A reimagining of Yudetamago’s Kinnikuman comic as a theatre of shape-shifting, protean bodies.
When my parents moved house, I came across a stack of old comics that I’d read as a child. The Kinnikuman series (1980–1988) by Yudetamago was probably the one that I’d obsessed about the most. In my memory, the shape-shifting characters with their interchangeable masks and body parts had transported me to an exhuberant and intoxicating world of fluid subjectivities. It was an experience that rendered any other comic I subsequently came across as dull and condescending. Leafing through the comics years later, I laughed in disbelief, finding it not how I remembered it at all. This zine is an attempt to nurse my disappointment by reimagining how it might have seemed in my mind as a child—a world where subjects and their bodies were indeterminate. The images are taken solely from the Kinnikuman comics and have been manipulated only by way of taking parts away; nothing has been embellished or added.
—Joji Koyama
Joji Koyama is a filmmaker, animator and graphic artist. His short films, animations and music videos have screened internationally, winning awards at the London Short Film Festival and British Animation Awards. In 2015 he published his first book of short visual stories, Plassein. This was followed by Elsewhere, an illustrated colouring book published by Penguin Books. His first feature length film Kuro, written and directed with Tujiko Noriko was released in 2017.
28 pages, 1/1 Colour Riso
Red Glue Bound
11 × 17.5 cm
Limited edition of 50
2019
