Heta Uma
Heta-uma, bad-but-good. The term surfaced in the Japanese illustration scene of the early 1970s rather than being coined by any one person, and spread widely in the 1980s through Teruhiko Yumura, who drew as King Terry. Its foundational comics work is Jonetsu no Penguin Gohan, serialised in Garo from April 1976 with Shigesato Itoi writing and Yumura drawing. Also Yoshikazu Ebisu, and Takashi Nemoto, whose Monster Man Bureiko Lullaby is drawn in a crude bulging line and is largely about bodies mutating and leaking.
Part of Underground Comics
31 moments in this segment.
- - 根本敬の映像夜間中学・ヨコハマ黄金町分校. Notice for a Yokohama edition of the screening series at Cinema Jack and Betty, where Nemoto narrates footage he has gathered over years of travelling.
- - 根本敬 On Radio/EVERYBODY KNOWS? 2009/6/20 Vol.633. Takashi Nemoto talks for the better part of an hour on a Shibuya FM show hosted by the poet Yuichiro Azuma, kept from a run that reached more than 770 broadcasts.
- - コミック雑誌なんかいらない（根本敬×内田裕也×ダンボール・バット）. Nemoto appears alongside Yuya Uchida and the band Danball Bat in a piece taking its title from the 1986 film about a scandal magazine.
- - 根本敬×みうらじゅん 青林工藝舎アックスストア会員限定動画. Takashi Nemoto and Jun Miura sit for a conversation made to mark the opening of Seirinkogeisha's online shop, released in four quarter hour parts.
- - 『根本敬の映像夜間中学』15年ツアー【広島校】のおしらせ. Notice for the Hiroshima stop of Nemoto's long running screening and talk series, in which he narrates found footage and documents he has collected for fifteen years.
- - 【ロフトラジオ第25回放送】「根本敬、因果鉄道の旅」. Takashi Nemoto sits for a long live radio session built around Inga Tetsudo no Tabi, his travel writing about drifters and outsiders he sought out and recorded.
- - 漫画家の蛭子能収氏がデザインした東京オリンピックの独創的なエンブレム. Asked on the spot to design an Olympic emblem while the official one was being withdrawn, Yoshikazu Ebisu protests about the lack of notice and draws it anyway on a sheet of card.
- - 1130 3 ミロとヘタウマイラスト. A lecture setting Joan Miro's deliberately childlike figures against Japanese heta-uma illustration, asking what separates untrained drawing from trained drawing that imitates it.
- - 【根本敬】わんぱく太郎、山野一ねこぢる夫妻とデニーズにて. Takashi Nemoto sits in a Denny's with Hajime Yamano and Nekojiru, the three talking across a restaurant table while the camera runs.
- - Nemoto, March 2017. The artist photographed on 26 March 2017 at an event of the record-collecting society he belongs to.
- - Takashi Nemoto in 2017. The heta-uma cartoonist, whose Monster Man Bureiko Lullaby is built on scatological and sexual excess drawn in a deliberately crude line.
- - 根本敬ゲルニカ計画. A crowdfunding appeal for Takashi Nemoto's attempt at a canvas the size of Picasso's Guernica, 349 by 777 centimetres, undertaken because something outside his own intention pushed him to it.
- - 【8/20生配信】根本敬ゲルニカ計画クラウドファンディング・ラストデー企画！. Ota Shuppan announces eight hours of live coverage from the Keihinjima workshop where Nemoto is painting the Guernica sized canvas, with Makoto Aida and Hiroko Okada among the visitors.
- - 2017.8.2. An hour long evening with Nemoto and the artist Makoto Aida among those present, the talk crossing between gallery art and printed comics.
- - 2019.2.26. A long recording of an evening bringing Takashi Nemoto together with Miruku Morizono, the corpse photographer Kiyotaka Tsurisaki and Keroppy Maeda.
