Shigeru Sugiura (杉浦 茂, Sugiura Shigeru, 3 April 1908 – 23 April 2000) was a Japanese manga artist famous for his surreal, nonsense gag manga.
Career
After initially studying painting, Sugiura became an assistant to the manga artist Suihō Tagawa.[1] He soon began drawing his own manga in 1933[1] and came to fame after World War II with a series of comedic manga for children based on stories like those of Sasuke Sarutobi, Jiraiya, and Journey to the West. Sugiura closely followed popular culture and thus his manga were also influenced by such contemporary fads as Godzilla, pro wrestling, and American science fiction films.[2] The philosophy of his manga "is of yukai, pleasure and amusement, pursuing the path as far from seriousness as possible. . . . The praxis of yukai is essentially the body in free motion, and Sugiura’s characters are defined by an excess of movement."[3] The result was a visual style that was often surreal and absurd. A craftsman, Sugiura could not keep up with the mass production of manga that the shift to weekly magazines brought at the end of the 1950s,[4] and his subsequent manga became more and more surreal, if not avant-garde, as they came to be directed at an older audience. He enjoyed a second boom in popularity from the 1970s on.[4]
^Tomita Satoko, ed. (2002). Sugiura Shigeru nanjarahoi no sekai (in Japanese). Mitaka-shi Bijitsu Gyarari.
^Gerow, Aaron (2006). "Wrestling with Godzilla: Manga Monsters, Puroresu and the National Body." In Godzilla’s Footsteps. Eds. William Tsutsui and Michiko Ito. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Pp. 63-81.
^The Ganzfeld - Issue 4 Dan Nadel, Jessi Rymill - 2005 "In the 1950s, his manga were serialized in boys' monthly magazines and published in original manga books; The Last of ... the Mohicans and Monkey King Goes West were humorous manga loosely based on American and Chinese classics, while Sarutobi, the Ninja Boy and Mister Robot reflected Sugiura's yearning for terrae incognitae and the world of fantasy."
External links
Comic Park First pages of Sugiura reprints available online (in Japanese).
Shōnen Jiraiya Seigō Matsuoka review of Sugiura manga reprint (in Japanese).
