The King of 50s Kaiju art

Due to strongly protecting his identity from way too much fame, Kazuyoshi ‘Wasuke’ Abe, Souji Yamakawa’s fellow contemporary who perhaps passed years to decades ago, is most likely known in much of the world primarily for being the rather reclusive character designer of many giant monster characters in a bunch of particularly famous old Japanese live action films and tv shows.

However, in his homeland of Japan, he’s more than just one of the first known character designers for the Showa era Kaiju monsters of a certain company; he’s also a creator who did a crapload of prototypical graphic novels. 

His least known works are also the ones which are nowadays seen primarily in a couple of Japanese museums and more notably in many online Japanese auction sites. Unfortunately, three of them are technically (almost fully) lost media due to countless factors going on throughout the decades.

Unlike Mr Wasuke Abe’s major Kaiju works, which have the luxury of being reprinted again and again, often with passionate love coming from countless fans (young and old alike), a crapload his countless non-Kaiju works are nowadays pretty much forgotten, even in Japan.

To my then unexpected surprise, a lot of his non-Kaiju works are probably very values dissonant nowadays, with the best known being Shōnen Zamba. Despite being a somewhat incomplete story with a short and horribly abrupt lifespan, Shōnen Zamba was a pretty good (but not totally great) jungle swashbuckler for its time. 

The story of Zamba likely began when two benevolent Japanese Brazilian scientists and their young son go to the jungle clad Mato Grosso in Brazil, with their friends, an American couple and their daughter, a little girl named Shari. However, they were all wrongfully imprisoned and then slayed by imperialist Euro-Brazilian forces from afar, which means that the two children have to survive living with somewhat distrustful natives there. 

The graphic novels are highly valued (currently) by a couple of (almost always) Japanese pulp fans, mostly because they have nicely drawn (albeit sitting steeply within what’s now called the uncanny valley) artworks, which sometimes appear on both Mandarake and Yahoo Auctions Japan. Even though all three items are probably sold years back, there are a Kamishibai set, decent picture books and an okay (albeit ridiculously expensive) card game on the unpredictable (and often unavailable except in Japan) AUCFree auction site. 

They’re also shown to have only a few surviving images available, not only on various search engines, but also on a couple of (domestically) Japanese-made books focusing on the makeup of both Shōnen and Seinen demographics (as it mostly was) in the years (and decades) up to and more commonly during the (then-recent) Heisei period. 

A few of his works include: Shōnen Zamba (for Kobunsha and Kodansha, 1954), King Somai, Jinma The Daimyo, Yamao Dan San (For Sankei, 1954), Chief Takashi, and Shōnen Congo (For both Kobunsha and Akita Shoten, 1959).