Takao Saitō, creator of the long-lived Golgo 13 media franchise and a pioneer of Japanese comics in terms of both irresistible action content and assembly line production, died of pancreatic cancer on September 24, 2021. He was 84.
Saitō was born in Wakayama Prefecture, the youngest of five siblings. "A bully in his childhood," as The Encyclopedia of Golgo 13 bluntly states. He displayed artistic talent from a young age, and thought he might become a painter while biding time in the family business of barbershops. He boxed as a young man, and enjoyed jidaigeki films. "I can remember seeing the silent movie versions," he remarked to the nationalist author Kunio Suzuki in a 2000 interview, "I think the silent films had more impact." Impact would prove important to his work in comics, which began in 1955 with the publication of Baron Air with Hinomaru Bunkō, a rental manga outfit in Osaka which provided much early exposure for the young cartoonists pushing toward a more sophisticated and sensational style of Japanese comics, eventually known as gekiga. Much to his mother's dismay, Saitō became a full-time cartoonist in 1956, and by 1958 was living in Tokyo with Yoshihiro Tatsumi and Masahiko Matsumoto: major players in the evolution of the form. These three, along with five other artists, formed the Gekiga Kōbō in 1959; an artistic and editorial collective, splitting income on the basis of individual pages produced, the Gekiga Kōbō served both to promulgate this new approach to popular cartooning, as well as to provide a bulwark against the turbulent fortunes of the rental book market as magazine serialization became more prominent.
In Tatsumi's 2008 memoir, A Drifting Life, Saitō's conception of gekiga is described as entirely different on a technical level from manga, to the point where Saitō considered the two approaches mutually exclusive. His organizational ideas also differed; Tatsumi depicts Saitō attempting to impose his brother Hatuzi, a businessman, on the group in a managerial role. By that time, Saitō had already begun work on Typhoon Gorō, a lively crime series that became one of the big rental manga hits of the period. By the end of 1959, Saitō and Tatsumi had both withdrawn from the Gekiga Kōbō, and in 1960 Saitō formed his own studio, Saitō Production, which rejected collectivism in favor of the corporate model. Notable early releases from the studio were the self-published Gorilla Magazine, an anthology begun in 1962, and a series of licensed 007 comics commissioned for magazine serialization by the large publisher Shōgakukan, beginning in 1964.
As the scholar Ryan Holmberg notes, by the end of the 1960s Saitō Production had refined its operation into something of a comics factory, with Saitō supervising various work teams, each with chiefs and sub-chiefs managing various subordinates in divvying up the drawing for various titles. As a result, even by the time the popular period drama Muyōnosuke began in 1967, a Saitō-Pro style had emerged which did not easily surrender the individuation of any contributor, Saitō included. "Even though I'm an artist," Saitō remarked to the cartoonist Naoki Urasawa, in a 2015 episode of the television documentary program Urasawa Naoki no Manben, "I'm not good at drawing pictures." However, Saitō maintained that combining the strengths of many in a studio setting could overcome any limitation, placing comics on the same level of sophistication as film and television; in this way, Saitō's idea of gekiga was not only a departure from the content of manga, but from the process of manga's creation.
In 1968, Saitō's legacy was sealed in the form of Golgo 13, the episodic chronicle of a sniper-for-hire which debuted in the premiere issue of Big Comic, a Shōgakukan publication tailored to readers seeking mature works in the serial magazine market. The efficiency of the Saitō Production assembly line, from its contracted scenario writers down to the workers assigned the duties of laying down strips of tone, assured the popular feature's longevity; it would not suffer its first hiatus until the COVID-19 pandemic in the 2020s, at which point the series was closing in on 200 official collected volumes, on top of at least four additional, overlapping reprint lines. However, the adventures of Duke Togo have only ever been a portion of Saitō Production's output; the 1970s brought notable projects such as Survival, a shōnen manga set in the aftermath of a cataclysmic earthquake; Japan Sinks, the first comics rendition of Sakyō Komatsu's oft-adapted 1973 novel; and Shōfu Naomi yawa, an account of the habits of courtesans in the first half of the 20th century, which served as a rare passion project for the business-minded Saitō. In 1974, LEED Publishing Co., Ltd. was spun off from Saitō Production as an independent publisher; LEED would cultivate its own extensive line of magazines, books and online endeavors, encompassing everything from dedicated samurai magazines to pornography and reaching far outside the walls of Saitō-Pro - including the 2014 debut of the Torch label for young 'alternative' cartoonists.
