On the 3rd of October the great Hideo Aduma passed away.
Besides his many achievements as a manga artist and cartoonist, he was the genius who created Little Pollon, one of my fave childhood tv cartoons. Aduma used to start each episode by portraying himself as a narrating, weird fly character with a human head, wearing an ink pen hat and often carrying a red flask. This was his self portrait, those were his props; the hagiographic attributes of a man, kind of like the Asian Bukovsky in cartoon form.
His life of great professional achievements came with a high price when, in the 90s, Aduma disappeared for months at a time in a bubble of alcohol, at the fringes of society. He came back on the scene in 2005 with a fictionalised account of these troubled times in his life.
An English language version of Disappearance Diary, published by Ponent Mons, explains:
In 1989 Hideo Azuma left his family and work and tried (unsuccessfully) to hang himself using the slope of a mountain. This autobiographical account of his slide into alcoholism and eventual recovery takes painful experiences from the darkest reaches of his mind and treats them with an overriding sense of a cartoonist’s humor.
Source: Comic Natalie