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Drawn & Quarterly to Release Maki Fujiwara's My Picture Diary Book in September

The company also announced that it will publish the Giant Robot: 30 Years of Refining Asian American Pop-Culture book, edited by Erik Nakamura. Nakamura and Martin Wong were editors on the Giant Robot bimonthly magazine that started in 1994 and ran until 2011 before turning into a website.

Additionally, the company stated it was "heartbroken" it could not "announce a very big new title from an Asian country with five letters," but added that it will announce the title soon.

The company describes the My Picture Diary book:

The wife of Japan's most lauded manga-ka documents a year in their lives with her own artistry.

In 1981, Fujiwara Maki began a picture diary about daily life with her son and husband, the legendary manga author Tsuge Yoshiharu. Publishing was not her original intention. “I wanted to record our family's daily life while our son, Shosuke, was small. But as 8mm cameras were too expensive and we were poor, I decided on the picture diary format instead. I figured Shosuke would enjoy reading it when he got older.”

Drawn in a simple, personable style, and covering the same years fictionalized in Tsuge's final masterpiece The Man Without Talent, Fujiwara's journal focuses on the joys of daily life amidst the stresses of childrearing, housekeeping, and managing a depressed husband. A touching and inspiring testimony of one Japanese woman's resilience, My Picture Diary is also an important glimpse of the enigma that is Tsuge. Fujiwara's diary is unsparing. It provides a stark picture of the gender divide in their household: Tsuge sleeps until noon and does practically nothing. He never compliments her cooking, and dictates how money is spent. Not once is he shown drawing. And yet, Fujiwara remains surprisingly empathetic toward her mercurial husband.

Drawn & Quarterly is releasing the complete works of Yoshiharu Tsuge in a seven-volume set. Ryan Holmberg is translating the works.

Tsuge was a pioneer of gekiga ("dramatic pictures") comics, a genre named by Yoshihiro Tatsumi in 1957 to describe an alternative style of manga that stresses realism and is aimed at adults. He is perhaps best known for his 1968 manga Neji-Shiki ("Screw-Style"), a surreal story about a man wandering a desolate, post-war Japan.

Teruo Ishii directed a live-action film adaptation of Neji-Shiki in 1998. Panik House released the film in North America under the title Screwed.

Sources: Drawn & Quarterly panel at San Diego Comic Con (Deb Aoki), Drawn & Quarterly's website