Kazuo Koike
Meanwhile, the genre had developed substantially in the hands of European and Japanese creators. In Europe, creators like Vittorio Giardino, Jacques Tardi, José Muñoz, Carlos Sampayo, William Vance and Jean Van Hamme have devoted substantial portions of their oeuvres to crime comics, especially to stories concerned with the trappings of detective fiction and police procedurals, often with a cynical, existentialist bent. Japanese creators like Osamu Tezuka ("MW", "The Book of Human Insects"), Akimi Yoshida ("Banana Fish"), Takao Saito ("Golgo 13"), and Kazuo Koike ("Crying Freeman") have explored subject matter ranging from the criminal mind to Yakuza gangs in manga form.