Unfiltered

I spent my childhood glued to a Super Nintendo with manga magazines in one hand and a pencil in the other, filling blank pages with drawings of naked girls from Dragon Ball and Digimon. My Bravo collection didn’t survive. Satoshi Urushihara was my god—Plastic Little, Ragnarok City, the kind of work that proved you could draw exactly what you wanted without apology. I wasn’t bad at it either, which tells you everything about how I chose to spend those years.

Ryuko Azuma’s work hits different. The guy’s based in Tokyo, and his drawings are depravity distilled—not polished, not trying to be gallery-ready. Just raw, weird, genuinely unhinged. He’ll mix grotesque self-portraits in with the explicit stuff, post it on Twitter, run a Tumblr that feels like watching someone’s brain spill out in real time. No pretense, no filter.

There’s something honest about it. The refusal to pretend you’re doing anything other than what you’re actually doing. He draws what he wants and puts it out there.

I’m older now and don’t spend my time drawing the way I used to, but I get it. The weather gets worse, the days feel longer, and you find yourself looking at work like Azuma’s and remembering that specific kind of obsession. The kind where you lose hours. The kind where nothing else matters. Maybe that never changes.