What is striking in the precise drawings of the japanese comic artist Manabe Shohei is their ability to immediately express the feeling of a street or a neighborhood. They succeed in revealing the interesting in the banal, the combination of the ordinary and the exceptional in the urban fabric.
Following the artist’s steps, we discover a naked japanese city where each detail is relevant to describe an everchanging urban condition.
Unfortunately, not many informations are available about this artist and his work. (Are these definitive drawings, or only background scenes? Which manga are they taken from? Every bit of information will be precious.)
Images via http://l-oo.tumblr.com
Related: Katsuhiro Otomu’s Domu
There’s an interesting albeit short essay about Manabe Shohei’s “Yamikin Ushijima-kun” manga in the “Mangapolis. La ville japonaise contemporaine dans le manga” exhibition catalogue (pages 36-39, ed. Le Lezard Noir).
Thanks for the information Alberto! We missed the exhibition but it shouldn’t be hard to find the catalogue.
If interested in this topic (comics/space/architecture/city) you may also be interested in my “Sequenze urbane” book about City and Comics. You can read it for free on issuu: http://issuu.com/comicsmetropolis/docs/sequenze_urbane
(only in Italian, sorry)
Thank you for sharing that, that’s really interesting
Omg O_O