2023-09-12 08:33:47
Flashy headgear, sunglasses systematically screwed onto the nose… Like his hero armed with a “psychogun”, Cobra, the mangaka Buichi Terasawa did not go unnoticed. He died at the age of 68 on September 8 following a myocardial infarction, announced on X (ex-Twitter) the company Buichi Terasawa Productioninformation taken up by the Japanese daily Mainichi.
Born in 1955 on the island of Hokkaido in Japan, Buichi Terasawa launched into comics in 1974 after standing out in manga competitions organized by Japanese publishers. He will begin his career in publications shojoaimed at young girls, before supporting Osamu Tezuka, superstar of Japanese comics and father of modern manga, as an assistant.
In 1977, he took his freedom and a few months later gave birth to the science fiction series which would make him famous, particularly in France: Cobra. Published between 1978 and 1984 in the prestigious magazine Weekly Shonen Jump, this series narrates the adventures of an office worker who, during an artificial dream session, invites himself into the psyche of a space adventurer. The manga will sell some 50 million copies worldwide according to the specialist site Mangazenkancited by AFP.
A great movie buff, Buichi Terasawa gives his hero the traits of Jean-Paul Belmondo to the main character of Cobra : “I was very marked by Breathless [de Jean-Luc Godard, 1960]he told the Monde in 2016. Belmondo does things that are totally “crazy” from a Japanese point of view, like lifting the skirts of women in the street or closing his own eyes before dying. What lightness in the way we approach death, such a serious subject for us! » With the development of digital tools, Buichi Terasawa, in the 1980s, tried drawing and coloring techniques on the computer: he published The Black Knight Bat (1985), then in 1992 Takeru.
With the broadcast of the animated version of Cobra in France in 1985, first on Canal+ then in Dorothée’s “Récré A2”, a whole generation of young viewers became passionate about this magnificent and slightly frivolous vigilante, equipped with a destructive weapon instead of an arm, the dreaded “psychogun” (delta radius, in French), and smoking a cigar in all circumstances. With Albator and Actarus (Goldorak), Cobra is one of the first Japanese heroes to become true icons in France.
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