Muddy Wehara

Memorial site: 

https://muddywehalla.wordpress.com/

Passed away at the age of 52 on December 22nd, 2009, due to cerebral hemorrhage.

Muddy Wehara's introduction to comics was a hardbound collection of Popeye strips given to him by his grandfather. He has always been attracted to work outside of the mainstream, and remembers being an enthusiastic follower of Garo and Com as far back as elementary school. In 1977, Muddy dropped out of college, where he had majored in French literature, and began to devote himself to manga. Forced at first to work a number of menial jobs to support himself - including newspaper delivery boy, waiter, and Coca Cola distributor - in 1981 Muddy became assistant to the popular mangaka Yasuji tanioka. His break came a year later when he debuted in the adult weekly Manga Sunday. His early work, heavily influenced by the Punk aesthetic, was published in France and also appeared in American critic Greil Marcus's Lipstick Traces. With Garo's serialization of Denno Saibane Kiddo - an outlandish melange of weird biology and esoteris philosophy - in the early nineties Muddy sought to fulfill his ambition to create epic manga "on a magnificent scale." The series, however, proved too uncompromising even for Garo's normally adventurous readers, and it was dropped before completion. Wehara has since collaborated with Takashi Nemoto on the exuberantly messy, full-color manga "Oiwa", which was serialized in the Japanese porn magazine, Junjo Angel.