Books

Nothing Whatsoever All Out in the Open

by Kondoh Akino

translated by Ryan Holmberg

This collection of three stories by Akino Kondoh presents some of the cartoonist and animator's best-known work for Ax, Japan's premier venue for alternative manga, and a recent story about life in New York City.

Quiet stories of contemplation, mixed with the surreal strangeness just beyond conscious thought: pushing events into the background until you forget what they were, a girl feeling a strange presence as she goes to sleep, and losing part of yourself in preparing for someone's return.

World Map Room

by Yokoyama Yuichi

translated by Ryan Holmberg

In this, Yuichi Yokoyama’s long-awaited original graphic novel, published simultaneously in Japan and France, a stripped-back plot and minimal characterizations allow the artistry of Yokoyama’s ethereal drawings to shine through. The events within the narrative are spare and enigmatic: Yokoyama is as much fascinated by shapes and visual effects as he is by character and plot. First, the protagonists visit a city; then, our heroes watch airplanes departing and arriving at an airport; next, they go on board a ship and cross a river. Eventually, they arrive at a building where a man welcomes and guides them to the “world map room,” where they inspect a library. Eventually they leave, and reach a pond with a sunken ship. Their guide starts to explain the ship’s history, and slowly, with casual suddenness, the novel comes to a close. Yokoyama is the author of Travel, New Engineering, Color Engineering, and Garden (all published by PictureBox). He was the subject of a one-man show at The Kawasaki City Museum in 2010, and has exhibited in galleries and museums in Tokyo, Singapore, Rome and San Francisco. He lives and works in the suburbs of Tokyo.

The Mysterious Underground Men

by Osamu Tezuka

translated and with an essay by Ryan Holmberg

The influence of Osamu Tezuka (1928–89) on Japanese cartoons and animation is comparable only to a Walt Disney or an Art Spiegelman. Now, manga fans can finally enjoy the first full-color Tezuka work to be published in English. While Tezuka’s New Treasure Island (1946–47) was the first major hit for the “god of manga,” the artist himself regarded this later publication as the first of his signature “story manga.” Originally published in Osaka in 1948, The Mysterious Underground Men tells the story of Mimio the talking rabbit, as he struggles to prove his humanity while helping his friends save Earth from an invasion of angry humanoid ants. Inspired by Bernhard Kellermann’s Der Tunnel (1913), and drawing widely on European and American science fiction as well as Milt Gross’ own pioneering graphic novel, He Done Her Wrong (1930), this full-color edition of The Mysterious Underground Men will not only introduce to English-language readers a founding father of modern Japanese comics, but will also offer a rare glimpse of the wide-ranging Western cultural sources that made up young Tezuka’s world. This is the second volume in PictureBox’s Ten Cent Manga series, edited by Ryan Holmberg, which aims to explore that mysterious nether-realm where Japanese and American popular culture overlap.

Winner of the 2014 Eisner Award for Best US Edition of International Material, Asia

Gold Pollen and other stories

by Hayashi Seiichi

edited, translated, and with an essay by Ryan Holmberg

Seiichi Hayashi was a leading figure in the hotbed of avant-garde artistic production of 1960s and early ‘70s Tokyo. He is best known for his lyrical and experimental manga for Garo, the famous alternative comics magazine. This volume collects a selection of Hayashi’s most important manga from this period, including “Red Dragonfly,” “Yamanba Lullaby,” and “Gold Pollen,” as well as the autobiographical “Dwelling in Flowers.” Published here in their original full color, these stories mix traditional Japanese aesthetics with Pop art sensibilities, and range in topic from the legacies of Japanese rightwing nationalism and World War II, to the pervasive influence of America over 1960s Japanese youth culture. This first color reprinting of Hayashi’s work captures the vivid experimentation of Japanese art at this time. Hayashi’s youth and beginnings as an artist are illuminated by an autobiographical essay from 1972, translated here for the first time into English. Art historian Ryan Holmberg discusses Hayashi’s place in postwar Japanese art and manga, as well as his wider contributions to the Tokyo avant-garde as a designer and experimental animator. This lavishly illustrated book is likely to have widespread crossover appeal for design and fashion aficionados, as well as for students of the manga genre.

The Last of the Mohicans

by Sugiura Shigeru

translated and with an essay by Ryan Holmberg

Sugiura Shigeru (1908-2000) is widely regarded as one of the masters of Japanese comics. His 1953 adaptation of James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans sold over 60,000 copies, quickly establishing him as one of the most sought-after children's manga artists of the 50s. His popularity had faded by the mid-60s, but he made a comeback later in the decade with a number of highly surrealistic, collage-like works, and he chose to rework Mohicans in this new style in 1974. Considered a masterpiece of postwar manga, The Last of the Mohicans is as beautiful to look at as it is a delight to read. This PictureBox edition—the first book-length publication of Sugiura in English—is edited and translated by Ryan Holmberg, who also provides a detailed introduction. It is the inaugural volume in PictureBox's Ten Cent Manga series, exploring that mysterious nether-realm where Japanese and American popular culture overlap.

Color Engineering

by Yokoyama Yuichi

translated by Ryan Holmberg

Comic artist Yuichi Yokoyama (born 1967) draws wordless narratives of scenarios that verge on visual abstraction. Stripped of any detail that might orient them in the past, present or future, they record the self-determined activities of machines and architectural structures in a pre- or post-human universe. With his fourth volume for PictureBox, designed and edited by the artist himself, Yokoyama broaches significant new terrain: color! Color Engineering reproduces both older and unseen imagery from the 2000s with dozens of color drawings and paintings that were executed in 2010 during a six-week open studio event held in Tokyo, at which the public was able to view Yokoyama at work. A selection of these canvases is reproduced here as gatefold pages, and is integrated among comic-strip sequences executed in a variety of techniques: photography, loose marker drawings, hyper-real portraiture and much more. These sequences continue his investigations into the world of machines, architecture and post-human fashion, and are the first Yokoyama narratives to provide insight into the artist's personal world, in details of his rural habitat.

Garo Manga: The First Decade, 1964-1973

by Ryan Holmberg

Garo Manga: The First Decade, 1964-1973 is a catalogue supporting an exhibition of the same name at the Center for Book Arts, New York City. It offers a survey of the renowned legendary alt-manga monthly Garo during the period of its greatest artistic efflorescence and political commitment in the ‘60s and early ‘70s. Among comic enthusiasts and historians of postwar Japanese culture alike, Garo is famed for literary and avant-garde experimentation within the comics medium as well as for engaging with the main political issues of the day, from rightwing incursions into national education policy to the Vietnam War. The exhibition featured each issue of Garo during the magazine’s first decade, from its inaugural issue in September 1964 to its 120th in December 1973. Among the artists spotlighted were Shirato Sanpei, Mizuki Shigeru, Tsuge Yoshiharu, Tsurita Kuniko, Kusunoki Shōhei, Hayashi Seiichi, Sasaki Maki, Tsuge Tadao, Katsumata Susumu, Suzuki Ōji, Abe Shin’ichi, and Akasegawa Genpei. Though this catalog has been sold out since the exhibition in 2010, an expanded edition is currently being planned for release hopefully in 2022.