Posted by Devin de Gruyl on Aug 4th, 2008
Influential manga artist Fujio Akatsuka passed away Saturday night, from complications arising from pneumonia. He was 72, and was diagnosed with esophegal cancer ten years ago; he’d been bedridden since 2002.
Chances are, you probably have no idea who Fujio Akatsuka was. He’s not often listed among the top manga artists in our own budding awareness of the art form. But if you’ve followed the evolution of manga and anime, it’s entirely likely you’ve encountered something that can trace its inspiration back to one specific title of Akatsuka’s - Himitsu no Akko-chan (Akko’s Secret).
In that series, the titular character, Akko, was a young girl granted the ability to transform into a secret identity to fight crime and battle evil. It was, in short, one of the very first successful examples of the genre we now know as the mahou shoujo, or “magical girl,” story.
Which means that Minky Momo, Cutey Honey, Sailor Moon, Card Captor Sakura, Nanoha, Pretty Cure, and many other very popular magical girl series throughout the years - even genre parodies like Pretty Sammy and Puni Puni Poemy - all owe a serious debt of gratitude to Akko-chan and Fujio Akatsuka for their very existence.
Akatsuka is also credited with pioneering a style of gag manga we now take for granted. Another early success of his was Osomatsu-kun (Little Osomatsu), which specialized in the sort of fast-paced, silly visual humor we see emulated in today’s 4-koma (four-panel gag strips) and is today considered part and parcel of the manga “experience” for many Western readers.
As I said… a very influential manga artist, even if you’re totally unfamiliar with his name. I myself had never heard of him before this bit of news was released, and when I started researching his career it was a no-brainer for me to write up an article for the site about him.
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