mokumoku studio is mentioned in Ryan Holmberg’s book!!

mokumoku studio went to TACO ché at Nakano Broadway to get Ryan Holmberg’s THE TRANSLATOR WITHOUT TALENT!!

As I wrote about Ryan before in this blog, he is a manga historian and translator. He found us through Instagram when we were posting #concoro, the daily corona manga and we even featured him as a leading character in case #20 of concoro. 

His book has recently been published which is called “THE TRANSLATOR WITHOUT TALENT”. This book is the compilation of his research findings on alternative manga and gekiga artists like Yoshiharu Tsuge and also the background stories of his translation. He also writes about nuclear power and social discrimination problems in Japan. That’s like..what I have really been interested in. 

Guess what?? mokumoku studio is mentioned in his book!! Our manga piece is in it!! 

It is just so amazing that mokumoku’s work is included in the same book with all of the prominent artists who created the foundation of Japan’s subculture. 


The society we live in is far from an artist friendly environment but places like TACO ché where you can find wonderful self-published books and the whole thing with the book made us happy about what we have done till now and also encourages us to move forward with it.

mokumoku studio’s manga was introduced in the historical media in the US!!

mokumoku studio is mentioned in Ryan Holmberg’s essay “More Corona Cartoons, Japan” at The Comics Journal! 

We met Ryan on Instagram when we were daily posting the corona manga series #concoro. He is a manga and art historian and a translator. He kindly shared his story for us to make one episode in concoro. He has been researching comics influenced by the coronavirus outbreak and mentioned about mokumoku’s work in his essay which is now online at The Comics Journal. 

We got connected to Ryan last April, when things were more uncertain than now and a lot of us were stuck at home. As the world was changing dramatically, we started the corona manga series with the urge to do something with art in this unprecedented time. The world seemed to be getting smaller and smaller at that time but meeting Ryan brought us a wider perspective and larger possibility. We are so thankful to Ryan for finding us!!

Tomoko Kakeda

Many thanks from mokumoku

We are now preparing to send out postcards to the people who took part in our corona manga project, which finished its daily uploads on May 6th. 

We are so happy that we got to collaborate and make art with the people who told us their stories. Literally, it is mokumoku studio’s heart to create art with individual stories like we did.

We are so thankful that they kindly trusted us and told us their stories. These are the connections that we will keep treating like treasures. 

tomoko kakeda