Suehiro Maruo

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Suehiro Maruo ( Japanese 丸 尾 末 広 Maruo Suehiro ; born January 28, 1956 in Nagasaki ) is a Japanese mangaka , illustrator and painter.

Career

Maruo graduated from middle school in March 1972, but then dropped out of high school. At the age of 15 he moved to Tokyo and worked there as a bookbinder , but also survived shoplifting. At 17, he sent his first self-taught manga to the manga magazine Shōnen Jump , but the editorial team found the material too dark and extreme for the magazine's commercial, weekly format and refused to publish it. Maruo then paused drawing manga until November 1980, when he made his debut as a mangaka with Ribon no Kishi ( リ ボ ン の 騎士 ) at the age of 24. Two years later he was able to publish his first, independent work: Barairo no Kaibutsu ( 薔薇 色 ノ 怪物 ). Many of his stories later appeared in the alternative magazine Garo before being published as anthologies.

Although Maruo is now mainly known as a mangaka, he has also created illustrations for concert posters, CD cases, magazines, novels, lithographs and other media, among other things. Action figures were also made of some of his characters .

Style and subjects

Many drawings Maruos show extreme depictions of sex and violence, which is why sometimes in terms of them Muzan e- talks, a particular form of Japanese woodblock prints of the Meiji period , mainly violence and other atrocities as a subject have. Maruo himself worked in 1988 together with Kazuichi Hanawa on the creation of a book on the subject with the title "Contest of cruel images of the Edo and Showa periods: 28 famous murders with poetry" ( 江 戸 昭和 競 作 無 惨 絵 英名 二 十八 衆 句 , Edo Shōwa kyōsaku muzan-e eimei nijūhasshūku ), in which besides his own work also colored woodcuts by Yoshitoshi and Yoshiiku were shown.

Maruo's nightmarish comics fall into the Japanese manga category known as eroguro ( エ ロ グ ロ , erotic grotesque ). The stories often take place in the first years of the Shōwa period , but the Japanese post-war era is also discussed. The characters in the story are often human monsters, freaks , freaks and other peculiar figures, whose bizarre characteristics are sometimes barely or not at all visible at first glance, Maruo's chiseled drawing style and his incorporation of ornaments and other symbols of the beautiful from the classical school of the Shōjo also often enough distract from the actual content-related border crossing (which consists, for example, of ax murders, abortions, rape and incest) or reinforce their impression as soon as one becomes aware of this contradicting aesthetic.

"Maruo's uncomfortably eroticized aesthetic evokes the repressed past of the new Japan: the undead demons of unpaid debt."

- Jens Balzer : Berliner Zeitung from February 26, 2004

The John Zorn Controversy

The avant-garde musician John Zorn used illustrations by Maruo for the albums Torture Garden and Leng Tch'e of his band Naked City in 1989 and 1990 . These images sparked immense controversy among Western audiences (which generally featured the violent and supposedly racist portrayal of Asian torture) and were eventually replaced, at least on the cover, when the albums were re-released together as Black Box in 1996 . The offensive art was simply banned into the booklet. John Zorn continued to work with Maruo thereafter.

Awards

German publications

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Berliner Zeitung: "Lament of an undead boy: To be read in German for the first time: the great Japanese comic artist Maruo Suehiro"

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Maruo, Suehiro
ALTERNATIVE NAMES 丸 尾 末 広 (Japanese)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Japanese mangaka
DATE OF BIRTH January 28, 1956
PLACE OF BIRTH Nagasaki , Japan