It was through LEED (or, "Lead" as they called themselves) that Saitō attempted a brash arrival on the English-language comics scene via a quartet of deluxe Golgo 13 collections in 1986 and 1987; sturdily printed with glossy dustcovers and all the original color pages from the Japanese releases -- albeit flipped to read from left-to-right and lightly edited for political content deemed potentially inflammatory to U.S. readers -- these $6.95 marvels remain a fascinating exercise in self-determination from the mid-morning of Japanese comics' visibility in North America. Later Golgo 13 translations would follow more traditional paths. Two stapled comic books were released by "Lead" in 1989 and 1990 - the first contained backmatter tips 'n tricks for the Golgo 13: Top Secret Episode video game, a befuddling, cinematic, and unusually randy NES cart that transfixed young gamers such as myself, while the second sopped to provincial expectations by adding computer color to all the art. The Shōgakukan-owned North American publisher VIZ stepped in as distributor for a subsequent three-issue miniseries (also colorized) in 1991, titled The Professional: Golgo 13 in harmony with the 1992 North American localization of director Osamu Dezaki's Golgo 13 animated film, an extraordinary barrage of lurid psychedelia that is less a straight adaptation of the comics than a tumescent daydream about them. It remains perhaps the most enduring vision of Saitō's character stateside, though viewers seeking a more authentic experience are directed to the 1973 Japanese/Iranian live-action Golgo 13 film, starring Ken Takakura (the original physical model for Duke Togo) and co-written by Saitō himself, though he would later claim that little of his script is visible on the screen. A 1977 Sonny Chiba vehicle (Golgo 13: Operation Kowloon) would follow, along with a 1998 direct-to-video anime (Golgo 13: Queen Bee) and a 2008-09 animated television series.
But while these adaptations are readily accessible in the English language, Saitō's manga remains elusive. Even accounting for unauthorized pirate translations, the great body of Golgo 13 comics in English remains VIZ's 13-volume 2006-08 book series, its storylines curated by editor Carl Gustav Horn. It may be that the relative obscurity of this very popular character in translation is due to the unstuck-in-time nature of the comics. Reading Golgo 13 is like developing an affinity for a certain type of liquor; I love these comics so very much, but they are very strange at first, because their narrative approach -- 6- or 7-panel pages dense with contextual dialogue, bursting every so often into collage-like depictions of minute physical activity, dotted with images obviously traced from photos and characters cycling through a set library of facial reactions -- has evolved by design from the manufactured processes Saitō devised in the 1960s: an evolution geared for efficiency, rather than contemporaneity. In his landmark 1983 study Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics, Frederik L. Schodt stated that Saitō "at times only pencils in the faces of the main characters." Urasawa recited a similar allegation to Saitō decades later on Manben, as the older man grimaced in recognition. Yet throughout the episode he performs supervisory work: drawing a few Golgo figures, lettering sound effects, and devising page breakdowns formed not by drawings but panels filled with a written code understood only by the staff of Saitō Production.
Other works of Saitō's have drifted into English, always in digital form, but whether it is DOLL the Hotel Detective (a crime comic set in the world of Golgo 13) from the 1980s, or Kitty Hawker (a lighthearted aviation adventure series) from the 1990s, it always looks unerringly like that idea of gekiga, a cliff face against the waves of time and taste. Small and colorful at the top of the cliff was Saitō, writing his memoirs and attending functions and accepting his Guinness World Records certificate for the longevity of Golgo 13. He told Suzuki that he had the series' final storyline stored completely in his head, fully laid out and ready to be drawn, but if that was ever shared with anybody it will be a while before we see it; without hesitation, upon Saitō's death it was announced that Golgo 13 would continue production without its creator, vanished like a morning mist around the skyscrapers built from the ambitions of that age.
