A new edition of Tiger Tateishi’s incredible 1982 comics collection Tora No Maki. Tiger Tateishi first began drawing cartoons in 1964, inspired by copies of MAD Magazine which occupation forces had left behind. Before moving to Milan in 1969, Tateishi regularly contributed to manga magazines. In Milan, while working for Ettore Sottsass at Olivetti, he began creating the incredible comic panel layout paintings posthumously collected in the book Moon Trax. Also around this time, as Fumiko Tateishi explains, Tiger “had a strong desire to make a real comic book, and spent almost five years working on the pictures for Tora No Maki. At first, Penguin Books in London were considering publishing it, and they had the originals for quite a while, but after a love call from Seigow Matsuoka at Kousakusha in Tokyo, the book was eventually brought out in Japan.”
Tiger Tateishi, from a 1976 letter to SD Magazine: “Apart from my work as a painter and illustrator, I have started doing cartoons again and am currently laboring away on those. All of them are very short pieces of a single page or at most three, and when I have accumulated 60 or 70 pages or so, I plan to start looking for a publisher in the UK or perhaps the Netherlands.” Cheat Sheets presents these comics in a single volume for the first time outside of Japan. Welcome to the strange world of the hermit Arara Sennin. -Publisher
