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I asked Ryan Holmberg, the curator of Garo Manga: The First Decade, 1964-1973, (running until June 26 at The Center for Book Arts in NYC) to write something for Comics Comics about the exhibition. He came through and more. Take it away, Ryan.

Tsuge Yoshiharu page from Garo

So, Dan has asked me to write something about “Garo Manga: The First Decade, 1964-1973.” Since I don’t want to completely rehash what’s in the exhibition catalogue, I think I will approach this from what I think the exhibition offers as a corrective to the dominant North American image of Garo—a venue for highly inventive and very funny, but supremely crass material, with lots of deskilled drawing, gross body humor, and non-sequitur narratives—an image informed by anthologies like Comics Underground Japan and PictureBox’s Monster Men Bureiko Lullaby that have translated work from the 1980s and ’90s. This standard image—I will call it “hetauma” (lit. “bad good,” i.e. deskilled, punk, et cetera) Garo for short—fits fairly well with contemporary ’70s-’80s underground comics in North America. The mutually adoring relationship between Gary Panter and Japan in the early ’80s is a good example of how there is a certain trans-national convergence of taste in alternative comics-making in that period which did not exist in the ’60s: Garo and Zap had little in common.

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Yes, that's a new painting by Ebisu.

If you’re anything like me, you must be wondering, “What does Japanese comics legend Ebisu do these days?” And you must also wonder, “Does he paint in his underwear?” Well, never fear, because here are the answers to all your questions. And mine, too. And some I didn’t know I had. You’ll be happy to know that we (ahem, PictureBox) will be selling work much like what is pictured in the link in just a few short months. If you poke around (NSFW) the rest of this site (an art agency) you’ll find some good information on Ebisu and Nemoto as well, not to mention a rather more eccentric artist, too.