"The Divorce Club" by Kazuo Kamimura by Bubble #Comics a Great Stylist, His Illustrations Have Been Embodied in Fashion and Advertising

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"The Divorce Club" by Kazuo Kamimura by Bubble #Comics A great stylist, his illustrations have been embodied in fashion and advertising. At the same time, he delivers mangas very anchored in reality around sensitive themes and striking female characters. A shooting star of manga in the eyes of his contemporaries with only fifteen years of career, Kazuo Kamimura will dazzle his peers and readers with a tightened work that is at once hard, moving and poetic. Almost all of her work will tell the stories of women's lives and destinies, addressing new themes and transgressive social issues in Japan. He started his career with Maria, a short series about a teenager from a wealthy family who gradually, in contact with her new high school friends, rebelled against her family and society. In the mid-1970s, Kamimura staged taboo subjects in a very conservative Japan, such as teenage sexuality, homosexuality, suicide or incest... Through Maria's quest for freedom, her family emancipation and students from all walks of life, mangaka painted a sensitive portrait of Japanese youth rarely seen elsewhere. Following this first sulphurous success, he joined forces with screenwriter Kazuo Koike to create Lady Snowblood. You know her, she is the one who inspired the character of Beatrix in Q. Tarantino's Kill Bill. Kazuo Koike being the talented scriptwriter of Lone wolf & cub or Crying freeman. With Kamimura, they create this incredible heroine obsessed with revenge as a legacy (she walks in the violent footsteps of her mother) who will consume her and turn her into a killing machine. Ready to do anything to avenge her, but with a moral sense that gives her nobility, Yuki will help the reader discover a Japan that is entering modernity and gradually abandoning its feudal system. He continues his exploration of medieval Japan in his next manga, Folles passions, around the figure of Hokusai through the point of view of one of his disciples. A love triangle around the illustrious master that allows the author to talk about creation and drawing. There will also be a discussion of artistic ambitions for the manga he drew in parallel with Lady Snowblood, Quand nous vivions ensemble, the story of two lovers, a couple of graphic designers and illustrators, who live in a common-law relationship without being married, followed by Le club des divorcés, one of his most successful works. He tackles societal struggles, as an adult extension of Maria's figure. He examines Japan in the 1950s and 1960s, its omnipresent unemployment and its major challenges hidden by a government in the midst of an economic explosion: divorce, poverty, suicide and the discomfort of these downgraded Japanese people. At the heart of the story, Yûko, this young divorced woman who fights to save her bar and regain her daughter's affection, takes us far into the details of her daily life. The pleasure of these plates passes through these sublimated details, in this daily life that oscillates between the tragic and the banal that the author describes with a lot of poetry and humour. A romance all the stronger as the author admits that there are many autobiographies in this story, around his childhood spent in clubs following his mother who owned a bar. Moreover, he appears at two key moments in the story as a perverted drunkard, which he claims to have become in several interviews at the end of the publication of this series. A comic irruption (the other great regular of this practice is Tezuka who loved to represent himself as a naive or naughty character) which opens some reading tracks. This rather short manga is a beautiful entry point to discover the universe of Kamimura, a thoughtful romance that absolutely does not leave its reader indifferent. Kamimura will collaborate with scriptwriter Hideo Okazaki on two series, The Shinano River and Flowers of Evil. The first looks at the fate and condition of young women in the 1930s, a social fresco from the beginning of the Shōwa era in the Japanese countryside. The second, reserved for an informed public, shows the drifts of a serial killer, a sexual predator who gets away with it thanks to his relationships with the good society, even though he is one of the biggest psychopaths in history. The two series focus on the status of women during this period with two very different prisms: the one nicknamed " peintre of the Shōwa era", from the world of advertising and graphic design, will not hesitate to try experiences that sometimes change tools and style during pre-publication and seek to approach a form of purity. The artist's features thicken or diminish according to the emotion, the scenery often disappears, sometimes it is the faces (further accentuating the dramatization and uneasiness). Compositions and illustrations that accompany the narrative, which are sometimes self-sufficient in a very pictorial gesture. The eroticism and sublime aesthetics of his work do not eclipse the writing and the very strong biases. It is impossible to list everything, to describe everything, but all his work is recommended (and translated almost entirely into French). By Thomas Mourier Two volumes at Kana - Series completed. "Bubble click and collent" 08 Nov 2019 #Japon #Kazuo Kamimura #Le Club Des Divorcés #Manga copyright: All rights reserved

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