Shigeru Sugiura: Last of the Mohicans - Hardcover

Shigeru Sugiura

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0985159561 ISBN 13: 9780985159566

Publisher: PictureBox, 2013

Synopsis

Sugiura Shigeru (1908-2000) is widely regarded as one of the masters of Japanese comics. His 1953 adaptation of James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans sold over 60,000 copies, quickly establishing him as one of the most sought-after children's manga artists of the 50s. His popularity had faded by the mid-60s, but he made a comeback later in the decade with a number of highly surrealistic, collage-like works, and he chose to rework Mohicans in this new style in 1974. Considered a masterpiece of postwar manga, The Last of the Mohicans is as beautiful to look at as it is a delight to read. This PictureBox edition--the first book-length publication of Sugiura in English--is edited and translated by Ryan Holmberg, who also provides an introduction, and is the inaugural volume in PictureBox's Ten Cent Manga series, focusing on mass-produced genre works in Japanese postwar comics.

About this title

From Publishers Weekly:

Not really an adaptation of the James Fenimore Cooper classic, this is a translation of Sugiura's influential 1974 manga, which was a new version of an earlier work done by the cartoonist in 1953—a work that was itself not exactly considered faithful to the novel. As pointed out in the afterword by Ryan Holmberg, Sugiura often ignores Cooper's original and relies instead on various aspects of screen adaptations that made it over to Japan, as well as his love of silent film in general and appropriations of classic western comics designs and tropes. Here, the adventures of Hawkeye—a diminutive, wide-eyed boy also referred to as the Carabine Kid—look like they take place not in the Northeastern U.S., but in a prairie from a western movie. Art styles are mixed around energetically—the Native Americans are presented sometimes as traditional Wild West Indians, but also as outlandish cartoon characters who seem absurd at best and offensive at worst, with big noses and buck teeth. Almost everything is played for laughs more than thrills. American frontier culture as filtered through silent films and interpreted by a Japanese cartoonist adapting work from the 1950s makes for a strange reading experience, with multiple levels of cultural interpretation—and misinterpretation. (July)

About this edition

• Publisher: PictureBox
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0985159561
• ISBN 13: 9780985159566
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 160
• Editor: Ryan Holmberg