Books

Bat Kid

by Inoue Kazuo

translated and with an essay by Ryan Holmberg

Before Ichiro, before Star of the Giants, even before the Nippon Professional Baseball league, there was Inoue Kazuo’s Bat Kid (1947-49), celebrated as the first major baseball manga in Japan. Originally serialized in the legendary magazine Manga Shōnen, Bat Kid played an essential role in the growth of postwar manga. Its popularity drew aspiring cartoonists to Manga Shōnen’s famous amateur submissions section, many of whom would later go pro. It kept Manga Shōnen in business long enough to host Tezuka Osamu’s first major magazine serial, Jungle Emperor. After Inoue died suddenly in 1949, the artist who oversaw the continuation of Bat Kid, Fukui Eiichi, later went on to revolutionize manga by creating the groundwork for sports manga and gekiga both. The condensed book edition of Bat Kid—on which this English edition is based—was crowned the top children’s manga by Tokyo’s Mitsukoshi department store in 1948. The many baseball manga that began appearing in the ‘50s, leading to an explosion of sports manga in the ‘60s, all drew inspiration from Inoue’s pioneering work.

A rare opportunity to read early postwar manga in English, this edition of Bat Kid also contains a copiously illustrated essay by historian and translator Ryan Holmberg explaining the significance of Bat Kid, artist Inoue Kazuo’s career, and the popularity of baseball in Japan before and after World War II. Whether you’re manga mad or baseball crazy, this unique volume will not disappoint. Pick up a copy today and experience for yourself the baseball manga that started it all!

Praise for Bat Kid

Set in the early post World War II era, Bat Kid gives readers a rare opportunity to learn about the effects of WWII on Japanese baseball and the game’s reconciliatory power during a very sundering time.
—Germeen Tanas, Nine: A Journal of Baseball History & Culture

F

by Imai Arata

translated and with an essay by Ryan Holmberg

The tsunami and nuclear meltdowns of 2011 seem like yesterday. Wreckage still litters Japan's coastline. Fukushima's fields are piled high with contaminated soil. Tohoku, northern Japan, furious about how they have been treated by Tokyo, has seceded from the union. The rebels, known as the Nihonmatsu Front, are battling the more heavily armed Japanese government along the southern border of Fukushima. Meanwhile, they are being overwhelmed internally by a faction who call themselves the State of F. Composed of radicalized Tohoku natives and foreign guerrillas, the black-clad F knows only absolute obedience and cutthroat terror.

Though virtually unknown in its home country, Imai Arata’s F is the edgiest work of manga made in the wake of the 2011 disasters. Crossing splintery drawings of the devastations wrought by the tsunami and meltdowns with images sourced from Islamic State propaganda from the Middle East, F trespasses upon many taboos regarding political expression and etiquette in Japan. Originally self-published and sold at avant-garde art exhibitions, Imai’s F is truly underground. It deserves to become a classic.

Praise for F

Imai Arata's F is a stark and harrowing look at real world events framed through one of the largest natural disasters to affect Japan. It is a must-read for fans of alternative/indie manga, and anyone who calls themselves a manga or comics fan.
—Uchuu Shelf

Red Flowers

by Tsuge Yoshiharu

edited and with an essay by Asakawa Mitsuhiro and Ryan Holmberg, translated by Holmberg

Yoshiharu Tsuge leaves early genre trappings behind, taking a reflective and humorous approach in these stories inspired by his own travels. Red Flowers ranges from sensitive studies of people and landscape to ensemble comedies set in the rural villages, atmospheric inns, and hot springs of Japan. There are irascible old men, rowdy gangsters, reflective hospital escapees, and a mysterious mutt. It’s a world of tradition, lush natural environments, secret fishing holes, snow-buried houses, and bubbling cauldrons. Red Flowers affirms why Tsuge went on to become one of the most important cartoonists in Japan. These vital comics inspired a wealth of fictionalized memoir from his peers and a desire within the postwar generation to document and understand the diversity of their country’s culture.

