Author: Kitazawa Rakuten.
Title: [Rakuten Zenshu]. 1-3, 5-7, 9 [all published].
Description: Tokyo, Atoriesha (Atelier) 1930-31 (Showa 5 - 6). Seven volumes 27x20cm publisher's colour illustrated cloth, illustrated card cases; each 144pp, hundreds of colour, tri- and duo-tone illustrations. An excellent set. ¶ The complete works, such as it is, of the king of magazine cartoons and/or manga - Rakuten. It took me a while to figure out why I could never find a complete set of all nine volumes - such a thing doesn't exist - and even longer to find a good set of what does exist. I put a fair bit of that down to decades of Japanese booksellers, also unaware, deciding they have incomplete sets and selling them piecemeal. Add to that these are books that are usually thumbed into grimy exhaustion and you can see why I'm smug about this set.I'm yet to find an explanation for the two gaps but these weren't published in order; some later volumes appeared before the first. The Mayan(?) on the covers is reading a manga. On the back he is laughing so hard he has dropped his book.

Keywords: graphic art cartoons manga Japan c20th comics humour modernism politics social history meiji