Ninja Sarutobi Sasuke

Sugiura Shigeru (1908–2000) was one of the most popular manga artists of the mid-twentieth century and a pioneer of Pop Art in Japan. Originally trained as a painter, he debuted as a cartoonist in 1932 under the tutelage of Tagawa Suihō, a leading author of children’s manga in the prewar period. In the 1950s, Sugiura himself became a star for his zany, slapstick children’s adventure comics featuring ninja, samurai, cowboys, aliens, and other fantastical characters culled from Japanese popular fiction, Hollywood movies, and American comic books. In the late 1960s and 1970s, he experienced a second boom in popularity, this time for absurdist, surrealistic comics drawn for an adult audience. Due to his inclusion in seminal art comics publications such as Raw and The Ganzfeld, he is also recognized as a progenitor of avant-garde comics globally.

Ryan Holmberg is an award-winning translator and historian of Japanese comics. He has worked on over three dozen books with publishers such as Drawn & Quarterly, New York Review Comics, Bubbles, Living the Line, and Breakdown Press. He is the author of The Translator Without Talent (Bubbles, 2020) and Garo Manga: The First Decade, 1964–1973 (Center for Book Arts, 2010). A full bibliography of his work can be found at mangaberg.com.