustrated the darker elements of life. Tatsumi grew up in Osaka , near a U.S. military base called Itami Airfield . As a child, with his old brother Okimasa, Tatsumi contributed amateur four-panel manga to magazines that featured readers' work, winning several times. After corresponding with like-minded children, Tatsumi helped form

Manga Shōnen - Misplaced Pages Continue

1248-459: Was an incommensurable difference between what I wanted to express and what you could express in children's comics. In 1957, Tatsumi coined the term gekiga to differentiate his work from the more common term manga , or "whimsical pictures." Other names he considered include katsudōga and katsuga , both derived from katsudō eiga or "moving pictures," an early term for films, showing the movement's cinematic influence. Tatsumi's work "Yūrei Taxi"

1287-421: Was founded in 1964. Tatsumi and other influential gekiga artists contributed to Garo . In the late 1960s, Tatsumi worked on a series of stories which were serialized in the manga magazine Gekiga Young as well as in self-published dōjinshi magazines. During this period, Tatsumi was running a publishing house for manga rental shops so he did not have time to work on his own manga; he felt like an outcast in

1326-536: Was influenced by the newspaper stories I would read. I would have an emotional reaction of some kind and want to express that in my comics." In short, Tatsumi aspired to create an "anti-manga manga", against his friendly rival and colleague Masahiko Matsumoto . Some of Tatsumi's first "anti-manga" manga were published in Shadow . Because Shadow was reducing its artists' output, however, Hinomaru asked his authors to also work on full-length stories. Tatsumi yearned to do such

1365-565: Was popular in the Osaka -based akahon market and gained a big readership. Kenichi Katō had previously been the editor of the popular boys magazine Shōnen Club at Kodansha and had good connections to some of the most popular artists at the time. Kimba the White Lion by Osamu Tezuka was the most popular series from the magazine. Among the series featured in the magazine were: Yoshihiro Tatsumi Yoshihiro Tatsumi ( 辰巳 ヨシヒロ , Tatsumi Yoshihiro , June 10, 1935 – March 7, 2015)

1404-443: Was straying too far from its roots and wanted to reclaim its meaning. In 2009, he said "Gekiga is a term people throw around now to describe any manga with violence or eroticism or any spectacle. It's become synonymous with spectacular. But I write manga about households and conversations, love affairs, mundane stuff that is not spectacular. I think that's the difference." The monthly magazine Garo , devoted to publishing gekiga ,

1443-723: Was the autobiographical manga Gekiga Bakatachi!! , serialized in Shogakukan 's magazine Big Comic in 1979, which recounts his experience of creating the foundations for the gekiga movement together with Tatsumi and Saito in Osaka in the 1950s. From 1980 on, he focused his artistic career on papercutting . He died of cancer in 2005. Matsumoto was strongly influenced by Tezuka at the beginning of his career, especially Tezuka's focus on story rather than humor. Unlike Tezuka, Matsumoto drew more elongated characters and made his stories consistently dramatic without comic elements, which Tezuka had included in all of his works. Matsumoto developed

1482-528: Was the first to be called gekiga when it was published at the end of 1957. In 1959, the Gekiga Kōbō ( 劇画工房 ) formed in Tokyo with eight members including Tatsumi, Matsumoto and Takao Saito . The group wrote a sort of "Gekiga Manifesto" that was sent to various publishers and newspapers declaring their mission. Some authors use the term gekiga to describe works that only have shock factor. In 1968, Tatsumi published Gekiga College because he felt gekiga

1521-427: Was well received by Hiroshi's fellow authors, with Masaki Sato ( 佐藤まさあき ) calling it "the manga of the future". What I aimed to do was increase the age of the readership of comics. It wasn't that I was trying to create anything literary, but I did want to create an older audience. I didn't do that single-handedly, but I did succeed to a certain level. And, again, part of that was accomplished out of necessity. There

#326673