is a Japanese cartoonist and essayist. He was active in comics between 1955 and 1987. His works range from tales of ordinary life to dream-like surrealism, and often show his interest in traveling about Japan. He has garnered the most attention from the surrealistic works he had published in the late 1960s in the avant-garde magazine Garo. Tsuge began producing comics in 1955 for the rental comics industry that flourished in impoverished post-War Japan. Initially, he made comics in the hard-boiled gekiga style–dark, realistic tales with negative endings. When rental comics ceased to be viable employment in the mid-1960s, Tsuge was in dire straits until he was picked up by the publishers of the avant garde comics magazine Garo. From 1965 to 1970, he entered his most widely known phase when he produced often surrealistic and introspective works for Garo. The June 1968 issue saw the most famous of these: the dream-based "Neji-shiki" (most commonly rendered "Screw Style" in English). Following his success in Garo, Tsuge became withdrawn, and from the 1970s no longer had his works published in that magazine. He works became alternately autobiographical and erotically fantastic, until health and psychological problems drove him from comics after 1987. Tsuge has become a cult figure in Japan. In the West, his status is often compared to that of American cartoonist Robert Crumb. He has had a long-lasting influence, and his works have been adapted to film and television numerous times. His works have rarely been translated–in English, only three short works have appeared. Since 1987, he has stopped producing comics, and has lived a quiet life with his son in Tokyo since his wife's death in 1999, occasionally cooperating with adaptations and reproductions of his past work. Life and career Tsuge was born on 30 October 1937 in Katsushika, Tokyo, Japan. He was the eldest of three sons. After the death of Tsuge's father in 1942, two half-sisters, from his mother's second marriage, were introduced to his family. The recession in post-World War II Japan, inspired Tsuge to create comics to the pay-libraries' editors in an attempt to solve his financial problems. Being intensely shy, making dramatic pictures was one way to avoid meeting people and to earn money simultaneously. He created his first gekiga at 18, showing Osamu Tezuka's influence, who was one of the first mainstream artists to draw gekiga. Early career (1955–1965) Tsuge began his cartooning