Inio Asano
I think this is something that should be addressed before anything else. It’s been known for a while now that Asano expressed in an interview his desire to undergo a sex-change operation, but judging from these[1] two[2] blog posts by Matt Thorn, the translator of Nijagara Holograph and all-around person that seems pretty sensible to gender issues I think it would still be appropriate to use the masculine pronoun. I don’t want to offend anyone and if newer information surfaces I will be more than happy to redact my language.
I’m not sure if Inio Asano just appears to be prolific because most of his work is made up of collections of short stories and manga series just one or two volumes long, but at only 34 years old he amassed a sizable body of work. Debuting at 17 years old, at 21 winning the Prix GX for young mangaka and having a short stint as Shin Takahashi’s assistant, Asano quickly established himself as a, if not the, cartographer of juvenile urban alienation.
I think of him as the flip-side of Okazaki’s cool ennui. His stories are bursting with emotion, they are wet with tears and sweat and spit and sex and they usually hit like a motherload. A lot of them explore the different facets of romance, of falling into and out of love and carrying through relationships while maintaining (or abandoning) individuality and independence. They also rub on bigger issues such as faith, environmentalism, capitalism, even terrorism just lightly enough to universalize the individual histories and project more depth onto them.
His style is rich, using photorealistic backgrounds (usually photos digitally manipulated, or rendered interiors) but making good enough use of shading and lightning to convincingly integrate his more cartoonish characters into them. He also has the figures interact with the environment: they lean on railings, they jump in puddles, they sit on benches and stairs, they walk into shadows. While he cannot really achieve any greater spatial continuity because of his approach the images themselves, and even short sequences, are convincing and powerful and they relate to one another. I also like that even if his faces are more or less ”manga faces” he almost never goes for idiomatic indices in order to represent different emotions, opting for honest and much stronger facial expressions and body language.
Originally published at redditaltcomix
