Manga took a giant leap into its future on New Year's Day 1963, when space-age cartoon images from Osamu Tezuka's famed comic book "Tetsuwa Atomu (Astro Boy)" came to life in Japan's first original animated TV series. This was the birth of anime, which has now mushroomed into a multi-billion-dollar global industry.
A year later, however, the same industry coughed up Garo, a 180 yen underground manga magazine, which, in many ways represented everything that Tezuka's loveable "Astro Boy" was not, giving a voice to a generation of largely unknown underground manga artists and writers whose works were often laced with dark, satirical narratives and weird, surrealistic imagery.
When Missouri-born artist and curator Tim Evans first flipped through the dog-eared pages of an old Garo magazine in 1992 during his college years in California, not only was he introduced to the wilder side of Japanese manga culture, but also to a fresh and dynamic medium for visual expression that would profoundly alter his career.