Ninja Sarutobi Sasuke

Shigeru Sugiura, Ryan Holmberg, Ryan Holmberg

Book cover for Ninja Sarutobi Sasuke
Book cover for Ninja Sarutobi Sasuke

Ninja Sarutobi Sasuke

Ninja Sarutobi Sasuke

Shigeru Sugiura, Ryan Holmberg, Ryan Holmberg

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Description

A classic character of Japanese literature is reimagined as a mischievous, shapeshifting adventurer in this zany, Pop Art-esque gag manga by a titan of the genre.

In the early 1960s, the Japanese manga artist Shigeru Sugiura took the well-loved literary character Ninja Sarutobi Sasuke and made him his own.

In this legendary gag manga, Ninja Sarutobi Sasuke, Shigeru sends the famous Ninja on a wild, eye-popping adventure: Sarutobi encounters cowboys and aliens, spaceships and sailing ships, mid-60s celebrity cameos, mushroom clouds, detectives with squirt guns, and more in a delightful and ever-surprising world.

Available for the first time in English and with a new essay by Ryan Holmberg, Ninja Sarutobi Sasuke is a must-read of trippy visuals and silly storytelling.

About the Author

Shigeru Sugiura (1908-2000) was a hugely popular and influential Japanese comics artist. Sugiura was originally trained as a painter, and early in his career his work was selected for the prestigious Teiten exhibition. He began creating manga in order to make a living, and by the 1950s had risen to major prominence, gaining renown through his comics for children and his pioneering role in the genre of gag manga. In the 1970s and 80s he experienced a second boom in popularity, this time for more absurdist, avant-garde manga geared towards adults.

Ryan Holmberg is an arts and comics historian, author, editor, and Japanese-English translator. His translations include Tezuka Osamu's The Mysterious Underground Men, for which he won an Eisner Award, Tadao Tsuge's Slum Wolf, and Yoshiharu Tsuge's The Man Without Talent (New York Review Comics). He has contributed to publications such as Art in America, Artforum, The Comics Journal, and The New York Review of Books. He has taught about Japanese art and cultural history, most recently at the Art Institute of Chicago, UNC Chapel Hill, and Tokyo University. He lives in North Carolina.

Critical Reviews

"Eye-popping images rendered in styles both hyperrealistic and playfully childish abound across virtually every panel of this long overdue collection of classic comics. . . . Suguira Shigeru . . . reimagines Sarutobi Sasuke, a heroic ninja from Japanese folklore, as an anarchic, shape-shifting prankster set loose in feudal Japan to bedevil whoever crosses his path. . . . Suguira Shigeru's sense of design and bold use of collage and montage effects result in an enjoyably silly and absurd masterpiece of early psychedelic art." --Library Journal

Publishing Information

Publisher: New York Review Comics
Pub date: 2024-06-11
Length: 250 pages

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