A Nobody Artist

A revealing glimpse into the life and times of alt-manga s most intriguing comics auteur. Tsuge Yoshiharu, one of manga s last living legends, remains an elusive and highly influential character as he moves into the final phase of his career. A Nobody Artist features a number of loosely (and disputably) semiautobiographical vignettes often concerning a young cartoonist trying to make a go of it in the shifting manga market.

True to form, Tsuge delivers much more than a straight accounting of a cartoonist s life. Lust routinely distracts our young artists while older artists again and again provide a model for what not to do, or more likely, where a cartoonist s life will lead you. Fleeting moments of domestic happiness are upset by bouts of self-doubt.

As always, Tsuge s art is succinct and glorious a beautiful document of a changing Japan. This penultimate volume in Drawn and Quarterly s complete collection of the legendary manga-ka s oeuvre collects richly-detailed and deeply human comics stories originally published between 1981 and 1985. Translated by prolific manga scholar and art historian Ryan Holmberg.