Gengoroh Tagame

Gengoroh (sometimes Gengorou) Tagame, b. 1964, is openly gay and Japan's best known artist who deals in explicitly hardcore themes of male homosexuality and BDSM. His work typically depicts hirsute and stocky characters of the type called bears in English. This genre, which Tagame founded and still leads, is called bara manga -- roughly "bear porn" or "bear graphic novels," a subset of gei comi or "gay comics." Bara manga as a genre stands in sharp distinction to the better known yaoi manga, which generally feature stories of young, smooth, hairless gay men that have particular appeal to female readers.

Tagama the artist has a large number of magazine illustrations and some fine art to his credit, but his reputation rests primarily on his many manga, many of them multi-part. Tagame's best-known and most widely-read manga today is probably his trilogy from the mid-2000's, "Pride", about a hunky college student who is trained as a BDSM slave (masochist) by a college professor who becomes his master.

Some of Tagame's work has been translated and sold in France. There are no official translations of his manga in English-speaking language to date; in a few cases fans and amateurs have taken it on themselves to clandestinely scan and translate some of his work into rough English, a process known as Scanlation. This type of work is widely circulated on the Internet but is not legal due to copyright conventions and Tagame receives no royalties for it.