Meet Kitaro. He's just like any other boy, except for a few small differences: he only has one eye, his hair is an antenna that senses paranormal activity, his geta sandals are jet-powered, and he can blend into his surroundings like a chameleon. Oh, and he's a yokai (spirit monster)! With all the offbeat humor of an Addams Family story, Kitaro is a lighthearted romp in which the bad guys always get what's coming to them.
Kitaro is bestselling manga-ka Shigeru Mizuki's most famous creation. The Kitaro series was inspired by a kamishibai, or storycard theater, entitled Kitaro of the Graveyard. Mizuki began work on his interpretation of Kitaro in 1959. Originally the series was intended for boys, but once it was picked up by the influential Shonen magazine it quickly became a cultural landmark for young and old alike. Kitaro inspired half a dozen TV shows, plus numerous video games and films, and his cultural importance cannot be overstated. Presented to North American audiences for the first time in this lavish format, Mizuki's photo-realist landscapes and cartoony characters blend the eerie with the comic.
The book is full of impressive imagery nonetheless. Some of the splash pages are really stunning [...] there is a lot of weird and wonderful stuff crammed into these pages, from imaginative renderings of the classic yokai in Japanese folklore to Mizuki's interpretations of the foreign devils (heh), as well as simple morality tales and fables.
Kitaro's creator Shigeru Mizuki is a pioneer and master of manga who is celebrated in Japan but has been largely unknown in North America until recently. Fortunately, Mizuki's work has been made available to an English-reading audience by Drawn & Quarterly, who have begun to release handsome and affordable translations of his greatest works [...] Although Kitaro was clearly intended as mass entertainment (and remains enormously popular in its home country), these stories are durable, and Mizuki's cartooning is brilliant in its range and invention.
He's an iconic character in Japan, as popular as Batman is here, and his adventures, which remind me a bit of The Addams Family, have sold in the millions.