This year saw a number of manga authors nominated for the prestigious Eisner Awards in a handful of different categories. The main manga win landed inside the Best U.S. Edition of International Material—Asia category, which went to Maki Fujiwara’s My Picture Diary manga.My Picture Diary won against some tough competition, including Shin’ichi Sakamoto’s #DRCL midnight children, Tatsuki Fujimoto’s Goodbye, Eri, Kyoko Okazaki’s River’s Edge and Mokumokuren’s The Summer Hikaru Died.Outside of that, Daniel Warren Johnson’s Transformers comic took home the awards for Best Continuing Series and Best Writer/Artist, Sana Takeda (The Night Eaters: Her Little Reapers, Monstress) got an Eisner for Best Painter/Multimedia Artist and Peach Momoko (Demon Wars: Scarlet Sin) was awarded as Best Cover Artist.
Drawn & Quarterly publishes My Picture Diary and describes it like so:
In 1981, Fujiwara Maki began a picture diary about daily life with her son and husband, the legendary manga author Tsuge Yoshiharu. Publishing was not her original intention. “I wanted to record our family’s daily life while our son, Shosuke, was small. But as 8mm cameras were too expensive and we were poor, I decided on the picture diary format instead. I figured Shosuke would enjoy reading it when he got older.”
Drawn in a simple, personable style, and covering the same years fictionalized in Tsuge’s final masterpiece The Man Without Talent, Fujiwara’s journal focuses on the joys of daily life amidst the stresses of childrearing, housekeeping, and managing a depressed husband. A touching and inspiring testimony of one Japanese woman’s resilience, My Picture Diary is also an important glimpse of the enigma that is Tsuge. Fujiwara’s diary is unsparing. It provides a stark picture of the gender divide in their household: Tsuge sleeps until noon and does practically nothing. He never compliments her cooking, and dictates how money is spent. Not once is he shown drawing. And yet, Fujiwara remains surprisingly empathetic toward her mercurial husband.
Translated by Ryan Holmberg, this edition sheds light on Fujiwara’s life, her own career in art, writing, and underground theater, and her extensive influence upon her husband’s celebrated manga.
Source: The Beat
