Underground Art Magazine Manga Alternative | Page 3

I
E D I TO R I A L
3 | Underground 2017
’m not going to BS you; all my life I have been reading comics, but manga never appealed to me.
Growing up I began to expand my horizon outside of standard American comics and graphic novels. I
wanted a wider view outside of just reading American comics. So, I decided to read the most famous
manga stories such as Akira and Ghost in the Shell which are stories that appealed to my interests,
because I am a fan of dystopian and sci fi fiction. During my teens, I had a lot of lesiure time, so I
spent most of it reading manga and soon discovered “hidden gems” in the manga reading section,
gekiga, in the half-price store in my neighborhood. In Japan gekiga was the “underground comix.”
As a reader, who is familiar with many indie comics, I never knew what gekiga was. The first gekiga manga
story that I read was a Dark Horse publication, Lone Wolf & Cub, written by Kazuo Koike and illustrated
by Goseki Kojima. Then, I read another gekiga manga entitled a Drifting Life, an autobiography based on
Yoshihiro Tasumi’s life of how he was an artist that pioneered the gekiga writing and art movement that
started in the late 1950s. The story was so intriguing, that as a fan of indie comics, I decided to do a topic
on gekiga for the Spring and third issue for Underground Art Magazine. Read my interviews and get to
know South Korean manga artists Hyun Ji Kim and Japanese artist & writer Atsushi Kaneko.
-An inspired gekiga character
that I Illustrated to represent
my reaction of discovering
gekiga for the very first time.