ink-logging:

Lovely Drawings from Japan, 3/3/19

Wandering Island Vol. 2, Kenji Tsuruta, translated by Dana Lewis: This is the newest installment of a very irregular series from the irregularly-translated Tsuruta, an artist who’s done a lot of illustration and design work apart from his irregular schedule of comics. “Spirit of Wonder”, his first project to appear in English, consists of less than 200 pages, and took nearly a decade to finish; the first collected volume of “Wandering Island” was released in Japanese in 2011, with the second following in 2017. But there is always an audience for these books when they show up, and it’s not just manga maniacs - the first English installment of “Wandering Island” scored a surprise Eisner nomination in 2017.

It’s pretty easy to see why: Tsuruta is an enormously skilled cartoonist, capable of integrating extremely gestural, line-driven character art and sturdy environments built from hatches, tones and pooled blacks, with few visible ‘seams’ in the composition. I presume he’s using photo reference, but his pages don’t look like it; rather, they often look like comics as photographs, crisply blocked, with the story’s heroine sometimes ostentatiously posed amidst the stone and water of the story’s setting. In cinema, this kind of thing is sometimes derided as One Perfect Shot-ism, but I don’t think such unapologetic bravura is so common in comics, at least not at this level of technical aptitude; you can usually tell when an illustrator is dabbling in comics by the stiltedness of the panel-to-panel flow, but  Tsuruta is as smooth as the shōnen superstars… probably smoother in translation, as the comparative lack of visual shorthand in his work (e.g. motion effects, superdeformation) situates him analogously to western norms of Handsome Drawing.

But this does not mean Tsuruta isn’t firmly planted in Japanese popular drawing; his work can pretty easily be read in the tradition of comics and illustration that juxtaposes technical equipment or detailed architecture with pretty girls - one can tilt their head sideways and imagine “Wandering Island” transforming into an art book of girls wearing headphones or something, so intent is the artist on documenting Mikura, his heroine, from every possible angle. The first volume of the series took on a distinctly voyeuristic quality, as Tsuruta would veer in tight on this woman curled and wriggling in despair, bandaged or bikini-clad or nude from the bath, inconsolable from the death of her grandfather, whom she eventually becomes convinced has actually gone away to a mysterious, mobile island. Vol. 2 plops Mikura down on the island itself, where she spends a solid 3/5 of the page count wandering in the hot sun, feeling the silent eyes of hostile inhabitants on her skin, and gradually building up the determination to chart the island, so as to outpace her vulnerability. 

There is also, of course, a tradition of manga that primarily depict quiet scenes in evocative settings: Jirō Taniguchi’s “The Walking Man”, or Hitoshi Ashinano’s “Yokohama Kaidashi Kikō”. One suspects the nature of such work makes it easy for editors to slot episodes irregularly in between magazine serials - in the back of this volume, English edition editor Carl Gustav Horn gallantly identifies the 15(!) issues of Kodansha’s monthly “Afternoon” from across half a decade in which bits and pieces of this book appeared. Again, though - it’s a testament to Tsuruta’s skill that the book feels very whole, very tight and considered: a very focused study of physical and emotional isolation, very focused on the willowy poise of its heroine, whose interiority is signaled by the sheer attentiveness of the drawing. If you’ve read a lot of manga aimed at men and boys, you want to maintain some skepticism when work like this is acclaimed in a desexualized manner – and, if you’ve looked at some of this artist’s other works, you know he can and will go gale-force horny – but you also realize that pages such as these represent a myriad of shortcuts not taken. When Mikura reclines nude in the night air, charting stars, you do feel this artist communicating how nice it feels, beyond how nice it looks. This too is Tsuruta’s expertise.  

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Taiyou, Taiyō Matsumoto: This 2018 Shogakukan release is the third official Taiyō (Taiyou) Matsumoto (Matsumoto Taiyō) (松本大洋) art book, following 1995′s “100″ and 1999′s “101″. Basically, it’s 217 pages of Matsumoto selecting personal favorites from among his 21st century illustration works thus far. There’s some very sparse commentary (in Japanese only), but mostly it’s image after image, often divided into little movements: here’s a bunch of studies of hands; here’s some images depicting feudal Japan; here’s some simple pen-and-ink pieces, building in detail. The sources for these images are many – it was great fun seeing a no-logo version of Matsumoto’s poster for the 2013 Toronto Comic Arts Festival show up in a ‘kids reading comics’ flight – and what emerges is the sense that much of the artist’s practice seems to pivot toward his big manga projects, like distinct ‘periods’: images from “Takemitsu Zamurai” are surrounded by contemporaneous feudal Japan pieces; images from around the serialization of “Sunny” feature lots of children. A helpful index is included in the back of this softcover production, housed in a cardboard slipcover, and priced at a very reasonable ¥3800; ignore the goofballs selling copies on Amazon for like $85, they’re trying to soak you.          

-Jog