Overview

A manga icon s most perplexing, transgressive, and astounding work of horror and surrealism. By the mid-1970s, Tsuge Yoshiharu was a man changed by circumstance something his work from 1975 to 1981 boldly reveals. After settling into married life with fellow artist Fujiwara Maki (author of Eisner-winning My Picture Diary), Tsuge would return to the narrative formulas that he knew best: tall tales exchanged between fellow travelers, macabre parables tinged with magical realism, and the enduring comedy of the domestic everyday in a Japan rebuilding itself in the decades following the Second World War. And yet the confusion and mental illness simmering beneath the surface of his more surreal works come to a rolling boil, reaching an unsettling and horrific crescendo in a series of nightmarish delusions. He Rolled Me Up Like A Grilled Squid captures a mid-career author taking stock of his anxieties and suspicions while connecting the dots between his seemingly monotonous present and his complicated past. Confrontations between both periods in his life are explored through the lens of his deteriorating mental state, expressed directly through experiments with different visual styles collected in this volume. Translated by prolific art and comics historian Ryan Holmberg, He Rolled Me Up Like A Grilled Squid is a remarkable catalog of creative experiments alongside a veteran storyteller s most compelling observations about people at their most human.

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9781770467804

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Reviews

""Tsuge throws open his inner gates of possibility and lets the world rush in with all its complexity, humanity, beauty, uncertainty and violence."" --Chris Ware, The Washington Post ""A gritty and humorous postwar Japan is depicted in these early works by the influential manga cartoonist."" --The Guardian ""Tsuge's raw and profound work is equal parts pathos and poetry, streaked with irony and ribaldry."" --Kirkus, Starred Review ""Exemplary... an elucidating glimpse into modern manga's origins."" --Publishers Weekly, Starred Review ""[Tsuge] draw[s] horror from unflinching realism."" --Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

Author Information

Yoshiharu Tsuge was born in Tokyo, Japan in 1937. Influenced by the realistic and gritty rental manga of Yoshihiro Tatsumi, he began making his own comics. He was also briefly recruited to assist Shigeru Mizuki during his explosion of popularity in the 60s. In 1968, working for Garo magazine, Tsuge published the ground-breaking story 'Neji-shiki' (commonly called 'Screw Style' for Western readers.) This story established Tsuge as not only an influential manga-ka but he also became a cultural touchstone in the changing Japanese art world. He is considered the originator and greatest practitioner of the 'I-novel' method of comics-making. In 2005, Tsuge was nominated for the Best Album Award at Angouleme International and in 2017 he won the Japan Cartoonists Association Grand Award for Yume to tabi no sekai.

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