The Artists Struggle
Spending hours in front of the page, trying to extract that image that is tormenting you in that space behind your eyes. The never ending pull toward the eternal toil. The page can be comforting and all consuming at the same time. This is the struggle you endure for your craft. For some of us the ultimate validation lies in being able to create art to make a living. This is always and has always been an uphill battle. Now with AI creating the art, some think the hill has gone exponential. I can guarantee that no matter how much you think the odds are stacked against you, your journey to a successful career will never compare to the struggle of the manga artist Shigeru Mizuki.
An artist from a young age, he took inspiration from art magazines and stories about ancient Japanese gods and monsters. Mizuki wasn't too fond of school, a sentiment I'm sure most of us artists can relate to. In an interview in the Japan Times he remarked: "I missed the first class every day, because I couldn't get up early in the morning. So I scored zero in math tests, because math classes were held the first thing in the morning and I skipped virtually all those classes. So I was called an idiot all the time." He spent time running the streets and getting into fights.
In the year 1943, with the war well underway, he was drafted into the Japanese Army and assigned to the Bugle Corps. His assignment to the Bugle Corps was likely due to him being artistically inclined. Still, he wasn't much into music or playing the bugle. Conflicts with his commanding officer, and maybe his disdain for authority. Or maybe he didn't want to submit his musical talents to the authority of the military machine. Maybe I'm projecting, you get what I'm saying though. This eventually led him to request a transfer to the infantry. He ended up being sent to New Britain Island, in an area we now call Papua New Guinea. The ship he was on was torpedoed and sunk not far off shore from the island, with most of his fellow crew members killed. He was picked up and redeployed.
Once on the island, he and his platoon were ambushed by American machine gunners. Mizuki was able to narrowly escape the grips of death yet again by diving into the ocean. After a grueling swim and trek through the jungle he finally made it back to his camp. Only to be rewarded by his commanding officer telling him he should have died with the rest of his platoon. This would've no doubt been proof of his value as a cog.
This still was not the end of his struggle. He eventually contracted malaria. Then, while he was recovering, an Allied air raid caught him in an explosion and took his left arm. Not just any arm, his drawing arm. As a southpaw, that was the hand he created with. Interestingly, if he'd only just played the bugle, his journey would not have led to this pivotal point in his life. You would think his troubles would be over. Even after the war ended, his struggles as an artist were just beginning.
Returning home to a war torn Japan, he found it difficult to find a way to survive. He burned through many different jobs. These included stints as a fishmonger and a bicycle taxi operator. Eventually, with a loan from his parents, he opened a guest house. It was here an influential character entered: an artist in a genre called kamishibai, a form of street storytelling accompanied by illustrations. Inspired by the genre, he resolved to train his remaining arm to draw and paint. A task that couldn't have been easy, but by the 1950s Mizuki was churning out hundreds of drawings.
The combination of a favorable new market, coupled with his talents that had been tempered and hardened through immense struggle, led Shigeru Mizuki to take on manga as his primary medium. His early works were inspired by American comics like Superman and Tales from the Crypt. By 1960 he created his own version of Hakaba Kitarō, drawing on the stories of Japanese gods and monsters he loved as a child. From this sprung a whole genre of yokai related comics, of which Mizuki can be considered a pioneer.
He went on to have a career to be admired by any artist, creating manga on a variety of subjects, including the horrors of war, a subject he was all too familiar with. When you look at what you are facing in opposition to your goals as an artist, reflect on what Shigeru Mizuki had to endure, and understand it IS the struggle that created the artist. If he'd stayed a bugle player we may not have ever been inspired by his work and the struggles behind it. It was his opposition to being a cog that differentiated him from the rest of the machinery.