“Karōjite debyū: Yamagami Tatsuhiko Kigeki shin shisō taikei, hoka”
As published in Seishun manga retsuden (Legend of Manga’s Youth; Magazine House, 1997). Later republished as Ano koro manga wa shishunki datta (Back Then Was When Manga Was Coming of Age; Chikuma Bunko, 2000), pp. 203-209.
For the second half, he turns to the master gag manga artist, Yamagami Tatsuhiko (b. 1947), who would emerge in the 1970s as the reigning champion of parody and gag manga with his most famous creation, Twerp Detective (Gaki deka, 1974-1980, referred to as "Kid Cop" in Frederik L. Schodt's seminal Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics). Natsume concisely traces Yamagami’s career from the pages of COM, his experiments with gekiga, sci-fi and parody, and his full arrival in the mid '70s as the king of comedy manga. But even by the turn of the '70s, Yamagami was considered by “manga youth” like Natsume to be part of the counter-cultural youth movement.1 While Tezuka Osamu's Phoenix (Hi no tori), particularly in its COM-serialized 1967-68 “Future” ("Mirai-hen") story arc, smacked male readers as being “too grand” (bōdai-sugiru) or so epic that it left them feeling that something was off, Yamagami’s SF work Luminous Wind (Hikaru kaze, serialized in Weekly Shōnen Magazine in 1970) was far more rooted in the reality of the Vietnam War, and even the memories of the “darkness” (kurasa) of World War II, which was then still in the back of the minds of Japanese per Natsume.2
This essay was first published in the August 1996 issue of the literary magazine Oh! Pigeon! (Hato yo!) and later collected in Natsume’s Legend of Manga’s Youth (Seishun Manga Retsuden), from which we have translated other short pieces that have appeared on this site, including those on Hayashi Sei’ichi & Kamimura Kazuo, Ikegami Ryōichi and Miyaya Kazuhiko. After the January 1995 closure of an earlier venue, the controversial magazine Marco Polo, Natsume transferred his autobiographical form of comics history to Oh! Pigeon!, where his column would continue until October 1997. This is the first of a two-part essay on Yamagami, about whom little has been written about in English (the aforementioned Schodt notwithstanding), despite his gigantic footprint on Japanese humor comics. In his History of Postwar Gag Manga (Sengo gyagu manga shi, 1981 [2009]), Yonezawa Yoshihiro writes that so welcome was Yamagami’s move to shōnen manga magazines from young adult (seinen) ones, that even though his new Twerp Detective was only supposed to run for six episodes, within a short span he boosted the sales figures of its home magazine, Weekly Shōnen Champion, from 800,000 copies to over 1,000,000. The protagonist Komawari-kun signaled the “birth of a new type of shōnen hero” and a new development in the type of comedies Yamagami would create in his boys’ manga.3
Before that, Yamagami was working on hybrid gekiga/gag manga such as Compendium of New Philosophy: A Comedy, which Natsume describes here as great inspiration for his own career in 1972, as he started to draw manga and publish for the first time.
As always, the translators thank Natsume-sensei for his permission to translate and publish his works.
-Jon Holt & Teppei Fukuda
* * *
“There are so many young people these days that just don’t get it. It’s such a pain in the ass, I tell you!”
So said the chief editor of Garo magazine, Mr. Nagai Katsuichi, as he was flipping through the Sasaki Maki-like manga pages I had submitted to him for his approval.
This was March 1972, just before I entered my senior year at Aoyama Gakuin University. My submission to Garo was rejected.
I never ended up getting my manga published in Garo, but I did take the same manuscript over to a publisher called Lemon Company (Remon Sha), who were putting out pornographic books at that time. Lemon took only one panel from my manuscript and used it for a cut illustration within their magazine Black Notebook (Kuro no techō). That was the first time I had ever been published in a commercial magazine.
Black Notebook really was a weird magazine, with super-dark covers. Inside they featured pornographic photos along with articles and criticism that were voices of the anti-establishment; even with all the porn stuff, much of the writing had an intellectual twist.
I was really fretting things. The day would be coming when I would have to leave school and start to work for a company. That day was only one year away. My family’s house was in Tokyo, so I thought maybe I could survive somehow by being able to sell some of my manga. However, because my comics could not reach even the level of absurdity, it dawned on me that I wouldn’t make a business out of doing them.
Thanks to the connections provided by the manga artist Mr. Shitō Kineo, who took care of me quite a bit, there was a period where I would go to publishers and show them my comics several times. During that period, even though I was a guy who was so naïve and knew nothing about the world, it became clear to me that there was no chance I could make it unless I changed something.
With a plan to draw manga that would somehow become the foundation for my business, I did things like build up a stock of four-panel nonsense manga (Figure 1), and I tried to create parodies. Eventually Black Notebook let me run a three-page manga. By the end of the year, I had a four-page comic in Young Comic (Yangu komikku) [a monthly seinen magazine published by Shōnen Gahōsha]. I was able to make my debut after all.
It was indeed an incredibly busy year for me.
At the same time, I was working on cut illustrations for shinsho [roughly 4" x 6.8" size] paperback comics, which was an opportunity for which Mr. Shitō introduced me. I also did part-time jobs to pay my rent.
I kept showing up for my classes, since I had to graduate college. I went back and forth to the library, trying to prepare my graduation thesis in History. Occasionally, I would show up at meetings for the university [protest] movements. In December, I went three days without any sleep, but—by cramming for it—I did complete my thesis. On top of all of that, I debuted as a manga artist.
