Muku Yōji 椋陽児
Osaka-born bondage illustrator, comics artist and writer (1928–2001) known for his drawings in Uramado and later SM magazines and comic lines.
Muku Yōji was a Japanese illustrator, comics artist and writer of erotic fiction known for bondage drawings in postwar Japanese SM magazines. The Lambiek Comiclopedia gives his birth as November 18, 1928, in Osaka, and says he worked as a railroad worker and salesman before turning to art, which he taught himself. Japanese Wikipedia describes him as a kinbaku illustrator, erotic gekiga artist and novelist, and lists many pen names across his drawings, stories and comics.
Uramado
His name is tied above all to Uramado, the Tokyo SM magazine published by Kubo Shoten from 1956 to early 1965. Japanese Wikipedia lists him among its editorial staff, and Lambiek calls him one of its house artists, alongside Harukawa Namio. Lambiek says many of his black-and-white drawings were based on photographs, which he often redrew and colored for pulp magazines, and that he worked regularly with the photographer Sugiura Norio.
The historian Kawahara Azumi records that he edited Uramado’s successor, Suspense Magazine, together with Suma Toshiyuki (Minomura Kō) and Iida Toyoichi (Nureki Chimuo). When it was suspended in 1969 the three left Kubo Shoten and, in April 1970, launched their own magazine, Abumento, which ended after six issues that September.
Later work
According to Lambiek, Muku began drawing SM comics around the age of forty and in the 1970s drew for the Satan Comics and Joy Comics lines, while also writing stories for Uramado and SM Select. Japanese Wikipedia adds that his later work ran in the monthly magazines SM Hi-shōsetsu and SM Mania, and that in 1978 he illustrated a mainstream mystery-quiz book for the publisher Gakken. It lists more than thirty titles under his name, many of them bondage-themed comics and illustrated books, and Lambiek mentions a collection titled Jō (“Rope”).
Muku died on July 31, 2001.