|
Kazuo Koike, a Japanese manga writer whose dark samurai action series “Lone Wolf and
Cub,” “Lady Snowblood” and “Crying Freeman” — influenced films by filmmakers
Quentin Tarantino (Kill Bill) and Sam Mendes (Road to Perdition), died April 17 due to pneumonia. He was 82..
Koike's family posted this on his personal Twitter page: "Kazuo Koike, who had been hospitalized for a long time,
and passed away on April 17th due to pneumonia," the message reads (as
translated from Japanese). "Many people love Kazuo Koike and his works, and we
thank you very much from our hearts. The funeral was attended only by relatives. Thank you very much for everything."
Koike’s manga featured stylized graphic violence that benefited from the
black-and-white color scheme of manga. He regarded most samurai films and manga
as insufficiently violent and overly ritualized in their swordplay: “Black and white gave him the ability to render blood graphically without the intensity
that you would have in color,” said Andrew Farago, curator of the Cartoon Art
Museum in San Francisco. “If you tried that in American comics, you wouldn’t get
away with that and have mainstream distribution. It was a very cinematic
approach, but it wasn’t gratuitous.” Mr. Koike and his artists, he added, “were
very aware of the audience and the boundaries and limitations of what the
publisher would allow.”
He was best-known for the manga series Lone Wolf & Cub (28 volumes), which he created with Goseki Kojima. The two were known as the
"Golden Duo" and created Samurai Executioner and Path of the Assassin as well.
Koike also created Crying Freeman (with Ryoichi Ikegami), Lady Snowblood (with
Kazuo Kamimura), and Hanappe Bazooka (with Goseki Kojima). He did some Marvel
work including a Japanese-exclusive Hulk: The Manga in 1970 and a story with C.B.
Cebulski in X-Men Unlimited #50 in 2003.
Koike taught college for a while and a many of his students became well known.
He started the Gekiga Sonjuku, a college course meant to teach people how to be
manga artists. A good story, he believed, always begins with character
development: "I’ve only been teaching how to develop characters — never how to construct a
story line,” he once said. “What I always try to do is persuade my students to
create a strong character first. If you have a strong character, the story line
will develop naturally, on its own. "
Kazuo Koike, was inducted into the Will Eisner Comic Industry Hall of Fame in 2004.
|