Praise for Red Flowers

This quirky collection of alternative manga from Tsuge, a founder of the avant-garde manga movement in the 1960s, shows off his cartooning chops through humorous and autobiographical tales… Throughout, he plays with story structure, ending many tales on ambiguous images… And despite the creator’s weighty reputation, this proves accessible and fun for manga newcomers as well.
—Publisher’s Weekly

The Sky is Blue with a Single Cloud

by Tsurita Kuniko

edited and with an essay by Asakawa Mitsuhiro and Ryan Holmberg, translated by Ryan Holmberg

The Sky is Blue with a Single Cloud collects the best short stories from Kuniko Tsurita’s remarkable career. While the works of her male peers in literary manga are widely reprinted, this formally ambitious and poetic female voice is like none other currently available to an English readership. A master of the comics form, expert pacing and compositions combined with bold characters are signature qualities of Tsurita's work. The early stories “Nonsense” and “Anti” provide a unique, intimate perspective on the bohemian culture and political heat of late 1960s and early ‘70s Tokyo. Her work gradually became darker and more surreal under the influence of modern French literature and her own prematurely failing health. As in works like “The Sky is Blue with a Single Cloud” and “Max,” the gender of many of Tsurita's strong and sensual protagonists is ambiguous, marking an early exploration of gender fluidity. Late stories like "Arctic Cold" and "Flight" show the artist experimenting with more conventional narrative modes, though with dystopian themes that extend the philosophical interests of her early work. An exciting and essential gekiga collection, The Sky is Blue with a Single Cloud is translated by comics scholar Ryan Holmberg and includes an afterword cowritten by Holmberg and the manga editor Mitsuhiro Asakawa delineating Tsurita's importance and historical relevance.”

Praise for The Sky is Blue with a Single Cloud

A fantastic, continually surprising look at one of Japan’s most innovative—and least remembered—manga artists.
—Gabrielle Belot, The Atlantic

Graced with a thorough, informative afterword by Ryan Holmberg, The Sky is Blue with a Single Cloud is a generous, well-annotated retrospective, serving as both a fitting memorial and effective showcase for this iconoclastic artist, the first and only regular female creator for the legendary alt-manga magazine Garo.
—Rob Kirby, Solrad

Meticulously curated... The Sky is Blue with a Single Cloud is a label-defying collection of Kuniko Tsurita's gekiga [that] explores the role of women through numerous shorts in unexpected formats.
—Terry Hong, Shelf Awareness

The Sky is Blue with a Single Cloud is a superb and beautiful collection, one worth repeated readings for pleasure and reflection alike. The Anglophone world owes thanks to those involved in its production that English speaking audiences will finally get to encounter Tsurita's powerfully innovative and provocative work, which resonates with meaning for manga historians and contemporary audiences alike.
—Rhea Rollmann, Pop Matters

[T]hough her life may have been cut short by illness, Tsurita still impacts anyone reading her work on a level so deep it seems she might well have been a pen pal.
—Jeff Provine, Blogcritics

Kuniko Tsurita’s comics are a declaration of their own existence. A fiercely independent artist, Tsurita overcame a sexist society and a body wracked by chronic illness to draw comics throughout her tragically short, brilliant life… Her artistic voice is as singular as her career was unique, not an alternative or a derivative but an idiosyncratic grammar special unto itself. An elegant scream.
—Helen Chazan, The Comics Journal

The Swamp

by Tsuge Yoshiharu

edited and with an essay by Asakawa Mitsuhiro, co-edited and translated by Ryan Holmberg

