Zodiac: Capricorn

Gender: Male

Shiriagari Kotobuki is the undisputed champion of vaudeville in manga. His work is always absurd and oftentimes intelligent. He flips casually through styles and themes: heta-uma, shojo, gag, surrealism. His first manga in the early 1980s were parodies of 50s-60s period and horror gekiga. He then moved on to basic Japanese social types, like white collar "salary men" and secretarial "office ladies" (but beared). Shiriagari hit big in the 1990s, receiving numberous awards for his work, most of all the Yaji Kita series, a zany surrealistic perversion of Edo-period travel literature. It was made into a film in 2004. Shiriagari has also been successful as a commercial artist, from character design for a popular national children's television program, to the opening animation to one of the Takeshi Kitano's television variety shows.