{"id":639,"date":"2009-12-18T12:36:00","date_gmt":"2009-12-18T17:36:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/2009\/12\/a-little-on-makoto-aida\/"},"modified":"2009-12-18T12:36:00","modified_gmt":"2009-12-18T17:36:00","slug":"little-on-makoto-aida","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/?p=639","title":{"rendered":"A Little on Makoto Aida"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a> I imagine Makoto Aida <\/a>being a kid who wanted to draw manga like Suehiro Maruo<\/a>, and then the kid grew up to become a gallery artist. I don\u2019t think he\u2019s that well known in American comics circles, maybe because his work is so explicitly about Japan or because comics is a very small part of what he does. Like a lot of contemporary artists, he works across mediums: sculptures, paintings, performances, videos, plans for housing projects, whatever. He painted a quick Fuji watercolor image over his BFA diploma and sold it for the price of the university entrance fee. (After selling it he said: \u201cThough I am not supposed to say, art is so strange.\u201d) And he doesn\u2019t make dividing the works easy; his (beautiful) monograph Monument for Nothing <\/em><\/a>catalogs his works by color, as opposed to chronologically or by medium or theme. All of the mostly blue works are grouped together, the mostly white works, etc. He\u2019ll break up a series of works if the colors of the individual parts are different.<\/p>\n

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His main comics effort, Mutant Hanako<\/em>, is actually a continuation of his \u201cWar Picture Returns\u201d series of paintings. Here\u2019s how Aida describes the story, from Monument for Nothing<\/em>: \u201cWith the setting of the Pacific War, it is a mixture of elements of extreme nationalism, brutal erotic depiction, and airheaded adventurous action, which as a whole is closer to simply ridiculous absurdity than a crazy constructed air castle.\u201d There\u2019s a good plot summary of the book here: http:\/\/everything2.com\/title\/Mutant+Hanako<\/a><\/p>\n

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In his more cartoony work, he alternates between very immediate drawings (Mutant Hanako<\/em> is an example of that, and his \u201cMinna to Issho\u201d series) sort of like Takashi Nemoto<\/a> and heta-uma (he\u2019s described heta-uma as \u201ca style of illustration and graphic design which was hot [in the eighties]\u201d), and more illustrative, detailed images that resemble Suehiro Maruo. I like how it\u2019s common among mangaka to draw in such a similar way to other mangaka. It\u2019s like the drawings are just about functioning to create a story. The story\/storytelling is where the individual is. But, in Aida\u2019s case, he\u2019s somewhere between being a regular fan mangaka and a pop artist. He\u2019s using something that he likes, as Takashi Murakami<\/a> does. But Aida\u2019s much warmer than Murakami. Aida\u2019s more like underground comics. It\u2019s all very hand-done.<\/p>\n

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A side note:
I have the Japanese printing of Mutant Hanako <\/em>and there\u2019s an English translation of the work in the back of it. That\u2019s rare among manga and more common among art books, so I don\u2019t know if it\u2019s because they thought of it as an art book more, or it could possibly be in reference to the crazy American\/Japanese relationships in the Mutant Hanako <\/em>story. Anyway, I\u2019d like to see more of these limited-audience manga be translated on separate pamphlets (by an English publisher\/distributor) that would then be inserted into the original printing of the book, and then distributed online through the English publisher. Obviously it isn\u2019t as ideal as a fully translated new book, but beggars can\u2019t be choosers when it comes to manga translations with such a small potential audience. <\/p>\n

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I imagine Makoto Aida being a kid who wanted to draw manga like Suehiro Maruo, and then the kid grew up to become a gallery artist. I don\u2019t think he\u2019s that well known in American comics circles, maybe because his work is so explicitly about Japan or because comics is a very small part of what he does. Like a lot of contemporary artists, he works across mediums: sculptures, paintings, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[835,838,859,1259],"class_list":["post-639","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-makoto-aida","tag-manga","tag-maruo","tag-nemoto"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/639","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=639"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/639\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=639"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=639"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=639"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}