Yoshiharu Tsuge is one of the most influential and acclaimed practitioners of literary comics in Japan. The Swamp collects work from his early years, showing a major talent coming in to his own. Bucking the tradition of mystery and adventure stories, Tsuge’s fiction focused on the lives of the citizens of Japan. These mesmerizing comics, like those of his contemporary Yoshihiro Tatsumi, reveal a gritty, at times desperate postwar Japan, while displaying Tsuge’s unique sense of humor and point of view. “Chirpy” is a simple domestic drama about expectations, fidelity, and escape. A couple purchase a beautiful white bird with a red beak. It is said that the bird will grow attached to its owners and never fly away. While the girlfriend is working as a hostess, flirting with men for money, the boyfriend decides to draw a portrait of the new family member and disaster strikes. In “The Swamp,” a simple rural encounter is charged with sexual tension that is alluring but also fraught with danger. When a young woman happens upon a wing-shot goose, she tries to calm it then suddenly snaps its neck. Later, she befriends a young hunter and offers him shelter, but her motivations remain unclear, especially when the hunter notices a snake in the room where they’ll both be sleeping. The Swamp is a landmark in English manga-publishing history and the first in a series of Tsuge books Drawn & Quarterly will be publishing. Translated from the Japanese by Ryan Holmberg, with an essay by Mitsuhiro Asakawa.”

Praise for The Swamp

Powerfully strange... A gritty and humorous postwar Japan is depicted in these early works by the influential manga cartoonist.
—Rachel Cooke, The Guardian

Exemplary... This fine start to a much-anticipated Tsuge retrospective series offers an elucidating glimpse into modern manga’s origins.
—Starred Review, Publishers Weekly

Throughout the work here, beautifully detailed establishing panels are used to show the setting, switching to much more simple panels to foreground the action. This excellent collection is a great introduction to Tsuge’s early career.
—Pete Redrup, The Quietus

Tsuge and Kafka use images that draw attention to the surreal uncertainty of ordinary life. In the spirit of Kafka, the mysterious endings of Tsuge’s comics often feel fable-like with their haunting final images. But in both cases, these are images that linger rather than conclude. These are fables where the sense of virtue, truth, and reality evocatively swings.
—Nathan McNamara, LA Review of Books

Ordinary people struggle with ideas of destiny and meaning in this collection of short stories from the early days of Garo by Yoshiharu Tsuge, all dating to the mid-1960s when he was actively developing his avant-garde and surrealist style of storytelling...one of the great creators to have come out of the mid-twentieth century.
—Rebecca Silverman, Anime News Network

The Man Without Talent

by Tsuge Yoshiharu

translated and with an essay by Ryan Holmberg

Yoshiharu Tsuge is one of the most celebrated and influential comics artists, but his work has been almost entirely unavailable to English-speaking audiences. The Man Without Talent, his first book to be translated into English, is an unforgiving self-portrait of frustration. Swearing off cartooning as a profession, Tsuge takes on a series of unconventional jobs—used-camera salesman, ferryman, stone collector—hoping to find success among the hucksters, speculators, and deadbeats he does business with. Instead, he fails again and again, unable to provide for his family, earning only their contempt and his own. The result is a dryly funny look at the pitfalls of the creative life, and an off-kilter portrait of modern Japan. Accompanied by an essay from the translator Ryan Holmberg which discusses Tsuge’s importance in comics and Japanese literature, The Man Without Talent is one of the great works of comics literature.

Praise for The Man Without Talent

While The Man Without Talent is by turns mysterious, philosophical and slapstick, it is also tender, capturing the moment-to-moment shift in emotions of a frustrated man who nevertheless loves his child. In a book about valuing the left behind, Tsuge shows us what is never actually at risk of being forsaken.
—Hilary Chute, The New York Times Book Review

Tsuge’s raw and profound work is equal parts pathos and poetry, streaked with irony and ribaldry. His lines are beautifully clean and wonderfully expressive, the pages sometimes presenting expertly cartoonish simplicity and other times almost photorealistic detail... Humanity stunningly observed—a treasure.
—Starred Review, Kirkus

[A] deeply philosophical parable about capitalism, art and beauty, and the pressures of modern life... It is easy to see from this book how Tsuge has become one of Japan’s most celebrated gekiga (“dramatic pictures”) artists.
—Ella Bucknall, LA Review of Books

Drawn in stark black-and-white panels, Tsuge’s frank narrative portrays an artist-in-decline, an anti-Bildungsroman that offers effective storytelling, enduring characters, poignant reflection and, most notably, gratifying art… Holmberg’s [essay] ‘Where Is Yoshiharu Tsuge?’ is an illuminating enhancement—biographically, historically, literally.
—Shelf Awareness

