Ashita no Joe artist Tetsuya Chiba dead at 87, Kodansha announces

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Japanese manga artist Tetsuya Chiba, known for his boxing masterpiece 'Ashita no Joe,' dies at 87 independent.co.uk

Tetsuya Chiba, the manga artist who drew the boxing series Ashita no Joe, has died at 87, his publisher Kodansha announced on Tuesday. Chiba died last Thursday in a Tokyo hospital; the publisher gave no cause of death.

Ashita no Joe — "Fighting for Tomorrow" — follows an orphan who becomes a professional boxer, and it remains one of the most influential works in Japanese comics. But the biography behind the panels is its own story. Chiba was born in Tokyo in January 1939, and months later his family moved to northeastern China, where his father worked at a printing factory. He was six years old, still in China, when Japan surrendered on August 15, 1945. Amid anti-Japanese riots and hunger, his father's Chinese translator hid the family in an attic. There, Chiba drew pictures for his three younger brothers. The family fled to the port city of Huludao and returned to Japan in 1946.

He debuted as a manga artist in 1956, initially drawing comic books for girls before switching to boys' magazines in the early 1960s. His sports catalogue runs through the grammar of effort, defeat and redemption that serialized sports manga still speaks today: the baseball story Chikai no Makyu (The Magic Ball), the kendo series Ore wa Teppei, the sumo manga Notari Matsutaro, and Ashita Tenki ni Naare, about a teenage golfer.

Chiba drew it all from a childhood spent hiding in attics and crossing the sea as a refugee of an empire that had lost. The orphan who boxes his way out of nothing was not, for him, an invention.