Comics Underground Japan

The observer seeks "Japanese Art", does not speak Japanese, is led to a musty, sparsely-peopled place inhabited by "living national treasures" and other precious monuments to the national character. For that which is sanctioned is subsidized, is seen. This is not that. This is what happened around the three-quarter century mark - that place on the historical clock when maudites emerge. Why? I'll tell you next century. The inks and paper cost almost nothing, which is nearly a crime in some circles. And you could hide them in your desk. Much of Japanese art is about endurance. The rumpled scrawlings of these masters are the denial of endurance (or its homage: ambivalence is here a vocabulary function). But it's all more than you want to read about. Go look, and know that this book is a 4-part miracle. The selection is unimpeachable. Kevin Quigley has eschewed stories that rely on subtle contextual knowledge for their pyrotechnic operation. It must have been a grueling selection process that resulted in a volume that so typifies the form, and can yet be reached by readers at any level of experience. Anyone who has read the originals knows that the translation by Kevin, Hiroko Ikuta Quigley and Umezawa Yoko is brilliantly targeted and illuminative. Ken Swezey and Laura Lindgren of Blast Books are to be credited with producing a volume that confers upon these works the luxurious quality that the artists might have wanted but could never have hoped for when they were impelled to choose this road to spill their ideas upon. And all this for fifteen bucks (that's the fourth part of the miracle).