Kinnikuman in the Expanded Field
A reimagining of Yudetamago’s Kinnikuman comic as a theatre of shape-shifting, protean bodies.
When my parents moved house, I came across a stack of old comics that I’d read as a child. The Kinnikuman series (1980-1988) by Yudetamago was probably the one that I’d obsessed about the most. In my memory, the shape-shifting characters with their interchangeable masks and body parts had transported me to an exhuberant and intoxicating world of fluid subjectivities. It was an experience that rendered any other comic I subsequently came across as dull and condescending. Leafing through the comics years later, I laughed in disbelief, finding it not how I remembered it at all. This zine is an attempt to nurse my disappointment by reimagining how it might have seemed in my mind as a child—a world where subjects and their bodies were indeterminate. The images are taken solely from the Kinnikuman comics and have been manipulated only by way of taking parts away; nothing has been embellished or added.
—Joji Koyama
Published by Toupée in 2019
Available here