We’re sorry to report the passing of Manga creator Yoshiharu Tsuge, who died of aspiration pneumonia on 3rd March 2026, his family announced last week.
Well known as an avant-garde creator in Japan, Tsuge’s reluctance to have his work translated meant that it has only been widely accessible to English-language audiences since 2019. US publisher Drawn & Quarterly is currently publishing his complete work, with the newest volume, He Rolled Me Up Like a Grilled Squid, the manga icon’s most perplexing, transgressive, and astounding work of horror and surrealism, due for release on 31st March 2026.
A Nobody Artist is scheduled for release in September, with other relases by the manga maestro through the year.
Yoshiharu Tsuge was born in Tokyo, Japan in 1937. Influenced by the realistic and gritty rental manga of Yoshihiro Tatsumi, he began making his own comics. He was also briefly recruited to assist Shigeru Mizuki during his explosion of popularity in the 60s. In 1968, working for Garo magazine, Tsuge published the ground-breaking story “Neji-shiki” (commonly called “Screw Style” for Western readers). This story established Tsuge as not only an influential manga-ka but he also became a cultural touchstone in the changing Japanese art world. He is considered the originator and greatest practitioner of the “I-novel” method of comics-making.
In 2005, Tsuge was nominated for the Best Album Award at Angouleme International and in 2017 he won the Japan Cartoonists Association Grand Award for Yume to tabi no sekai.
His younger brother, Tadao Tsuge, is also a cartoonist.
Yoshiharu Tsuge (つげ義春, Tsuge Yoshiharu; 30th October 1937 – 3rd March 2026)
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• Drawn & Quarterly: Tsuge Yoshiharu Profile
He Rolled Me Up Like a Grilled Squid, the latest in The Complete Tsuge Yoshiharu series from Drawn & Quarterly, is a manga icon’s most perplexing, transgressive, and astounding work of horror and surrealism.
By the mid-1970s, Tsuge Yoshiharu was a man changed by circumstance—something his work from 1975 to 1981 boldly reveals. After settling into married life with fellow artist Fujiwara Maki, author of Eisner-winning My Picture Diary, Tsuge would return to the narrative formulas that he knew best: tall tales exchanged between fellow travellers, macabre parables tinged with magical realism, and the enduring comedy of the domestic everyday in a Japan rebuilding itself in the decades following the Second World War.
And yet the confusion and mental illness simmering beneath the surface of his more surreal works come to a rolling boil, reaching an unsettling and horrific crescendo in a series of nightmarish delusions.
He Rolled Me Up Like A Grilled Squid captures a mid-career author taking stock of his anxieties and suspicions while connecting the dots between his seemingly monotonous present and his complicated past. Confrontations between both periods in his life are explored through the lens of his deteriorating mental state, expressed directly through experiments with different visual styles collected in this volume.
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John is the founder of downthetubes, launched in 1998. He is a comics and magazine editor, writer, and Press Officer for the Lakes International Comic Art Festival. He also runs Crucible Comic Press.
Working in British comics publishing since the 1980s, his credits include editor of titles such as Doctor Who Magazine and Overkill for Marvel UK, Babylon 5 Magazine, Star Trek Magazine, and its successor, Star Trek Explorer, and more. He also edited the comics anthology STRIP Magazine and edited several audio comics for ROK Comics; and has edited several comic collections and graphic novels, including volumes of “Charley’s War” and “Dan Dare”, and Hancock: The Lad Himself, by Stephen Walsh and Keith Page.
He’s the writer of comics such as Pilgrim: Secrets and Lies for B7 Comics; “Crucible”, a creator-owned project with 2000AD artist Smuzz; and “Death Duty” and “Skow Dogs”, with Dave Hailwood.
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