As you may have heard, Naoki Urasawa is going to be hosting a weekly series of hour-long NHK documentaries on the lives of cartoonists next month; subjects include Akiko Higashimura (Princess Jellyfish), Kazuhiro Fujita (Ushio and Tora) and Inio Asano (it’s Tumblr, I needn’t say more), but it will not surprise you to learn that I am most looking forward to the episode on Golgo 13 creator Takao Saitō, which is set to air on 9/25.
But that’s not *just* because Duke Togo was my imaginary friend as a child - Urasawa himself is actually tied to G13 history, insofar as one of his earliest shorts, 1983′s BETA!!, ran as a space-filling bonus feature in a contemporaneous Golgo 13 reprint book. Future Urasawa editor/co-writer/enabler Takashi Nagasaki was managing Saitō-Pro’s reprints at Shogakukan at the time, and it was through BETA!! that the two met; I doubt it was a coincidence that future Urasawa collaborators like Kazuya Kudō (Pineapple Army) and Hokusei Katsushika (Master Keaton) were both Golgo 13 scriptwriters.
Anyway, in 2008 Shogakukan put out an enormous collection of thirteen Golgo 13 storylines as selected by thirteen celebrities; Urasawa was one of the participants, and above we see an excerpt from the story he picked, 1968′s “Roaring in the Delos Island”. A sharply traditional pick, as the tale’s staff represents the originating G13 creative team: writer Kazuo Koike; layout man Saburō Takemoto; work team heads Takemoto, Mikijirō Kōra and Fumiyasu Ishikawa, who managed individual groups of junior artists responsible for different parts of the story; and director Takao Saitō himself, who was still personally drawing parts of the comic at that time - perhaps it was him who decreed that these final five pages occur without dialogue, all the better to chase the cinematic dreams of commercial gekiga…
(Golgo 13, Takao Saitō & Saitō-Pro c. 1968)
