Umibe no Machi

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A selection of titles from the gekiga scene, a short-lived yet influential artistic movement that flourished during the 1960s to the 1970s and maintains a prominent underground presence today. While mostly known as a pioneer of cinematic paneling and close attention to realism, it would be more accurate to consider gekiga as a counterculture. Surrealistic, autobiographical, and experimental works emerged as an alternative to the Tezuka school of aesthetics and paved the way for other artists to different modes of expression.

This is in NO WAY a comprehensive list and should be treated more as a starting point for diving into this movement. There are so many more important artists and titles in the scene that MAL unfortunately does not have entries for, and probably never will. Since I can't speak Japanese, there may also be some titles that I am unfamiliar with. The 50-title limit doesn't help either, but I hope this gets you started in this often-unexplored side of manga.

Note: Not all of these titles are available in English.
11/04/2022 Updated to include more underground artists.

If you enjoyed this interest stack and want to learn more about gekiga, feel free to check these other outlets:
The MAL Gekiga Club
Taniguchi Scanlations
Habanero Scans
Illuminati-Manga
Hox Scanlations
Stinky Scans
Ryan Holmberg's translations
Star Fruit Books
Glacier Bay Books
Koenji Shawn Reviews
The Comics Journal
Breakdown Press
Drawn and Quarterly
New York Review Comics
AX Volume 1: A Collection of Alternative Manga

One manga per author.

Heta-uma (ヘタウマ or ヘタうま) is a Japanese underground manga movement started in the 1970s with the magazine Garo. Heta-uma can be translated as "bad but good", designating a work which looks poorly drawn, but with an aesthetically conscious quality, opposed to the polished look of mainstream manga.

Some of heta-uma's main artists are Teruhiko Yumura (pen name "King Terry", not on MAL yet), Yoshikazu Ebisu and Takashi Nemoto.

This stack includes what are commonly seen as heta-uma works, as well as those I personally consider to be drawn with this sensibility.

As the title says. I have plenty more to add and some which don't have MAL entries as well. Will update those here at a later date. Enjoy!

Honestly, MAL must hate Gekiga - so many great titles are simply non-existing. I struggled a bit and got frustrated over that. Will edit and change some titles at another date (as I always say with my lists, hopefully I will really get to it).

Gekiga knows quite a few different definitions, but one brief explanation that holds most overall clarity, imo, is the one given by scholar Natsume Fusanosuke from the The Comics Journal essay "Taniguchi Jirō and His Gekiga Years" I highly recommend you go check out:

|| Although I just offhandedly wrote the word “gekiga”, it is a term that has experienced many changes in meaning over time. It first referred to (1) a period from the late 1950s when it was became the rallying cry by Tatsumi Yoshihiro and others all the way through the early 1960s, when it was popular in rental manga magazines. It then became (2) a term that includes the works of Sanpei Shirato and Hirata Hiroshi as they were making waves in the mass media. Then, it came to describe (3) the period from the late 1960s through the 1970s - a period during which, while gekiga was becoming the flagship for the anti-Tezuka Osamu style of manga in Weekly Shōnen Magazine, there was also a shift in manga expression towards a more excessive style called “seinen gekiga”, which was often used to describe the postwar generation of artists like Miyaya Kazuhiko and others. Usually “gekiga” is best understood as having these three phases. ||

The history and evolution of gekiga manga is fascinating and very fruitful in its counter and counter-counter polymorphous shifts. Wonderful, awe-striking, weird, erotic, political, harsh, violent. You name it.