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In an interesting moment in Seijin Suzuki's 1965 classic yakuza/camp film One Generation of Tattoos, a young gambler realizes that he has unwittingly drawn his sensitive younger brother into the shady underworld. Looking intently at his baby brother, the yakuza admonishes him, "This is no place for you. Go back to school!" Suddenly the angle of the camera swings underneath the older brother's face until his tortured visage looms painfully close to the viewer. Surprisingly, his face looks hauntingly like the face in a Ryoichi Ikegami illustration for SANCTUARY. This particular drawing depicts the expression on the face of teenage gangster Akira Hojo as he bids his companion Chiaki Asami farewell. They are parting company to pursue their dreams. Just as Suzuki uses unusual editing and camera techniques to make an otherwise drab gangster story visually punchy and dynamic, so Ikegami manages with inks and brushes to pull all the emotions inside his characters right out into their faces.
Ikegami's first hit, drawn in 1974, was about a high school gang, tough punks who attended a school replete with guns, gangsters, terrorists, and even some very cute girls. GALLANT GANG may appear somewhat crudely drawn when compared to Ikegami's later work, but even its over-the-top story becomes believable when the artist breathes such vivid life into his creations. The hero of the story, emerging from a fight covered with blood and flexing his muscles despite razor blades stuck in his arms and face, still manages to look tough. In an interview printed in ANIMERICA, Anime & Manga Monthly Vol. 1, No. 7, Ikegami said that when GALLANT GANG first appeared in a weekly manga magazine, it "really stood out... All the other manga were so stylized and cartoony." While the comic's premise is rather farfetched, it nonetheless doesn't look corny. Characters are variously handsome or grotesque, but they look like real people.
Ikegami's next big hit starred a young girl gifted with shocking psychic
powers. MAI, THE PSYCHIC GIRL , published in English by Viz Comics in 1987, was
unique at the time because it was one of the first mainstream comics for boys to feature a
female protagonist. Mai is a pretty Japanese teenager forced to battle evil organizations
that seek to exploit her powers. One of her greatest nemeses is a young German psychic
named Turm. Ikegami's illustration of icy Turm is chilling; her eyes are drawn in such a
way that she looks vastly more threatening than innocent Mai.
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MAI, THE PSYCHIC GIRL was a success with both young and older
readers, but Ikegami next ventured into drawing comics definitely oriented towards adults.
WOUNDED SOUL was an action-adventure series which put its female heroine into some
very uncomfortable situations involving a large insect and a tree trunk.... Then came CRYING
FREEMAN , an enormously successful, long-running series which masterfully depicted
both extreme violence and sex. [This month the graphic novel CRYING FREEMAN PERFECT
COLLECTION: PORTRAIT OF A KILLER (re-releasing the first two volumes of the CRYING
FREEMAN series) goes on sale!-AR] While many of the sexual encounters in the FREEMAN
series are rooted in violence, the relationship between the central character, Crying
Freeman, and his wife, Emu, is always very tenderly portrayed. In context, their
consensual sexual encounters look perfectly natural. But, as Ikegami points out: "If
you only concentrate on bits and pieces, it's going to look lurid." Attempts to
censor FREEMAN were made in both Japan and the United States, where, in spite of
the "For mature readers only" warning on all the covers, it has stirred up quite
a bit of controversy.
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In Ikegami's next major work, he took a 360-degree turn from the fantasy world of FREEMAN. SANCTUARY is a series about two young men who attempt to change a relatively realistic, contemporary Japan. One joins the yakuza, the Japanese crime syndicate, and the other runs for political office. Ikegami's readers expect handsome men in his manga, and he comes through with dashing Akira Hojo, a rising Mafia don, and the bookish, yet hunky, Chiaki Asami, a political up-and-comer. Ikegami is a genius at depicting the unique faces of the old men who control the Japanese government. Isaoka, the nemesis of our young heroes, has a face straight out of the Tokyo daily papers: a mass of heavy eyebrows, artful wrinkles, sneaky eyes, and poker-faced expressions which explode into fierce anger. Ikegami's ideal as an artist is to draw a manga that "makes it seem as though [the story] could happen in 'real life' ".
Ikegami is currently illustrating an even more shocking, semi-realistic story, one that may be a little too much for some audiences to stomach. THE ACCIDENT is the story of Kyoko, a young Japanese woman who is raped by a group of American soldiers. A young African-American soldier rescues her, and as their relationship evolves, she falls in love with him. When he is killed, she begins a quest to avenge his murder.
What makes THE ACCIDENT so gripping is Ikegami's ability to portray the faces of the American G.I.'s and the young Japanese woman with equal accuracy. One has to imagine that Ikegami has spent tremendous amounts of time sketching the vast variety of American faces to so accurately depict them on paper. Even in SAMURAI CRUSADER (currently appearing right here in MANGA VIZION!) the face of legendary writer Ernest Hemingway is drawn with close attention to his outrageous public persona.
In Shonen Sunday Manga College, a Shogakukan, Inc. publication about Manga artists at work, I saw a photograph of Ikegami's workplace and drawing tools. The image that lingers in my mind is a close-up of Ikegami's drawing hand. The calluses on his fingers are enormous, thickened and hardened from the years he has spent creating characters for his fans all over the world. Imagining the sheer number of hours he's spent coming up with such a bevy of images is absolutely humbling to any aspiring manga artist or writer. When it comes to depicting characters and scenes that are both photorealistic and vividly imaginative, nobody has a more natural gift the Ryoichi Ikegami. With SANCTUARY having ended in Japan, we say "domo arigato," and look forward to Ikegami's next gripping work.
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