NEW YORK, NY.- Beetles, Cats, Clouds features three women manga artists—Tsurita Kuniko, Yamada Murasaki, and Kondoh Akino—whose work defied the reigning gender conventions within Japanese comics from the 1960s into the 2000s. Against the stereotypes of melodramatic romance in shōjo manga (girls’ comics) and sexual objectification of women characters in shōnen (boys’) and men’s manga, these artists explored gender issues and new languages of artistic expression in ways that challenged the social and aesthetic norms of their day.

While active in a variety of venues, and in some cases in multiple media, all three are best known for their work in alternative manga periodicals, namely Garo, COM, and Ax. This exhibition focuses on original drawings from their comics, supplemented by sketches, illustrations, animated shorts, and printed books and magazines.

Emerging in the 1960s as part of the era’s vibrant counterculture and in opposition to the commercial and artistic strictures of the mainstream comics industry in Japan, alternative manga provided a platform for young artists to respond to rapid social change through experimental visual and narrative styles, autobiographical fiction, and anti-establishment themes. Though alternative manga was initially hampered by the same male-dominated hierarchies that governed the rest of the manga industry, over time women artists and editors reshaped its magazines into spaces where women contributors could explore issues that mattered to them personally in a voice that was their own—be it on gender norms, sexual freedom, patriarchy at home and in the workplace, the trials of marriage and motherhood, or elder care. Tsurita, Yamada, and Kondoh were each at the forefront of this gradual revolution in their respective eras.

Curated by historian, editor, and translator Ryan Holmberg in collaboration with 80WSE.

Tsurita Kuniko (1947–1985) drew shōjo manga in the mid-1960s, but came into her own within the pages of the alternative magazine Garo, where she debuted in 1965. Though Garo is celebrated for experimentation and radical politics, Tsurita was the magazine’s only regular woman contributor until the late 1970s. Initially, she explored bohemian youth culture, patriarchy, and gender fluidity in her often highly conceptual work. Diagnosed with lupus in 1973, she began to produce darker, oneiric comics about illness and mortality, continuing to draw bravely until her death in 1985. A large portion of her work has been collected in English in The Sky is Blue With a Single Cloud (Drawn & Quarterly, 2020).

Yamada Murasaki (1948–2009) began cartooning in 1968 for COM magazine, manga doyen Tezuka Osamu’s less masculine answer to Garo. Her earliest comics portray the challenges of growing up as a woman in a conservative household, articulated with a unique sensitivity to visual and verbal form, reflecting her youthful aspirations to become a poet. She paused her career in 1973 after marrying and having children, but returned a few years later after domestic troubles forced her to find ways to support herself and her two daughters. In the 1980s, she gained public attention as the “housewife cartoonist” for her unapologetic comics about marriage and motherhood in the pages of Garo and other magazines, both mainstream and alternative. Her best-known works include Sassy Cats (1979–80), Talk To My Back (1981–84), and A Blue Flame (1983–84), which was adapted as the film Bed-In (1986). All of the above manga are available in English from Drawn & Quarterly and have appeared in other languages as well.

Kondoh Akino (b. 1980) attended Tama Art University and debuted in Ax magazine in 2000. Melding the refined minimalism of traditional Japanese art with the imaginative flights of gothic fantasy literature, Kondoh’s exquisitely drawn and stylistically singular comics have ranged from surreal stories exploring women's identity and sexuality to romantic comedies and diaristic meditations. She also works as a fine artist and has exhibited her drawings, paintings, and hand-drawn animated shorts internationally. Her ongoing series Noodling in New York (2015–present) chronicles her life in the city, where she has lived since 2008. An English translation of her debut collection of comics, Box Garden Beetle (2004), is forthcoming from Glacier Bay Books.

Ryan Holmberg is an art and comics historian, editor, and Japanese-English translator. He is the author of The Translator Without Talent (Bubbles, 2020) and Garo Manga: The First Decade, 1964-1973 (Center for Book Arts, 2010). He has contributed numerous essays and reviews about art and comics to such publications as The Comics Journal, Artforum International, Art in America, and The New York Review. As an editor and translator of manga, Ryan has worked with Drawn & Quarterly, New York Review Comics, Breakdown Press, Retrofit Comics, PictureBox, Floating World, Bubbles, Glacier Bay Books, and Living the Line on over fifty books. His editions of Tezuka Osamu’s The Mysterious Underground Men (PictureBox) and Fujiwara Maki's My Picture Diary (D&Q) won the Eisner Award for Best U.S. Edition of International Material: Asia in 2014 and 2024, respectively. He has advised on manga-related exhibitions at the British Museum and the Honolulu Museum of Art. He is currently Senior Lecturer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (remote) and lives near Baltimore, MD.