Sasaki Maki (Edited and translated by Ryan Holmberg)
Published by: Break Down Press, 2015
Ding Dong Circus presents, for the first time in English, the best of Sasaki Maki’s work, mainly from alt-manga super magazine Garo.
Drawn between 1967-1974, the fifteen stories here follow Sasaki’s groundbreaking exploration of collage methods in comic storytelling, weaving through references to R&B, rock’m’roll, the Vietnam War, Andy Warhol, the Summer of Love, the Beatles, British humour, and the wacky world of Japanese consumerism.
Ding Dong Circus demonstrates what manga fans already knew: that in Sasaki Maki, Japan can claim not only a pioneer in experimental comics, but one of the world’s masters of Pop Art and a trenchant avant-garde critic of the Sixties.
Publisher: Breakdown Press (2015)
Ryan Holmberg is an art and comics historian. After receiving his PhD in Japanese Art History from Yale University in 2007, he taught at the University of Chicago, City University of New York, and the University of Southern California. He is a frequent contributor to Art in America, Artforum, Yishu, and The Comics Journal. He has edited and translated a number of historically important Japanese comics, amongst them Tezuka Osamu’s The Mysterious Underground Men (PictureBox 2014), winner of the 2014 Eisner Award for Best U.S. Edition of International Material: Asia.