All of the works included in that line featured conspicuously detailed, laborious art (one supposes to flatter the tastes of local comic shop denizens, as was often the strategy in 20th century manga localization), but not all of them enjoyed the same success nobody without a PhD in bullshit or the word 'VIZ' on a tax return remembers Yu Kinutani's Shion: Blade of the Minstrel, but Hotel Harbour View, drawn by Taniguchi and written by Natsuo Sekikawa, became something of a cult favorite. In 1990, VIZ debuted its 'Spectrum' line of bookshelf-ready paperback originals, their dimensions matching those of popular softcover collected editions of American comic books.

Indeed, extreme violence is where it all began, though the extremity was of an unexpected type. From 'Hotel Harbour View', written by Natsuo Sekikawa (VIZ, 1990). It's okay: that's how these things are reported in the generalist press, and it speaks well of Taniguchi's renown that such irregularities are even visible.īut that raises another question - what kind of renown are we talking about? The BBC prominently observed that Taniguchi's works were 'widely praised for the gentle manner in which he approached subjects that were often unique for Japan's manga consumers,' and 'stood apart in a genre sometimes seen as rooted in extreme violence and pornography.' Far be it from me to downplay the storied legacy of smut in Japanese comics, but framing Taniguchi as Manga's Good Boy does a disservice to both the breadth of his career and the facts of his publication history in English. I suspect this is because the Belgian publisher Casterman, which disseminated word of Taniguchi's death in the west, released a French-language edition back in '07, and presumably made note of that in a press release venues then repeated the information in English environs, a veritable dye pack bursting against their unfamiliarity with the artist's oeuvre. For example, The Magic Mountain - a mid-'00s serial which, to my knowledge, was never even collected in Japanese, let alone translated to English - has unexpectedly been cited several times among a very small handful of his notable works. Still, I did notice a few interesting things in the reportage surrounding his departure. I'll leave the summation of his life and work in more capable hands, as my own familiarity is strictly limited to those works we've seen translated to English - not an inconsiderable amount, but far less than the total output of an artist who'd been publishing professionally since the early 1970s. Features THIS WEEK IN COMICS! (2/15/17 – Quartier voisin)Īs you have probably heard, the manga artist Jirō Taniguchi died this past Saturday.

Jirō taniguchi the walking man