May 18, 2020
Ryu, Strongest Man on the Face of the Planet, is a major manga from Kaze Shinobu, one of the most important Japanese artists of the late 70s.
He started his career by working as an assistant for Go Nagai and drawing gag manga but it was only when he discovered about Philippe Druillet, a prominent ground-breaking French artist and co-founder of the “Métal Hurlant” magazine, that Kaze Shinobu really found his own style and his fascination for these from these artists from overseas will lead him to move to the U.S and start working for magazines such as Heavy Metal or Epic Illustrated, making him
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at the same time one of the first Japanese to make a name there.
How he managed to take his inspiration from western artists to create his own sense of paneling and composition, ambitious and transcendental, often playing with different perspectives at once to make his action scenes flow marvelously well, is nothing short of amazing.
Udagawa Takeo praised Ryu for mashing every aspect of the 70s counterculture in a single work, with the Antichrist roaming the earth with the face and clothing of Charles Manson, reviving Musashi Miyamoto Bruce Lee in a reflection of the seventies Kung Fu boom and the heroine being clearly modeled on Vampirella. It also embraces the occult and spiritual craze of the 70s where a lots of new religions were arising and mixed psychic powers with martial arts harmoniously. It apparently also started this trend (to a minor extent) of ultraviolent manga and ova made more popular with Hokuto no Ken that came out a few years after it.
One of my biggest problems I have with this manga is how rushed some parts are, Kaze Shinobu manages to bring up some cool concepts that are either undermined or cut short due to the low popularity of the series at the time its release. It’s also a shame that some of his ideas were plainly erased from the scrit like having the hero and his rival be involved in a gay love affair which would have been a big thing in a mainstream shounen magazine. Another one of my problem is that for something that’s supposed to be this over the top and cross a lot of boundaries, I think it would have gained to be more self-derisive and satirical but instead it’s a strange mixed bag where it will have some dumb Nagai style gag and then dump some weird bits of drama that are very off compared to the rest. This is another example, with the original Getter Robo, where it would’ve been better to not listen to his advices and stick to one genre of the other. At least the final scene, which I won’t spoil, remained intact in the mind of Shinobu and is still a fucking blast to read, probably one of the most sensational action scene ever produced in the history of manga.
That said, while Chijou Saikyou no Otoko Ryuu may be far from perfect, if you’re a fan of retro-badassitude and clean art, then it’s definitely a must-read.
Reviewer’s Rating: 6
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