Cheat Sheets

Tiger Tateishi began his artistic career in 1964, drawing inspiration from copies of MAD Magazine left behind by occupation forces. He regularly contributed to manga magazines before relocating to Milan in 1969. There, while working for Ettore Sottsass at Olivetti, he developed a distinctive style that produced the striking comic panel layout paintings later collected posthumously in the volume Moon Trax. During this period abroad, Tateishi harbored a deep ambition to create an authentic, fully realized comic book. As Fumiko Tateishi recounts, he devoted nearly five years to illustrating Tora no Maki. The project initially attracted the attention of Penguin Books in London, which held the original artwork under consideration for publication for a considerable time. Ultimately, following an intervention by Seigow Matsuoka of Kousakusha in Tokyo, the completed work was brought back to Japan and published there instead.