A Nobody Artist

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

The legendary Tsuge Yoshiharu remains an elusive and highly influential cartoonist as he moves into the final phase of his career. 

A Nobody Artist features a collection of semiautobiographical stories, 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. Sexual frustration routinely derails Tsuge’s young protagonists while their older peers provide consistent models of what not to do and whom not to become. As always, Tsuge’s art is succinct and glorious—a beautiful document of a changing Japan.

This penultimate volume in Drawn and Quarterly’s collection of the manga-ka’s mature works features richly-detailed and deeply human stories originally published between 1981 and 1985. Translated by prolific manga scholar and art historian Ryan Holmberg.