Usamaru Furuya (古屋 兎丸, Furuya Usamaru, born January 25, 1968) is a Japanese manga artist.
Biography
During elementary school, Furuya enrolled in the Osamu Tezuka Manga Correspondence Course and by the time he reached high school he had discovered a darker, more underground style.
He graduated from Tama Art University, where he majored in oil painting and developed an interest in sculpting and Butoh dance.[1] During college his work evolved from figurative to eventually dealing more with abstract shapes.
In 1994, Furuya published his debut series Palepoli in the renowned alternative manga magazine Garo. After graduating from college, he initially planned to work as a full-time artist while doing illustrations on the side, but his success in manga shifted his focus. Soon after, he published the gag manga Short Cuts in the mainstream seinen manga magazine Weekly Young Sunday.
He was a regular contributor to the alternative manga magazine Manga Erotics F from its beginnings in 2001 on. For this magazine he created the manga Lychee Light Club, based on a stage play, about a group of middle school boys aiming to build an AI with cruel tactics has been adapted into a TV anime series.
Otherwise, since the 2000s, he has published in mainstream seinen and shōnen manga magazines of different publishers like Kodansha, Shogakukan, Shueisha and Shinchosha, but also drew a yonkoma series for the daily newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun and made a manga biography about Emperor Akihito's life for the weekly magazine Shūkan Post.
Style and themes
Furuya works across different manga genres and has a broad variety of art styles, ranging from photorealistic drawing to mascot-like cute characters. His work has been published in major manga magazines as well as more underground magazines and cultural magazines. Masanao Amano describes that Furuya is known for "taking ordinary everyday situations, and adding instantaneous humor or transforming them into a mysterious world that showcases his surrealistic sense."[2]
His work is influenced by the New Wave movement in manga in the 1980s.[3]
Christianity is a recurring theme of his work. According to Sean Patrick Webb, christianity is found "most often in the context of Japanese children and adolescents struggling against childish impulses and making the transition to adulthood."[4]
Reception
Furuya's manga have been translated, among others, into English, French, German, Italian and Spanish.
While Furuya has not won any major manga awards so far, he was nominated or selected several times:
^Amano, Masanao (2004). Wiedemann, Julius (ed.). Manga Design. Köln: Taschen. p. 438. ISBN978-3-8228-2591-4.
^Mizumoto, Kentarō. "「ニューウェイブ」という時代". Sora Tobu Kikai. Archived from the original on January 23, 2003. Retrieved July 25, 2023.
^Webb, Sean Patrick (2021). "NEETs versus nuns. Visualizing the moral panic of Japanese conservatives". In Rosenbaum, Roman (ed.). The Representation of Japanese Politics in Manga. The Visual Literacy of Statecraft. Routledge. pp. 97–99. ISBN978-0-367-43996-5.