Bloody Stumps Samurai

by Hirata Hiroshi

translated by Ryan Holmberg, essays by Holmberg and Kure Tomofusa

Hindi/English bilingual edition:

THIS. IS. GEKIGA. Idolized by creators across the arts, from Akira's Otomo Katsuhiro to novelist Mishima Yukio, Hirata Hiroshi (b. 1937) is widely considered one of the most talented and influential artists of the comics medium in Japan. Known to English readers through such titles as Satsuma Gishiden (Dark Horse Comics), Hirata has been killing the samurai genre since the late 1950s with manga of jaw-dropping draftsmanship and heart-stopping cruelty. His work is essential, unforgettable, unparalleled - and in the case of Bloody Stumps Samurai (1962), too radical for its own good. With this book, Hirata set out to draw a passionate critique of discrimination against the Japanese outcaste community, known as the burakumin, around the character of Gennosuke, a young buraku whose mission to avenge and uplift his people through the sword goes horribly and gorily wrong. Though clearly intended as an anti-discrimination broadside, Bloody Stumps Samurai rubbed the Buraku Liberation League the wrong way, leading to copies being confiscated and burned and Hirata temporarily blacklisted. With essays explaining the history and politics of the work by critic Kure Tomofusa and translator Ryan Holmberg, this edition will blow your mind and turn your stomach. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of Japanese society, popular culture, or comics censorship.

Praise for Bloody Stumps Samurai

Bloody Stumps Samurai arrived in North America last year as something like a once-buried object, a work that had to be excavated before it could be translated...
—Greg Hunter, The Comics Journal

The Pits of Hell

by Ebisu Yoshikazu

translated and with an essay by Ryan Holmberg

Ebisu Yoshikazu. Television star, father of three, professional gambler, writer, cartoonist, pioneer. Since his debut in the legendary alt-manga magazine Garo in 1973, Ebisu has been spinning out surreal nightmares that combine the edgiest styles of Tokyo’s artistic counterculture with the absurd and infuriating realities of work and life in the big city. A cult classic upon its publication in 1981, The Pits of Hell offers nine stories that established Ebisu as one of the leading figures of the ugly-but-amazing "heta-uma" movement, the Japanese equivalent of punk and new wave. If you’ve ever wanted to sabotage a lecture about the Mughal Empire, control race boats through telekinesis, or rip your boss’s head off with a crowbar, this is the book for you.

Praise for The Pits of Hell

I have a new love: The Pits of Hell by Ebisu Yoshikazu. This collection of surreal and savage manga stories drawn in a naïve art style vibrates on my bookshelf and issues forth the sounds of thumping pachinko machines, clattering speedboat motors and roars of rage so intense there is no doubt in my mind they have the power to rip my head off. These stories are screwball, haunting, mystical, shocking, hilarious, frightening, and sad—usually all at once.
—Paul Tumey, The Comics Journal

That Miyoko Asagaya Feeling

by Abe Shin’ichi

edited and with an essay by Asakawa Mitsuhiro, translated by Ryan Holmberg

That Miyoko Asagaya Feeling is an important collection of stories based on artist Abe Shin’ichi’s own struggles with romance, art, alcohol, and mental illness, originally published in Garo and other venues in the early and mid ‘70s. Tsuge Yoshiharu is usually credited for pioneering quasi-autobiographical, shishōsetsu-style manga in the mid-late ‘60s, but these Abe stories are really the first case of a Japanese cartoonist writing regularly and in a brutally frank way about his personal life. They are more or less contemporaneous with Justin Green's Binky Brown (1972), but without the cartoony absurdities and neurotic self-flagellation. Abe's freeform drawing, sometimes scratchy sometimes fluid, is also really amazing. Interestingly, a couple of the stories are told from his partner Miyoko's point of view. Rounding out the volume is an essay by Asakawa Mitsuhiro, who also selected the works. This is a must-have for both alt-manga fans and people interested in the history of comics as literature.

