Yoshikazu Ebisu


Yoshikazu Ebisu is a Japanese comics author and actor.

Biography

Born in Amakusa, Kumamoto Prefecture, Ebisu grew in Nagasaki. During childhood, he experienced the trauma of the post-World War II and atomic weapons. He drew manga since he was a child, influenced by Osamu Tezuka and Mitsuteru Yokoyama, being especially an avid reader of the latter's work Tetsujin 28-go. In the late 1950s, Ebisu discovered the emerging gekiga genre and is immediately affected. "My interests and my themes changed," he recalls, "I moved from giant robots to human beings and realistic stories." Furthermore, he attributed a great importance to the influence of American action films, in particular The Last Command directed by Frank Lloyd with John Wayne, which inspired him to invent increasingly original and intense representations in the use of works.
In 1970, he moved to Tokyo. His work appears for the first time in the magazine Garo on 19 August 1973, at the end of the first golden period of the Japanese underground manga, and his grotesque and darkly surreal works immediately became a mainstay of the genre. Themes and drawings are marked by antisocial, anti-realistic and irrational aspects. Some of his featured works include the Salaryman series.
In recent years Ebisu became mainly known as a TV star, collaborating with Takeshi Kitano.