Shinji Mizushima: Renowned baseball manga artist dies at 82

The Japanese cartoonist Shinji Mizushima, noted for his comics on baseball, died at the age of 82 on January 10 due to pneumonia, according to what his representative agency reported on Monday.

Originally from the city of Niigata, on the western coast of Japan, Mizushima debuted as a cartoonist in 1958 when he was 18 years old.

The manga author (mangaka), better known nationally than internationally, gained popularity after publishing a work on baseball in 1970, the national sport in Japan, of which he was a great fan, and which was the focus of much of his professional career.

His work “Dokaben”, which deals precisely with this sport, is the manga with the most volumes published altogether to date, 205 volumes, although it has never been officially recognized with this distinction due to the way in which it was serialized.

The comic, which ended up being published in 2018 after 46 years, is divided into five series with independent numbering, so it was not taken into account when awarding the award, which currently falls on “Golgo 13”, by the also deceased Takao Saito, who has published 203 volumes of the same series.

Sadaharu Oh, famous former baseball player and president of the Japanese team Softbank Hawks, issued a message of condolences expressing his gratitude to Mizushima for portraying the team’s predecessor clubs, the Nankai Hawks and Daiei Hawks, in his work “Abu-san”, and for the contributions of his work to the dissemination of sport.

The mangaka Tetsuya Chiba, author of the well-known boxing manga “Ashita no Joe”, praised in another message published on his website, along with an illustration of both, the deep knowledge of his contemporary about baseball and pointed out that the excellence of his works it made it difficult for him to work on any work about that sport.

Mizushima had retired from the profession in December 2020.