Nominated for 2020 Eisner Award, Best Archival Collection/Project

Outdoors

by Yokoyama Yuichi

translated by Ryan Holmberg

Ballistic buzzing guided camera drones, terrorizing fur and feathers. Drip drop drop top inside your futuristic RV Zen boombox, and then you float away. There’s nothing like a trip into the great unknown with avant-garde manga artist Yokoyama Yuichi. Originally published in Japanese in 2009, Outdoors is another rip-roaring eye feast and ear bomb by the cult author of New Engineering, Travel, and Iceland.

Praise for Outdoors

Innovative to the point it borders on being mysterious, the work of “neo-manga” auteur Yuichi Yokoyama never fails to impress precisely because it’s nevertheless eminently approachable, even inviting—and while his latest work to be translated into English by Ryan Holmberg (who also interviews Yokoyama for the book’s engrossing “backmatter” section), Outdoors is considered something of a less-than-essential, “smaller” entry in his lengthy oeuvre by some scholars of the medium, it’s still a fine example in microcosm of his recurring themes and concerns, as well as a worthy-enough subject of study and analysis in its own right.
—Ryan Carey, Solrad

Slum Wolf

by Tsuge Tadao

edited, translated, and with an essay by Ryan Holmberg

Tadao Tsuge is one of the pioneers of alternative manga, and one of the world’s great artists of the down-and-out. Slum Wolf is a new selection of his stories from the late '60s and '70s, never before available in English: a vision of Japan as a world of bleary bars and rundown flophouses, vicious street fights and strange late-night visions. In assured, elegantly gritty art, Tsuge depicts a legendary, aging brawler, a slowly unraveling businessman, a group of damaged veterans uniting to form a shantytown, and an array of punks, pimps, and drunks, all struggling for freedom, meaning, or just survival. With an extensive introduction by translator and comics historian Ryan Holmberg, this collection brings together some of Tsuge’s most powerful work—raucous, lyrical, and unforgettable.

Praise for Slum Wolf

As a collection of stories, Slum Wolf presents a fully realized view of the persistence of defeat and occupation on the Japanese culture. As readers follow the disaffected and maladjusted characters through their worlds, Tsuge consistently prompts the reader to consider the feelings and circumstances by invoking the reader’s empathy and fears.
—Gregory Smith, Pop Matters

Tsuge’s art veers wildly from cartoon abstraction to painstakingly detailed drawings of shadowy figures and looming city streets, rendered in harsh, energetic linework that propels the eye from panel to panel. The stoic attitude of these excellent pieces is summed up in one character’s reflection: “Without receiving a dose of pain once in a while, it was hard to remember the point of staying alive.” This period piece holds lasting resonance.
—Publishers Weekly

Meeting these comics on their own terms means hoping for little and observing as much as one can. Tadao himself operates in the same manner. Attentiveness its own reward, in a life that may offer few of them, and the result is a collection of complex, enduring works.
—Greg Hunter, The Comics Journal

The Troublemakers

by Baron Yoshimoto

edited, translated, and with an essay by Ryan Holmberg

A collection of some of the best stories by Baron Yoshimoto, one of the Japanese manga artists who helped develop the graphic novel form in the 1960s and '70s by targeting an older audience with scintillating and exquisitely drawn stories about class, gender, ethnicity, and race. With an essay by noted manga historian and translator Ryan Holmberg. The stories included are “Eriko’s Happiness,” “High School Brawler’s Ditty,” “Insect,” “The Gambling Stripper,” “Nostalgia,” and “The Girl and the Black Soldier.” With an essay by noted manga historian and translator Ryan Holmberg.

Baron Yoshimoto was born in 1940 and grew up in Kagoshima prefecture, Japan. While at the height of his popularity as one the leading gekiga artists, he suddenly concluded all of his serializations and left for the United States. In 1985, he returned to Japan and began to produce paintings in an idiosyncratic style under the name Ryu Manji.

