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Kazuo Koike's "Jigoku manga" world. 

-Patrick Macias
 

"Comics are carried by characters...if a character is well created, the comic becomes a hit.-Kazuo Koike."

Jigoku Manga is real and palatable. In short, it is pretty much typified by any manga written by Kazuo Koike. It burns. It hurts, and it is sinful beyond belief. And as a card-carrying bad-comics masochist I
kind of like it that way. Besides, one can only imagine what kind of real trash gets to rest on puffy white clouds with angel wings up in accursed manga heaven-a place where Koike's best-known title, Lone Wolf and Cub,probably plays the harp.

LW&C is a populist classic that bores me to tears. Mostly because, well,I expect worse from Koike. Things like alternating cycles of sex and violence at superhuman intervals, flavored with casual racism, hard gambling, and dodgy historical fact. A big guy with a sword and a baby cart isn't enough, especially when Koike is the primary architect of my own private "Jigoku manga"-and perhaps yours too.

Born in Akita in 1936, Koike was from the get-go a man of no small distinction. Previously a government bureaucrat and a professional mahjong player, he began his career as a manga scripter in the late sixties, i.e., the era when manga finally began to walk and chew gum at the same time. After doing time ghostwriting Golgo 13, Koike began hitting them out of the park left, right, and center in the seventies.

A fateful pairing with a manga-ka named Ryoichi Ikegami gave birth to AIUEO Boy, a celebration of globetrotting Japanese masculinity clad in swinging bell bottoms and aviator shades. Here the endless cyclical pattern of "fighting and fucking" that would make up later Koike-Ikegami blockbusters like Crying Freeman and Wounded Man was established. But in AIUEO Boy, there is still an amazing rawness to the formula that makes it even more thrilling and maddening. Killer oil-drum roadside barbecue instead of a TV dinner.

Perhaps you are thinking that Koike was nothing without his buddy Ikegami to bail him out. Rest assured that during this same era, Mr. "Jigoku Manga" was penning scripts even daffier than AIUEO's. The exact title escapes me now, but there's one about a serial rapist possessed by the spirit of his baby-faced ventriloquist doll, which is also the primary object of his affections (sidenote: this happened to be the most well-thumbed manga at the ramen shop I found it at). There's also Tale of Youth, which is about 19-year-old kid having Rabelaisian adventures across Mongol-invaded China which include getting addicted to opium and having sex with criminally old women.

By the eighties, Koike was well established as a big cheese. He opened the Kauzo Koike Gekiga Sonjuku, a manga school that gave birth to Rumiko Takahashi (are his Manga Hell qualifications still in doubt? Methinks not!) and flooded the market with more crazy manga. In Hanappe Bazooka, he teamed up with Go Nagai to depict the inter-dimensional adventures of a kid with a penis for an index finger. This is one of the greatest manga I've ever seen..
Honest. Not to be forgotten also are Mad Bull and Brothers which imagined Ed Koch-era New York as the habitat of Nazis, cyborgs, and Magnum bullet casings. Together they are "Jigoku Manga" made manifest.

So where are we now? Well, the bio in Wounded Man says that Koike is the founder of Koike Shoten (his own publishing firm) as well as a professor at Osaka College of Art. He's been a TV show host, the founder of a golf magazine, and the writer of 'serious' novels and poetry. In Wounded Man, there's a photo of him grinning at you as if he knows what you are about to read and exactly what sort of impact it is going to have-so he's alive and well.

So as the collected denizens of "Jigoku Manga", let's hope that the best, I mean the worst, is still ahead of him.
 

 
 
 

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