Featured Artist – Boichi

For this feature I’m turning my eyes towards manga. I really hope everyone knows what manga is, but just to be safe, manga, literally, means comics in Japanese. Right now one of my favorites manga artist/writers is Boichi.

Mu-jik Park (박무직; born January 29, 1973), known professionally as Boichi, is a South Korean manga artist living in Japan.

I first came across his work, probably online somewhere but I know it was this image;

What struck was the boldness of the composition as well as the speed in the lines and detail, above all. All of his work has this level of detail and it’s quite striking.

The other striking thing is that his work is very clearly masculine in nature. Meaning that he loves drawing sexy ladies in very provocative poses.  Poses that most Americans don’t see everyday.

So upon discovering him I found that most of his work was not translated for English, which really didn’t bother me as I was only really getting his work for the art. I started with Raqiya which IS translated to English.
From there I got into Wallman and then Origin, the later of which is just now coming out in English so I will probably be re-buying it to read it and better understand what was going on. Dr. Stone is his latest one and it just wrapped up. Which is the oddest thing about him.  Boichi’s series don’t last too long. Wallman was 3 Volumes. Raqiya was 5. Origin was 10. His longer ones, Sun-Ken Rock was 25 volumes and Dr. Stone just ended at 26, with 1 or 2 off-shoots of that as well. The norm, among manga artists, is to stay on their respective books for years and years. Either way, his artwork is tremendous. Most of the manga that I pick up to check the artwork in is usually sub-par. I put it right back down again. Every volume of his that I’ve picked up is full of some of the most beautiful manga I’ve ever seen. Intense crazy action, cartoon interaction with other characters, and sexy women. 
Here’s a gallery of his work.