| Yoshiharu Tsuge つげ義春 |
|
|---|---|
| Born | Yoshiharu Tsuge 柘植義春 October 30, 1937 Katsushika, Tokyo, Japan |
| Nationality | Japanese |
| Area(s) | Writer, Penciller, Inker, Manga artist, Essayist |
| Pseudonym(s) | Tsuge Yoshiharu |
Yoshiharu Tsuge (つげ義春 Tsuge Yoshiharu, born October 30, 1937) is a Japanese manga artist and essayist. He was active in comics between 1954 and 1987. The content of his works range from tales of ordinary life to dream-like surrealism, and often show his interest in traveling about Japan. He has garnered the most attention from the surrealistic works he had published in the late 1960s in the avant-garde magazine Garo.[1]
His birth name is spelled 柘植義春, but he signs his works つげ義春, with identical pronunciation.
His brother Tadao Tsuge (つげ忠男 Tsuge Tadao) is also a cartoonist. He was married to actress and illustrator Maki Fujiwara (藤原マキ Fujiwara Maki, 1941-1999), with whom he had one son.
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Tsuge was born on October 30, 1937 in Katsushika, Tokyo, Japan. He was the eldest of three sons. After the death of Tsuge's father in 1942, two half-sisters, from his mother's second marriage, were introduced to his family. The recession in post-World War II Japan, inspired Tsuge to create comics to the pay-libraries' editors in an attempt to solve his financial problems. Being intensely shy, making dramatic pictures was one way to avoid meeting people and to earn money simultaneously.[2] He created his first gekiga at 18, showing Osamu Tezuka's influence, who was one of the first mainstream artists to draw gekiga.[3] When a girlfriend left him in his early 20s, combined with his debt, Tsuge went into depression and attempted suicide.[4] In 1965, Katsuichi Nagai, editor and publisher of avant-garde magazine, Garo, heard about Tsuge's plight and printed "Yoshiharu Tsuge - please get in touch!" on one of the pages of Garo.[5]
In 1966, Tsuge suffered from another onset of depression and stopped drawing his own manga to be Shigeru Mizuki's assistant. Under Mizuki's influence, Tsuge's later publications feature highly-detailed backgrounds and his trademark cartoonish-characters.[3] Arguably one of Tsuge's more famous works, Screw Style (ねじ式 Neji-Shiki) was published in Garo in 1968. Since the publication of Munō no Hito (無能の人, lit. "The Man without Talent") in 1986, Tsuge has not drawn anymore manga. Gilles Laborderie from Indy Magazine notes that Tsuge "tries to create a pace through careful narrative techniques rather than through grand dramatic events" and compares his style to Yoshihiro Tatsumi's.[1]
In English, Tsuge's works have rarely been translated. The first, Akai Hana, was published in the seventh issue of the first volume of art spiegelman's prestigious RAW magazine in 1985 as an insert. The second issue of the second volume of the same magazine saw the appearance of Oba's Electroplate Factory in 1990 (translation by Akira Satake and Paul Karasik). The most recent translation was of Screw Style in the Comics Journal's special 250th issue[2][6] in February 2003, translated by Bill Randall.
Munō no Hito (無能の人, lit. "The Man without Talent") was translated into French as L'Homme sans talent in 2004, and was nominated for best album at the Angoulême International Comics Festival the following year.