Times Literary Supplement
The world of Japanese graphic novels
It’s the air: the twisting movement as two archers on horseback face each other down beneath a tortured sky. In Saito Takao’s manga Muyonosuke (1967), the eponymous one-eyed bounty hunter watches as a fight breaks out between the warriors. The gouache on paper infuses a sense of melancholy into the wash of grass, the clouds turning bloody, an arrow’s swooshing tail. Sand kicked up by hooves produces black, screech-like markings up through the frame.