Tank Tankuro Slipcased Hardcover
I considered it a pleasant diversion and a distinct honor working on the cover design of Tank Tankuro.....Sakamoto's pages seemed wonderfully energetic, almost willfully naive and playful, yet also strangely dire, given their overriding military theme. The immediate Western association I saw was with cartoonist Milt Gross, of the so-called screwball school whose work captured the slam-bang of vaudeville, Yiddish humor and never took itself seriously, while at the same time getting at some of the common frustrations and societal anger that higher arts don't necessarily directly address. Gross's frenetic, loopy pen style is analogous somewhat to Sakamoto's, and I get the same sort of feeling of hectic happiness when looking at their work. --Chris Ware