The urban slacker novella Marmalade Princess marks reclusive manga-ka Ito Shigeo’s English-language debut

Marmalade Princess is a five-part graphic novella deliberately told out of order. Drawn in wiry black inks and filled in with distinct 80s pops of bright color reminiscent of Warhol’s latter-day prints, it follows a pack of trendy youths on what has all the makings of a madcap summer adventure.

Marmalade Princess showcases Ito’s previously uncollected short comics fiction across a number of post-Garo alt-manga magazines such as Yakou, Comic Baku, and the famed A*Ha–the Esso-sponsored monthly manga magazine that published the likes of Guido Crepax and Gary Panter.

Ito Shigeo’s comics center aimless urbanites in their mid-teens and early 20s. A prolific yet elusive manga-ka of the 1980s, he stopped publishing comics in 1991. After a Japanese folk rocker put Ito’s art on a 2020 album cover, interest in the author’s work spiked, prompting the republication of his short stories in Japan. Marmalade Princess is translated by prolific literary translator David Boyd.