A Nobody Artist

A revealing glimpse into the life and times of alt-manga’s most intriguing comics auteur Tsuge Yoshiharu 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 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.