However, during all this time I would play tennis, go see movies, have long telephone conversations with my friends, so that as a student I was actually quite busy. Looking back on myself, I realize I had so much free time, yet back in those days I felt like a hamster on a wheel. (Geez, I can’t help but feel sorry for the person I am now…)
I am grateful though for that thesis, which I really crammed and cobbled together, because it gave me an important experience where I fully immersed myself in writing something without thinking about anything else. I was still just 22 years old and I had a girlfriend, but for a period of about one to two months straight I did not feel any sexual desire. Once I did finish the thesis, all of a sudden I had a total collapse, and for a long while I felt like I was craving something that had gone missing from my life.
At my college, in the beginning of 1972, there was a large fight with people throwing rocks at each other. How it was triggered, I do not know, but the incident involved hundreds of students, including regular [i.e., non-protestor] students, against campus security police and right wing activists. The hardcore [protest movement] students had been gathering at Shibuya Park, so they were not present for that incident. The mood of the student movement was still widely felt by us then.
In February [of 1972], the United Red Army (Rengō Seki Gun) took over and held up at a lodge at Mount Asama, where they became involved in a shootout with the Japanese police. At that time, the [slightly earlier] incident which involved lynchings-turned-murder [among Red Army members] had not yet become public, so even I was feeling that I should support the Red Army somehow. I felt something like a debt to these people who seemed to be honestly pursuing the “revolution,” which was an idea that would swell up in my mind and disappear.
But I also knew that I had to soon start embracing that thing called “a life” (seikatsu), so I began to calculate how I could manage my daily needs at the bare minimum and how long I could do that. (By the way, I figured 2500 yen [approx. 8.25 USD in 1972] was what I needed to pay the rent, utilities and food bills.) I had the intention of marrying my girl once I graduated college, so I decided to somehow make it work for the two of us to have a normal life together - and if I could draw my manga too, then I would do that. It struck me that if I could not pull it off, then maybe that was the limit of my talent. I had reached a point where I thought the most important thing for me was to somehow live my life like a regular person.
* * *
This was the year when Yamagami Tatsuhiko suddenly broke new ground with his manga Compendium of New Philosophy: A Comedy (Kigeki shin shisō taikei, serialized in Manga Story from 1972 to 1974). Before that, Yamagami had been drawing sci-fi manga short stories without much flair. In COM, he brought to the fore anti-authoritarian criticism with his Record of the Human War (Jinrui senki, 1968-1969); for Weekly Shōnen Magazine, he depicted a near-future where there is a revival of the militarism in his Luminous Wind (Hikaru kaze, 1970). In Pop Comic (Poppu komikku), he traced the stages of the frustrations of a failed activist in Nue Monster (Nue, 1972). I kept an eye on Yamagami’s progress with those stories, feeling a kind of kindred connection with this artist. The agitprop tone of his Luminous Wind was not my cup of tea, but I was interested in the artist Yamagami Tatsuhiko himself.
For a while he had been drawing a crazy and stupid gag manga called Hit the Road, Hirarin! (Tabitate! Hirarin, serialized in Weekly Shōnen Sunday in 1971), but at any rate, the change he showed with his Compendium of New Philosophy: A Comedy was a big, drastic new direction for his work. Yamagami’s pictures were sexually perverted; they were stupid; they were filled with slapstick humor. However, his drawings were nothing like the staple gag manga style established by major figures like Tanioka Yasuji and Akatsuka Fujio. The power of Yamagami was to take that world, and apply without fear to his gekiga style, by which he would draw the backgrounds with super-minute detail. It was clear that he was an artist who had broken ahead of and out from regular story manga as it existed then. It was also obvious Yamagami did so with the intention of destroying the story manga approach itself.
What he was doing was a perfect reflection of how I personally felt about myself in the early 1970s: a depressed person still somehow nursing the image of himself as some kind of “rebel,” who then burst out laughing at that aspect of himself in the past, leaving that person behind to scamper through the era. Those gags of Yamagami, replete with anarchy and indiscretions, were perfectly in sync with the chaos of my own mental state at that time. Probably most manga young men at the time felt the same way and that is why they rallied around Yamagami’s humor.
Yamagami took the heavy, dark gekiga style, which he had been practicing until that point in time, and transformed it into comedy. In that sense, his gekiga is a form of self-criticism that comes about from the way he expresses himself in manga. Also, his expression was set apart from the naïve style from the end of the 1960s, a time when manga was often a way for artists to express themselves. Yamagami’s works can be seen as a form of self-expression that created a bridge [from the 1960s] into the 1970s, where artists made fun of themselves and made that kind of stuff into an art.
Yamagami’s gags seemed to me like a hole in the wall he drilled to get through a sense of ennui, of a blockage I felt inside of me that I couldn’t easily put into words. It is like there exists simultaneously in his work both a kind of defiance (“All that matters is whether it’s funny or not”) and a confidence (“If we don’t let things get interesting, there would be nothing to do, bub”). So, in the background where I decided to chuck all my shyness and pretentions and just get out there and draw a manga that would sell, I had in me a sure faith in the power to destroy that came from Yamagami’s gag manga.
Soon thereafter, with his gag manga, Yamagami blazed one path after another; like a bulldozer loaded with a nuclear warhead, he utterly destroyed all the competition. Even so, his pictures exhibited a graceful line and refinement to them, so his female figures could be so sexy (Figure 3). Because of that, in his drawings he can show the most extreme gaps between the pictures and fanciful leaps in story logic.
Yamagami continued to build a decent readership for his gags with his enthusiastic fanbase, but with his Twerp Detective (Gaki deka, 1974-1980) that base soon went nationwide, and then he changed the face of the gag manga genre itself. So right around the time I was in my trial period of getting a job in order to fit into society, all of this was happening in manga.
* * *
The post In This Way I Made My Debut: Yamagami Tatsuhiko’s <em>Compendium of New Philosophy: A Comedy</em> appeared first on The Comics Journal.
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