If you have ever leafed through a Showa-era boys' magazine and stopped at a lurid full-page cutaway of a monster, a ghost, or a shadowy criminal, you have already met Goto Ishihara. This expanded edition gathers roughly fifty years of his output into a single 144-page volume, letting you trace how one illustrator defined the look of postwar Japanese pulp imagination.
The book is organized by subject, so you can move through his worlds one at a time: phantoms and criminals who live in the dark, yokai rendered with unsettling realism, kaiju built for sheer impact, vengeful ghosts, and the fearful women of detective fiction illustration. Later chapters follow him into sports art and its surging muscles, into girls' magazines where even a demure heroine carries an erotic charge, into manga, into visions of the afterlife, and finally into the late work where he added humor to his signature mix of power, poison, and sensuality.
His peak came in the 1960s and 70s, when the daizukai, the elaborate explanatory illustration, ruled the pages of boys' magazines and Ishihara was one of its great practitioners. Seeing that work collected here shows how much of it was pure draftsmanship rather than novelty.
The text is in Japanese, but the appeal of this book is overwhelmingly visual, and the plates can be enjoyed on their own. Published by Kawade Shobo Shinsha. Brand new copy.
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