Tana Oshima
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Ryan Carey interviews the artist
Tana Oshima is an elusive cartoonist to me, as I've seen their comics on the Domino site for years at a passing glance but have never felt a strong enough connection to pick up any of her work. So, in honor of their newest comic published by Comics Blogger here's a primer of sorts exploring a cartoonist pushing the limits of sequential storytelling to places we didn't know we wanted to go. The comix critic Ryan Carey (Patreon) is the leading proponent and authority on Tana Oshima's comics career, he has reviewed most of her comics to date forming a concurrent commentary on one our most intense cartoonists.
BEFORE AFTER (Comics Blogger) Description by publisher Thomas Campbell: "BEFORE AFTER is a avant garde sci-fi tale about space, time, bodily function and alienation. Oshima's organic shapes, ballpoint lines and evocative patterns drag the reader through while raising questions of purpose, femininity and perspective. It's an otherworldly transmission from an emerging talent of experimental comics."
Review by Ryan Carey
comicsblogger.net
THIS PLACE SUCKS SO MUCH (Bootleg Books) also available here. Review by Ryan Carey: "Here's something different, the first (to my knowledge, at any rate) autobio/memoir comic from the iconoclastic Tana Oshima, whose work more often than not falls somewhere along the axis between visual poetry and pure abstraction."
Bootleg Books
16 RUBBER DUCKS (Self-published) also available here. Austin English at Domino Books: "This strikes me as a comic that I wish we saw more of these days: a personal reflection zine, a container of the authors reckoning with the world. Oshima presents thoughts and ideas with clarity and heart, the mark of all important art. Much to chew on here as we follow Oshima's thinking, beautifully translated into the comics form."
Domino Books
THE LADDER (Self-published) also available here. Review by Ryan Carey: "Oshima illustrates these proceedings loosely, giving a sense of immediacy to them that is subtly different than urgency, and definitely what is called for in a zine that is every bit as much about the spaces in between the ladder's rungs as it is the rungs themselves."
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I AM THAT SHAPE AGAIN (Paper View Books) also available here. Review by Ryan Carey: "Standing on its own but also functioning as an effective companion piece to THE LADDER is I'M THAT SHAPE AGAIN, which in essence internalizes the same themes and uses a LITERAL twist on the Gysin/Burroughs "cut-up" technique to present its text in forms one could argue are both DEconstructed and REconstructed simultaneously, each phrase more coalescing within, as opposed to directly addressing or even complementing, the art around it."
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DE LO ERRANTE Y ABERRANTE [OF THE WANDERING AND ABERRANT] (Rialta Ediciones) Spanish-language reissue of VAGABOND, NABOKOVA, MASQUERADE, THEATER OF CRUELTY, and an interview conducted by Legna Rodriguez. Translated from a review by Mario Cardenas: "This book is, then, extending the meaning of it's title, a way of walking, of moving, and assuming transit while going from one place to another, at the same time that the wanderer deviates or departs from the usual."
THE BOOK OF ICE (Self-published) OOP. I couldn't find any commentary on this particular Oshima book.
Cargo Collective
ISOLATED (lulu.com) Review by Ryan Carey: "Everyone is given four pages to work with (apart from Galvan, who only uses two), and as one would expect, pretty much all these strips are autobiographical in nature, but even the ones that aren’t in form are in spirit, given the same thing was resting heavy on everybody’s shoulders all over the world at the time — which rather brings me to my main point here : expect a uniquely unpleasant and harrowing reading experience with this as you look back on a time that absolutely no one is nostalgic for."
lulu.com
UNBOUND (Self-published) OOP. Review by Ryan Carey: "But there are layers upon layers of meaning and import to unpack over, above, and beyond what’s happening on a liminal level, and to that end we find ourselves grappling with questions of identity, displacement, emotional bonding, the meaning of community and belonging, and even power dynamics and inequality — as with all things Oshima, the real journey is within, no matter how far afield events may take us."
