A gritty collection of graphic short stories by a Japanese manga master depicting life on the streets among punks, gangsters, and vagrants.Tadao Tsuge is one of the pioneers of alternative manga, and one of the world’s great artists of the down-and-out. Slum Wolf is a new selection of his stories from the late Sixties and Seventies, never before available in English: a vision of Japan as a world of bleary bars and rundown flophouses, vicious street fights ...

With those piercing eyes and flicks of the tail, house cats observe domesticity poetically, and with sass“Have you ever given birth before?”“Me..? No, not yet.”“When it happened to me for the first time, it wasn't just kittens that I birthed, but also me as a mother. So now, as I'm raising them, I am also raising myself as a mother… And it ain’t no joke! So, no! I don't really have the luxury to think about things like whether my...

The essential early work by the modern master of Japanese literary comicsYoshiharu Tsuge is one of the most influential and acclaimed practitioners of literary comics in Japan. The Swamp collects work from his early years, showing a major talent coming into his own. Bucking the tradition of mystery and adventure stories, Tsuge’s fiction focused on the lives of the citizens of Japan. These mesmerizing comics, like those of his contemporary Yoshihiro Tatsumi...

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

In the end, we're all the same…we just want to be smothered like babies against anotherhuman's beating heartThrough a cracked door, heartsick Emi hears a playful growl. Cautiously, she lets her lover in—a wolf of a man wielding a bouquet of roses. His shoulders must have been four inches wider than mine. As I stood behind him, I fantasized about the broadness of his chest and the thickness of his neck...and about becoming his mistress once again.

A celebrated masterwork shimmering with vulnerability from one of alt-manga's most important female artists.“Now that we’ve woken from the dream, what are we going to do?” Chiharu thinks to herself, rubbing her husband’s head affectionately.Set in an apartment complex on the outskirts of Tokyo, Murasaki Yamada's Talk to My Back (1981–84) explores the fraying of Japan's suburban middle-class dreams through a woman's relationship with her two daughte...

A manga icon’s most perplexing, transgressive, and astounding work of horrorand surrealismBy the mid-1970s, Tsuge Yoshiharu was a man changed by circumstance—something hiswork from 1975 to 1981 boldly reveals. After settling into married life with fellow artistFujiwara Maki (author of Eisner-winning My Picture Diary), Tsuge would return to thenarrative formulas that he knew best: tall tales exchanged between fellow travelers,macabre parables tinged with magical realism, and the end...

The influential cartoonist hits his stride as he celebrates the charms and oddities of rural postwar cultureYoshiharu Tsuge leaves early genre trappings behind, taking a light, humorous approach in these stories based on his own travels. Red Flowers ranges from deep character studies to personal reflections to ensemble comedies set in the hotels and bathhouses of rural Japan. There are irascible old men, drunken gangsters, reflective psychiatric-hospital e...

An alt-manga legend strikes out on his own, creating some of his most revealing and personal worksOba Electroplating Factory is a startlingly bleak but nonetheless captivating portrait of mid-century Japan in its most unglamorous iteration. Glimpses of the artist reflecting upon his life, his work, and his contemporaries pepper the narrative landscape: a wife teases her husband about a former fling on a trip to the hot springs, a young cartoonist is aghast...

The most critically acclaimed comic of the Japanese countercultureNejishiki unveils the most iconic scenes from Yoshiharu Tsuge’s highly respected body of work alongside his most beloved stories. A cornerstone of Japan’s legendary 1960s counterculture that galvanized avant-garde manga and comics criticism, the title story follows an injured young man as he wanders through a village of strangers in search of emotional and physical release. Other stories in ...

The best-selling Archie wedding series continues with The Married Life, two ongoing series each featuring one of Archies two possible futures, one married to Betty and another married to Veronica.“Archie Loves Betty: Saturday” First, in “Archie Loves Betty: Saturday” Archie and Betty fight to make their dreams come true in Manhattan, but back in Riverdale, Mr. Lodge will stop at nothing to break the man that broke his daughters heart.“Archie Loves Veronica: Dear Dilton…”Meanwhile, in “Arch...

The armies of Persia—a vast horde greater than any the world has ever known—are poised to crush Greece, an island of reason and freedom in a sea of madness and tyranny. Standing between Greece and this tidal wave of destruction are a tiny detachment of but three hundred warriors. Frank Miller's epic retelling of history's supreme moment of battlefield valor is finally collected in its intended format—each two-page spread from the original comics is presented as a single undivided page.