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THE BLOG AT THE CROSSROADS
HETA-UMA & MANGARO: 40 Years Of Wild Japanese Graphics
Posted: January 23, 2015
Back in the post-hippy, pre-punk early Seventies in Japan, Yumura Teruhiko (above in a fashion advert) was the trailblazer of a consciously raw, hand-made and apparently craftless graphic style, for which he coined the term ‘heta-uma’, broadly ‘unskilled-skilled’, or ‘bad but good’. Rejecting the period’s empty polish and inhuman perfectionism, ‘heta-uma’ was a much-needed injection of Pop Art Brut. Yumura rejoiced in exuberant scrawling and collage, off-register colouring and Japanised English, often embracing yet subverting imported American ideals from romance comics or muscle-building adverts. Under the mock-Westernised pen-names ‘Terry Johnson’ or ‘King Terry’ from ‘Tokyo Funky Studio’ or ‘Flamingo Studio’, his covers and comics appeared in the monthly manga magazine Garo. Read my report and watch my video about two French exhibitions on underground manga here…
Read The Blog At The Crossroads here.