Fukushima Devil Fish

by Katsumata Susumu

edited and with an essay by Asakawa Mitsuhiro, translated by Ryan Holmberg

More than twenty years before the meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi reactors in 2011, Katsumata Susumu was using his cartooning skills to alert Japanese to the dangers of nuclear power. Inspired by Katsumata's research trips to the now notorious facility and his background in physics, Fukushima Devil Fish begins with two stories from the 1980s on the subject of “nuclear gypsies,” the men who labor under oppressive conditions to maintain Japan’s fleet of nuclear power plants. The book then cycles back to the late '60s and '70s with a group of stories, originally published in the legendary alt-manga magazines Garo and COM, populated with creatures from Japanese folklore and lonely young men bereft of home and family. At turns haunting and endearing, Fukushima Devil Fish reveals Katsumata as both a master of comics as a poetic form and a true friend to the victims of Japan’s modernization. The collection is rounded out with a suite of essays by the artist, historian Asakawa Mitsuhiro, and critic Abe Yukihiro, which illuminate Katsumata’s life and career and the importance of his work in a post-Fukushima world.

Praise for Fukushima Devil Fish

For most electricity consumers, where energy actually comes from and the workers behind its production are entirely unknown. Recognizing this, the late manga artist Katsumata Susumu felt the need to give voices to the hundreds of thousands of invisible janitorial workers in Japan’s nuclear plants, documenting their existence in popular comic form during the 1980s.
—Madeleine Morley, Eye on Design

Art changed in Japan after the tsunami and nuclear meltdowns of March 2011. So did art history—or at least it should have… That the disasters ushered in a new era in Japanese culture is widely recognized. That they also inspired a reappraisal of what had been made in the past is only partially so… Fukushima Devil Fish reveals Katsumata’s personal geography and compromised pastoral landscape as a map to a better understanding of how the 2011 disaster was, above all, a disaster for northern Japan.
—Ryan Holmberg, The New York Review

Red Colored Elegy

by Hayashi Seiichi

translated by Taro Nettleton, with an essay by Ryan Holmberg

Ichiro and Sachiko are young artists, temperamental and discouraged about what life has to offer them. They fall in and out of love, jealous of each other's interests and unchallenged by their careers. Red Colored Elegy charts their heartache, passions, and bickering with equal tenderness, creating a revelatory portrait of a stormy love affair. A key figure of the postwar Japanese countercultural scene, Seiichi Hayashi wrote Red Colored Elegy between 1970 and 1971, in the aftermath of a politically turbulent and culturally vibrant decade that promised but failed to deliver new possibilities. Sparse line work and visual codes borrowed from animation and film beautifully capture the quiet lives of a young couple struggling to make ends meet. Ichiro and Sachiko hope for something better, but they're no revolutionaries; their spare time is spent drinking, smoking, daydreaming, and sleeping together and at times with others. Red Colored Elegy is informed as much by underground Japanese comics of the time as it is by the French New Wave. Its influence in Japan was so large that Morio Agata, a prominent Japanese folk musician and singer/songwriter, debuted with a love song written and named after it. This new paperback edition features an essay on Red Colored Elegy and Hayashi's contributions to contemporary Japanese comics from the art historian Ryan Holmberg.

Iceland

by Yokoyama Yuichi

translated by Ryan Holmberg

A new surrealist tale by the creator of neo manga, the critically-acclaimed Yuichi Yokoyama. His frenetic visual style contrasts with the taciturn pace of the story and dialogue as a group of friends wander the high-latitude areas of the strange icy Far North looking for someone. Readers of Yokoyama's other stories may even recognize some characters.

Yuichi Yokoyama is an Eisner Award-nominated artist who was born in 1967 in Miyazaki prefecture, Japan. A graduate of the Oil Painting Department of Musashino Art University, he shifted to manga in 2000, feeling that through it he could “express time.” These unique works would go on to be called “neo manga” and receive high acclaim in many fields. Presently, he is also active as a contemporary artist. His other graphic novels include Color Engineering, Travel, Garden, and World Map Room.

Red Red Rock and other stories, 1967-1970

by Hayashi Seiichi

edited, translated, and with an essay by Ryan Holmberg

A definitive, career-spanning collection of stories from one of Japan’s most famous alternative cartoonists. Totaling more than 250 pages, Red Red Rock collects over a dozen of Hayashi Seiichi’s most famous stories from his most prolific period, spanning his debut for Garo in 1967 to his adult work for Josei Jishin in 1969-70.

