Manga artist Jiro Taniguchi died Saturday at age 69. News of his death was announced by French comics and albums publisher, Casterman. “Jiro Taniguchi was deeply caring and sweet,” Casterman wrote. “The humanism that crosses his work is familiar with all his readers.”
Born in 1947, Taniguchi began his career in the ’60s as an assistant to Kyota Ishikawa, eventually launching his first comic, “A Desiccated Summer” in 1970. He went on to work with Natsuo Sekigawa on titles like “City Without Defense,” “Lindo 3,” and “The Wind of the West is White.” Perhaps one of his most well-known works is “A Distant Neighborhood,” about a man who goes to visit his mother’s grave, only to be whisked back in time to when he’s an 8th grade student again. The series was adapted into a live-action film in 2010, Quartier Lointain. He also collaborated with Jean Giraud, aka Moebius, on the 1997 series, “Ikaru.”
Taniguchi won the Osamu Tezuka Culture Award for “Botchan no Jidai,” the Alph’Art Award for “A Distant Neighborhood” at Angoulême International Comics Festival. He also received awards from Angoulême for “The Summit of the Gods” in 2002 and 2003, created in collaboration with Baku Yumemakura. In addition to comics, he wrote about 61 episodes of the series, The Solitary Garment.
He held a “deep admiration towards Western authors” and was always interested in pushing himself to find new ways to tell his stories.
[Via]
