Shintaro Kago: ????????????????????????

Shintaro Kago, as a cultural happening, is precisely in step with his times, completely in swing with the avant-garde urban hysteria of the postmodern, globalized first world. He captures perfectly our desperate attempts to make sense of a world that increasingly reveals itself to be too big, too strange and too complicated for any one of us to completely grasp - made all the worse by our contrary impulses towards progress on the one hand, and hanging on to the comfort of the familiar on the other. As a comics communicator and storyteller, however, he is miles ahead of most of his potential audience, even in Japan, famously known as The Most Comics-Literate Place On Earth. His work is put together like a cross between a Dali and an Escher: a combination of sheer absurdity and complex logical loopiness. This is true not only for the art itself, but for the stories and for the way they are told. The near-impossibility of deciphering some of his stories is one of their charms: as someone quite proud of my comics literacy, it's quite nice to not quite know what's going on in an environment in which my confusion is rewarded so well. An apt comparison might be the novelist Thomas Pynchon: Shintaro Kago's dense, complex and absurdly layered meta-meta-metafictional stories of gore, sex and cynicism convey pleasure and meaning through their texture - and they'd better, too, because the literal meaning of the storytelling is at times impossible to ascertain.

A short version of the above paragraph, sans-snobbery: WEIRD, DUDE! GROSS! TRIPPY, WOW!

A note: my inclusion of a Vice Magazine cover does not imply or in any way indicate my endorsement of said publication. I find Vice Magazine pathetic, immature and disgusting, and I hope you do too.

Artist: Shintaro Kago
Type of art: Sequential art, avant-bizarre, ero-guro nansensu, underground manga
Media: Pen and ink, sculpture, video, etc.
Time period: Contemporary
Country of origin: Japan
Motifs: Bizarre, formalist panel layout, overwhelm, gore, sexuality, absurdity, schoolgirls

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