Praise for Red Red Rock

Discovering Hayashi Seiichi's work was a revelation—it's an astonishing blend of sensibilities, steeped in a graceful melancholy.
—David Mazzucchelli

Trash Market

by Tsuge Tadao

edited, translated, and with an essay by Ryan Holmberg

Tadao Tsuge was one of the key contributors to the legendary avant-garde Japanese comics magazine Garo during its heyday in the late 1960s and early '70s, renowned for his unpretentious journalistic storytelling and clear, eloquent cartooning. Trash Market brings together six of Tsuge’s compelling, character-driven stories about life in post–World War II Japan.

“Trash Market” and “Gently Goes the Night” touch on key topics for Tsuge: the charming lowlifes of the Tokyo slums and the veterans who found themselves unable to forget the war. “Song of Showa” is an autobiographical piece about growing up in a Tokyo slum during the occupation with an abusive grandfather and an ailing father, and finding brightness in the joyful people of the neighborhood. Trash Market blurs the lines between fiction and reportage; it’s a moving testament to the grittiness of life in Tokyo during the postwar years.

Trash Market features an essay from the collection’s editor and translator, Ryan Holmberg. He explores Tsuge’s early career as a cartoonist and the formative years the artist spent working in Tokyo’s notorious for-profit blood banks.

Praise for Trash Market

The stark, simplistic drawing style and total absence of hope mean that this is not an easy read, but is ultimately a fascinating and rewarding one.
—Pete Redrup, Quietus

Trash Market [is] one of the year’s major comics publications, historically important and aesthetically raw.
—The Globe and Mail

Ding Dong Circus and other stories, 1967-1974

by Sasaki Maki

edited and translated by Ryan Holmberg

This collection presents, for the first time in English, the best of Sasaki Maki’s work, mainly from alt-manga super magazine Garo. Drawn between 1967 and 1974, the fifteen stories here follow Sasaki’s groundbreaking exploration of collage methods in comics storytelling, weaving through references to R&B, rock ‘n’ roll, the Vietnam War, Andy Warhol, the Summer of Love, the Beatles, British humour, and the wacky world of Japanese consumerism. Ding Dong Circus demonstrates what manga fans already knew: that in Sasaki Maki, Japan can claim not only a pioneer in experimental comics, but one of the world’s masters of Pop Art and a trenchant avant-garde critic of the Sixties.

The Man Next Door

by Matsumoto Masahiko

translated and with an essay by Ryan Holmberg

By the late 1950s, a new language of expression had come to dominate Japanese comics. Against the conventions of children's manga, it introduced a more adult focus on dynamic cinematic paneling, gritty urban settings, and the violence and hardships of everyday life in postwar Japan. Today, this style is known as "gekiga" (dramatic pictures), a term coined by one of Japan's most famous cartoonists, Tatsumi Yoshihiro, in 1957. The true innovator, however, was a little-known figure named Matsumoto Masahiko. His name for the style was “komaga” (panel pictures), in honor of the fact that the essence of storytelling in the comics medium is based on the dramatic composition of multiple paneled pictures. Matsumoto began exploring this new language in 1954, perfecting it in a series of gripping mystery stories between 1955 and 1957. Japanese comics would never be the same. The Man Next Door collects four of Matsumoto’s komaga stories, translated into English for the first time. The volume also includes an essay by Ryan Holmberg on the importance of Matsumoto's work in the history of Japanese manga, as well as an explanation of komaga by the artist himself.

Flowering Harbour

by Hayashi Seiichi

translated by Ryan Holmberg

It is 1969, and famed artist Seiichi Hayashi has decided that his comics, having flirted with pop, need some heart and soul. He turns to the moody graphics of old kashihon gekiga and the sentiments of Japanese enka blues.

"Because of you, my long life will be withered with frost. This fading shadow of an empty shell... our love." So laments the heart-broken bar hostess of Flowering Harbour, one of the classic works of the legendary alternative manga magazine Garo.

Reprinted in Vérité: Comix India vol. 2 (2019).