Der nutzlose Mann

Sukezo Sukegawa is a celebrated mangaka, and yet he suddenly stops drawing. As a seller of stones, which he collects on the riverbank, he is so unsuccessful that he plunges his family into misery. A man who cannot feed his family, they say, is useless. Yoshiharu Tsuge was also a celebrated cartoonist who revolutionised manga in the 1960s like no other: he founded the autobiographical manga and uncompromisingly explored the spaces between dream, reality and perception. Despite his success, Tsuge, who was depressed throughout his life, turned away from manga in 1987, but not without having delivered his artistic legacy with "The Useless Man", a disillusioned reflection on the artist as outsider. The stories and drawings may seem simple, but the mixing of this everyday tristesse with symbolic and metaphorical elements is haunting in both narrative and drawing, highly complex, deeply emotional and above all, timeless.