The Souji Yamakawa school of fashion and acting

Dear the Mitt Kahl school of acting and mime, move over! Here comes the near globally influential Souji Yamakawa school of acting and fashion, aka the (little known at least in the anglophone world) wonder that inspired the Kamen Rider and Super Sentai/Power Rangers schools of acting and mime.  

Souji Yamakawa and his own school of fellows are responsible for how a lot of Japanese pop culture’s best known villains and anti villains look and act. They may be the bad guys, (check!) and they may be flashy, (check!) but there are subversions. Something similar can be said for its best known heroes and antiheroes in their shared veins. 

The Villains

Skull, the main big bad villain of the Cyborg 009 Mythos, is likely inspired, in an ironic twist of fate, by a Golden Bat competitor called The White Skull, whose original incarnations themselves (mostly drawn with Souji Yamakawa’s pens) are mentors to all the original incarnations of The Tiger Boy. 

The Heroes 

There’s Prehistoric Ryū, who has been popular in Japan and Scandinavia for a longer time than one of his spiritual predecessors, Prehistoric Sabu. Said predecessor, himself inspired by Souji Yamakawa’s Sapin the Prehistoric Boy, got outcompeted by and ended abruptly upon the relative domestic (and overall national) success of Teruyoshi ‘Kyuuta’ (or Quintus) Ishikawa’s very own Prehistoric Boy Bibi in the mid-1960s. He and Bibi themselves had a major South Korean counterpart in Manhwa pioneer Jong Jin Lee’s Baba The Cave Boy, who also was one of Prehistoric Ryū’s competitors, but whose artwork appearances are very hard to come by even in his native country; mostly due to how fast the old manhwa volumes (and their masters) infamously decay, so much so that most of their reprints are now pieces of luxury mostly bought by ultra rich manhwa fans.