He isn't well known here, but I gather that in Japan Yoshitoshi ABe is quite famous. He's responsible for the stories or character designs of a good few of the best anime that's been released in America over the past five or ten years, such as the surprisingly excellent Haibane Renmei, full of suspicious religious symbolism but, as it turns out, quite a beautiful and insightful story with not a speck of the cliched piety I expected, Serial Experiments Lain, not at all bad though somewhat dated and willfully ambiguous, and the epic, dark, almost horrific dystopia of Texhnolyze. (I don't include any links for these because there are no good ones out there that I know of. The fan sites are mostly embarrassing.)
If you want an example of his work at its finest, I don't think you can do better than to see this painting (drawing?) at the top of his homepage. I was delighted to find, after sifting through the rest of the site (I don't understand Japanese, unfortunately), that he has links to several galleries which are well worth looking through here and here.
Posted by Alan Hogue at June 14, 2006 11:35 PMThanks for this. I especially love the fisheye effect on that painting.
Posted by: Ben Brumfield at June 17, 2006 08:49 PM