Ninja Sarutobi Sasuke

“Eye-popping images rendered in styles both hyperrealistic and playfully childish abound across virtually every panel of this long overdue collection of classic comics… . Suguira Shigeru … reimagines Sarutobi Sasuke, a heroic ninja from Japanese folklore, as an anarchic, shape-shifting prankster set loose in feudal Japan to bedevil whoever crosses his path… . Suguira Shigeru’s sense of design and bold use of collage and montage effects result in an enjoyably silly and absurd masterpiece of early psychedelic art.” —Library Journal

“As a madcap tour of a truly artistic mind, Ninja Sarutobi Sasuke is hard to beat” —Ross Locksley, UK Anime Network

“This new edition is remarkable not just because of its prior rarity, but because of the simple purity of its construction…. A quote attributed to Picasso seems apt: “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.” — Howard Waldstein, CBR

“This eye-popping mash-up of kiddie cartoons and underground art is perfectly weird.” —Publishers Weekly

“For me, this is such a joyful and engaging process, that I find Ninja Sarutobi Sasuke to be a perfect comic in terms of what it is trying to achieve. The manifestations of Sugiura’s stream of consciousness narrative never cease to amaze me.” – James Bradshaw, The Comics Journal

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 Suiho, 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).

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