Hideo Azuma

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Hideo Azuma ( Japanese 吾 妻 ひ で お Azuma Hideo ; born February 6, 1950 in Urahoro , Hokkaidō , Japan ; † October 13, 2019 ) was a Japanese manga artist .

Life

At the age of sixteen, Hideo Azuma began to draw Yonkoma manga with pencils . After working for a short time at a printing company in Tokyo, he became an assistant to the manga artist Rentarō Itai . He later named this together with Osamu Tezuka , Shōtarō Ishinomori and the writer Yasutaka Tsutsui as a significant influence.

He published his first comic as a professional draftsman in December 1969 with Ringside Crazy ( リ ン グ サ イ ド ) in the manga magazine Manga Ō . After brief work for magazines such as Shōnen Sunday and Terebi Magazine , he brought out a twelve-book series from 1972 to 1976 with Futari to 5-nin ( ふ た り と 5 人 ) in Shōnen Champion magazine, making it his longest work to date. Azuma's works from this time, according to Jaqueline Berndt "playful and novel gag-manga" , were all aimed at boys and were therefore to be assigned to the Shōnen genre.

From the mid-1970s, he also addressed a female target group with comics in Princess magazine . In this magazine he published the series Olympus no Pollon ( オ リ ン ポ ス の ポ ロ ン ) from 1977 to 1979 , which was implemented as a 46-part anime in 1982 . Based on the anime film adaptation, Azuma designed a new version of the manga for the 100th comic magazine from 1982 onwards. In Olympus no Pollon the draftsman uses elements from Greek and Japanese mythology as a framework for the plot; the title character Pollon is the little daughter of the god Apollo and, when she grows up, wants to be a beautiful goddess.

In the late 1970s, Azuma focused on science fiction manga with absurd plots for smaller magazines such as Manga Shōnen and Ryū . Berndt described these as “puzzling, spectacular nonsense fantasies” . These include Fujōri Nikki ( 不 条理 日記 ) published in 1978 , for which he won the Seiun Prize the following year , and Kyōran Sei'unki from 1979. The Magical Girl series Nanako appeared in Just Comic magazine from 1980 to 1985 SOS ( な な こ SOS ) about a girl from another planet who crash-lands on earth, losing her memory in the process, but retaining her superpowers. Nanako SOS was implemented as an anime television series in 39 episodes in 1983.

In the early 1980s, he pioneered the lolicon genre with pornographic manga depicting sex with underage girls . Azuma's lolicon mangas - including Junbungaku Series ( 純 文学 シ リ ー ズ ) and Hizashi - were published in magazines such as Shōjo Alice , which were sold through vending machines.

The outlier

In November 1989, due to pressure to perform, Azuma broke off all of his current series and ran away from his family and work to live as a homeless person after a failed suicide attempt. In February 1990 he was found by the police. In April 1992 he disappeared again and tried again as a homeless person, but then rented an apartment and took a job as a construction worker. He was not found again until March 1993. He continued his work as a construction worker for a while, but then returned to drawing. In 1998 he was forced to withdraw from alcohol because of his alcohol addiction.

He wrote the comic book Der Ausreißer ( 失踪 日記 , Shissō Nikki ), which was published by East Press in 2005, about the experiences with the two disappearances and alcoholism . This manga won the Japan Media Arts Festival's Manga Grand Prize , the Osamu Tezuka Culture Prize, and the Japanese Comics Association Prize, and has been translated into French, English, Spanish, and German. Although the experiences described were traumatic for the draftsman, the style of drawing and narration is rather humorous. He said: "This manga has a positive worldview and its style is funny, because people can't stand too much realism".

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Japanese Media Arts Festival ( Memento April 15, 2009 in the Internet Archive ).
  2. ↑ Japanese Writers' House ( Memento of the original from October 7, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.trannet-japan.com
  3. ↑ Archived copy ( memento of the original from October 7, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.chestjp.com
  4. ↑ a b c Jaqueline Berndt : Phenomenon Manga . edition q, Berlin 1995. p. 181. ISBN 3-86124-289-3 .
  5. ↑ Helen McCarty and Jonathan Clements: The Anime Encyclopedia. Revised & Expanded Edition . P. 498.
  6. ^ Hideo Azuma: The runaway . Writer & Reader, 2007, ISBN 3-937102-70-1 .
personal data
SURNAME Azuma, Hideo
ALTERNATIVE NAMES 吾 妻 ひ で お (Japanese)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Japanese manga artist
DATE OF BIRTH February 6, 1950
PLACE OF BIRTH Urahoro , Hokkaidō, Japan
DATE OF DEATH October 13, 2019