Manga & Anime

Manga Mondays ~ Posuka Demizu

Posuka Demizu is a Japanese freelance artist and mangaka known for detailed backgrounds and cute characters.

Manga Mondays ~ Posuka Demizu

Demizu was born and lives in Tokyo, Japan. She emerged on the manga scene in 2008 with a mini-series for monthly manga magazine Korokoro. She has worked on a wide range of projects with children’s magazine and video games companies. Notably, she has worked with animation studio JCstaff on the series Sakurasou no Pet na Kanojo (The Pet Girl of Sakurasou) and illustrated a comic for the popular card battle Orca Battle.

Beginning in 2016, Demizu collaborated with author Kaiu Shirai on Yakusoku no Neverland (The Promised Neverland). The series started in issue 35 of Weekly Shōnen Jump (Shueisha). It follows Emma and her friends who try to escape the orphanage they grew up in after they find out the unsettling truth behind it. Originally, Shirai planned to write and draw, but her editor felt like Shirai’s style ‘didn’t do the script justice’ and would be too hard for Shirai to keep up the quality of both. And so Demizu joined the project. Shirai had seen Demizu’s art before and loved it, but before starting the series they created a one-shot called Popy’s Wish. The outcome was better than Shirai imagined. Neverland has recently concluded three volumes with the fourth on its way.

This first collection of Demizu’s work, The Art of Posuka Demizu, was published last year in Japan. It features many of her outstanding illustrations from her career so far. An English edition is due for release in July, 2017.

Demizu’s characters are undeniably cute but are often tasked with navigating nightmarish landscapes. Her backgrounds are complex, filled with details, but her pencils retain a loose quality to them. She combines the details of a drawing using colour; limiting her pallet to only cool or warm tones. She also uses contrast to direct the viewer’s attention, with the most vibrant colour being the central focus.

You can find more of Posuka Demizu’s work on her website and Twitter.

Manga Mondays ~ Posuka Demizu
Manga Mondays ~ Posuka Demizu
Manga Mondays ~ Posuka Demizu
Manga Mondays ~ Posuka Demizu
Manga Mondays ~ Posuka Demizu
Manga Mondays ~ Posuka Demizu

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Discussion
  1. Posuka Demizu is definitely a female, I would appreciate it if you changed all the he, him and his to she and her

    1. Thank you. That has now been corrected.

  2. Mad Art Enthusiast

    I think it is interesting that Posuka Demizus work includes themes of tragedy, death and impending doom, but you can also find illustrations of her’s that displays acts of heroism, love, companionship, or just whimsical playfulness. You say that the characters are often tasked with navigating a “nightmarish” landscape, but that sounds more akin to a Zzidslaw Beksinki painting. I would rather say that her work is a “surreal reality” or essentially our world if we did coexist among things of a fantastical scale. Here you will meet creatures wholesome in both appearance and character, others that are deceptively bad, and then there are unmistakable monstrosity’s of your worst nightmares, yet rather then presenting this to us through a stereotypical fantasy setting filled with grandiose castles, enchanted forests, and magical springs, we are shown through an almost realistic yeat surreal way with buildings and attire reminiscent of the nineteen twenty era, to ghettos that look like something you’d find going into your worst part of the neighborhood. We see pictures of a young girl seated in a cafe having a meal with her impish devilish friend, an oni dad selling food products in an open marketplace with his oni son, an elvish character sitting cross legged at his computer looking back in annoyance as company intrudes his personal living space, humanoid gangster figures in a dark corridor laying waste to their unfortunate unseen victim on the ground, an undead boat captain fishing enthusiastically with his supernatural crew. You will go from angelic beings floating whimsically through the sky with many large wings and dragons capsizing a large boat, to normal schoolkids playing video games on a couch together, and the best thing is that none of it ever feels out of place. Another thing I also like about these illustrations is how the characters are never one of shots, you will see them again and again in other drawings, sometimes they are at the forefront of the picture while other times they are just casually crossing paths with another character in the background, and every encounter tells a story about and gives you insight to the kind of nature of these creatures, Posuka’s Demizu ability to capture all of this without words or narration is nothing short of spectacular in my humble opinion.

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