Four Color Apocalypse
PULP FRICTION (Self-published) still available here and here. Review by Ryan Carey of a reissue of Oshima's first comic: "What I do know for certain is this: as a bona fide and unabashed fan of Oshima’s comics, this is equally interesting for what it is and what it isn’t, for how it fits into her overall body of work and how it doesn’t, and as a skeletal roadmap that shows the directions she ended up taking, and those she steered clear of. I was transfixed by it for all these reasons and more, but I’m not certain Oshima herself would recommend this as a 'jumping-on point' for readers new to her stuff. But what the hell do I know? I only work here."
Four Color Apocalypse
THEATER OF CRUELTY (Self-published) OOP. Review by Ryan Carey: "Is the medium the message? Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that it is: herein Oshima certainly employs a lot of the former in service of the latter, utilizing pen and ink, paints, sumi inks, possibly toilet paper(?), and even stuff from the kitchen cabinet to convey — primarily in English but also in Spanish and, momentarily, about a dozen other languages — a sense of loss of self from the self, whether this exile is precipitated by a noisy neighbor, a vivid dream, a reality that seems like a vivid dream, or a purely metaphorical construct."
Four Color Apocalypse
Filthy (Self-published) Review by Ryan Carey: "Yes, elements of the fantastic abound herein — those tubes Oshima populates her strips with sure do bring to mind Jeff Nicholson’s criminally under-appreciated THROUGH THE HABITRAILS — but they feel like they “belong,” whereas the protagonist/authorial stand-in herself frequently doesn’t."
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MASQUERADE (Self-published) still available from here. Review by Ryan Carey: "There’s even more than a not-so-simple examination of identity going on here, though — Oshima is also, by means of the farmhouse, examining whether or not the act of making art can possibly bridge and/or resolve the gulf between herself and her understanding of herself."
Four Color Apocalypse
NABOKOVA (Self-published) OOP. Review by Ryan Carey: "Literary references, visual metaphors, and text that can be read and interpreted in any number of ways are all par for the course on these pages, and understanding of this book is both earned and absolutely unique to each reader."
Four Color Apocalypse
VAGABOND (Self-published) still available from here and here. Review by Ryan Carey: "As an exploration of imposed loneliness, VAGABOND is almost without equal in terms of its impact — an economy of quickly-scrawled lines lends visual immediacy and balance to words that are obviously chosen with care and precision and that even employ, by accident or design, a kind of measured tempo and meter, the cumulative effect being that both visual and narrative “languages” coalesce into an organic whole that is certainly unique to Oshima’s own experience and perspective, but one that holds within it, and consequently expresses, something universally understood and felt."
Four Color Apocalypse
THE THINGS I WROTE ON TOILET PAPER (Self-published) OOP. Austin English at Domino Books: "Oshima presents thoughts and ideas with clarity and heart, the mark of all important art. Much to chew on here as we follow Oshima's thinking, beautifully translated into the comics form. One of the most consistent and direct zine makers out there right now."
Cargo Collective
Tana Oshima is a literary translator, specializing in translating Japanese fiction into Spanish. Her most recent effort was this collection of short stories from Nobel Laureate Yasunari Kawabata. The synopsis translates as:
"Ten stories, a country in ruins.
This book contains ten stories with intertwined stories, sometimes because the protagonists share the same name, sometimes because of their subtly supernatural character, and almost always because they have love—and the pain that is born from it—as their central theme. Unpublished until now in Spanish, Seix Barral presents it this time in direct translation from Japanese.
Each of these stories was first published in literary magazines between 1951 and 1956, years in which the poverty and desolation of a ruined Japan traumatized a generation devastated by defeat in World War II. This is the historical context in which the author develops these stories. In them, as in many of his later works, the war and the surrender of Japan mark a before and after in the lives of the characters and it is a historical fact that is omnipresent as a background landscape."Interview with Tana Oshima on the translation process on an earlier project.
