That Miyoko Asagaya Feeling

Plot

Titled That Miyoko Asagaya Feeling, this is an important collection of stories about the artist’s own struggles with romance, art, alcohol, and mental illness, originally published in Garo and other venues in the early and mid 70s. Tsuge Yoshiharu is usually credited for pioneering quasi-autobiographical shishosetsu-style manga in the mid-late 60s, but these Abe stories are really the first case of a Japanese cartoonist writing regularly and in a brutally frank way about his personal life. They are more or less contemporaneous with Justin Green's Binky Brown (1972), but without all the cartoony absurdities and neurotic self-flagellation. Abe's freeform drawing, sometimes scratchy sometimes fluid, is also really amazing. Interestingly, a couple of the stories are told from his partner Miyoko's point of view. Rounding out the volume is an essay by Asakawa Mitsuhiro, who also selected the works. Pictured here is the cover of the February 1973 issue of Garo, featuring an image from Abe's story "Love" (which will appear in the Black Hook edition), with colors by Hayashi Seiichi. This will be a must-have book for both alt-manga fans and people interested in the history of comics as literature.