Manga artist Yoshiharu Tsuge dies at the age of 88

“Yoshiharu Tsuge is touching not only because of his choice of subjects – social outsiders are often the focus of his stories – but because he has succeeded in forming a poetic language of comics that is in no way inferior in its mastery to the most outstanding works by Carl Barks or Osamu Tezuka,” explained Reprodukt publisher Dirk Rehm on Friday.

Particularly in the short story collection “Red Blossoms,” which contains works published between 1966 and 1973, Tsuge succeeded “by using dynamic page layout, arrangement of image elements and movement of the characters to create expression and atmosphere that is hardly unparalleled in the more than hundred-year history of comics.”

“Rote Blossoms” was the first Tsuge volume of drawn short stories to be published in German in 2019, followed by “The Useless Man” and “Yoshio’s Youth”. Tsuge’s stories “are poetic, quiet and occasionally mixed with a touch of magical realism,” said Barbara Buchholz in her 2020 review of “The Useless Man”.

Tsuge’s stories are about questions such as what a person is worth if they are not useful to society. “The Useless Man” was Tsuge’s last major work in 1987 before he withdrew from public life due to a personal crisis and ended his drawing career. In 2020, the book was named one of the best ten comics of the year by a Tagesspiegel jury of critics.

For a long time, Tsuge’s work, which combined autobiographical and fictional elements, was only available in Japanese. Only a few years ago he approved translations into other languages, according to his Berlin publisher.

“Yoshiharu Tsuge renewed Japanese comics by introducing stories about real life and filling them with real characters,” says Reprodukt-Verlag in tribute to the illustrator. “With his unique voice that combines introspection, poetry and mystery, he achieved unrivaled mastery of the language of comics.”