F or many, the name Garo is synonymous with alternative Japanese comics. From its first issue in September 1964 to its last in 2002, the monthly magazine was home to artists working on the frontier, or fringe, of manga practice, be it in terms of political content, sexual content, a sense of humour unwelcome in mainstream period- icals, or drawing and narrative styles too unconventional for mass marketability. It typically meant work that ran counter to the profit prin ci ple of ma jor pub lish ing houses, which had, by the late 1960s, succeeded in pushing the print run of their most popular manga weeklies over the one mil- lion mark, reaching six million at the bub bly high point of the mid-1990s, be fore spi ral ling down to the current, much deflated but still robust 2.8 million. Garo, on the other hand, even at its great- est popularity, circa 1970, barely reached 80,000 copies a month, fizzling out to 3,000 in the 1980s, and rising temporarily to over ten thousand in the ’90s before its de- mise. Still, the magazine can claim amongst its alumni many of the most innovative manga authors and a handful of the most famed ones, some of whom might never have gained a foothold in the field without the platform of Garo. Yet, despite their monumental stature, many of the artists responsible for making the maga- zine what it was in its first decade have remained, outside Ja- pan, either names with auras but no oeuvres, or simply un- known, though this has begun to be remedied in the past few years with a few English translations published by Montreal’s Drawn and Quarterly: Hayashi Seiichi’s ‘Red Colored Elegy’ and some Tatsumi Yoshihiro stories. An exception to this rule is a translation of one of the most important Garo manga, Tsuge Yoshiharu’s ‘Nejishiki’ (see Fig. 4), which appeared in The Comics Journal (no. 250, February 2003). The result of this neglect has been, in North America at least, that Garo is mainly thought of as a venue for the supremely lowbrow. This is due to a handful of anthologies and single-artist books that present comics published in the magazine between the early 1980s and mid-1990s – work highly varied and original, but each more absurd, vulgar or ultraviolent than the previous. Com ics Un derground Ja pan (Blast Books, 1996) is an example of the former, Takashi Nemoto’s Monster Men Bureiko Lullaby from 1989-90 (Picture Box, Inc., 2008) an example of the latter. The world of early Garo was quite different – presenting an image of alternative manga that is more po- litically earnest, more art-histori- cally familiar and more classi- cally Japanese – even if it did set the stage for what was to come. Garo was founded by the pub- lisher Nagai Katsuichi (1921-96) and Shirato Sanpei (b. 1932), Ja- pan’s first major author of period manga. The two had worked to- gether since the late 1950s, Nagai having published a number of Shirato’s earliest books, includ- ing the seventeen-volume The Ninja Martial Arts ( Ninja bugeicho ) be tween 1959 and 1962. This violent epic of armed peas ant up ris ings and ninja superheroics is set against the backdrop of the civil wars of the late 16th century. The series was popular not only with its intended audience of male children and adolescents, but also with college students and intellectu- als. They celebrated, first, its view of Japanese history through the lens of a Marxian dialectical materialism and, second, its speaking to the challenges faced by the Left after the attempts to prevent the signing of the 1960 Treaty of Mutual Coopera- tion and Security between Japan and the US (‘Anpo 60’) had failed. Shirato thus entered the decade highly vaunted, quickly gaining commissions from many of the major manga periodi- cals. He received one of the most coveted industry awards in 1963, the first adaptation of one of his manga as an animation 1 The Manga of Garo, 1964-1973 Ryan Holmberg (Fig. 1) Cover page, showing Kamuy from The Legend of Kamuy By Shirato Sanpei (b. 1932) Offset on card stock Height 25.6 cm, width 18 cm (Garo 15, November 1965)