- - あれコード 幻の名盤解放同盟 2020.06.10. Takashi Nemoto, the critic Manabu Yuasa and the designer Hideo Funabashi run an episode of the record salvage project they started in 1982, playing deleted Showa pressings on the principle that every recording deserves a turn on the platter.
- - Issue 6: Takashi Nemoto and Mimi Yamasaki. An editor reads her interview with Takashi Nemoto and Mimi Yamasaki aloud, then describes each reproduced image in turn for an issue printed in both English and Japanese.
- - 2016.4.4. Two hours of loose conversation recorded with Takashi Nemoto and four others around a table, the kind of unstructured talk his circle has kept on tape for years.
- - 美学校「特殊漫画家-前衛の道〜商業漫画と特殊漫画-そのあいだ」レコジャケ展. Record sleeves made by Takashi Nemoto's Bigakko class and its graduates hang at Taco Che, the course sitting deliberately between commercial work and what it calls special manga, with Keiji Ito and Katsuoka Toyo as guests.
- - 漫画家森園みるくの「すごい！アーティスト・インタビュー」「UMA展覧会」参加作家のインタビューシリーズ8回目。みんな編です。. Cartoonist Miruku Morizono films the artists in a cryptid themed show at the Maboroshi Museum in Izu, Takashi Nemoto among them beside a taxidermist and a doll maker.
- - 根本敬を語る. A university circle spends half an hour on Takashi Nemoto, working through what the special manga label is meant to cover and where his books sit against commercial publishing.
- - エセム万と根本敬と絹川大によるトークイベント｢文化人類学 ドンワリ,ドンワリ｣. Curator Esemu Man, Takashi Nemoto and Dai Kinukawa sit together for a talk staged inside the same recurring exhibition, circling sexual objects made by craft artists.
- - 【5 -4 ヘタウマの魅力 】 キースヘリング・野見山暁治・湯村輝彦・蛭子能収など、ヘタウマの魅力はいったい何か？それは＜情報量と想像力＞の問題だった。. A retired art teacher argues that the appeal of the crude line is a matter of how much information a picture withholds, setting Yumura and Ebisu beside Keith Haring and Gyoji Nomiyama.
- - 【蛭子能収 75歳】認知症公表から『最後の展覧会』と題した個展で描く新境地. Broadcast coverage of the Aoyama show at which Yoshikazu Ebisu, then seventy five, exhibited paintings marking a turn away from the flat comic panels he built his name on.
- - In the court of the King: Interview with Teruhiko Yumura. Teruhiko Yumura talks across forty minutes about sixty years of drawing, the American and Japanese pop sources he worked from, and the bad but good manner that grew out of it.
- - Garo Manga Magazine: King Terry Flip Throughs!. Teruhiko Yumura drew Garo covers across seven separate years between 1977 and 1987, and this pass turns through issues showing the crude deliberate line that heta-uma took as its method.
- - 文化人類学トークイベント ｢ドンワリ ドンワリ｣特殊漫画家·根本敬 ｢SEX PRAYERS 2024 Ka-O-Bi大賞とルンパルンパ賞の授賞式｣. Takashi Nemoto gives a rambling anthropology talk at a craft and painting show built around sex as a subject, then hands out its two prizes.
- - Manga Talks #19 : Heta Uma & Autobiographical Manga!. A collector pairs Yoshikazu Ebisu's Pachinko and Watashi wa Nani mo Kangaenai with autobiographical books by younger artists, comparing how the crude line carries a first person voice.
- - 【特殊漫画家前衛の道根本敬クラス修了展2026】マーケティングを意識していない、ピュアなズームミーティング動画4（夢廻リナと高橋利明の対談）. Rina Mukai and Toshiaki Takahashi talk over video call around the graduation show of the drawing class Nemoto teaches, describing what the students made.
- - 【歴史・俗】湯村輝彦（ゆむらてるひこ）―落書きの中の革命・昭和四十二年七月. An account of Teruhiko Yumura working with Seitaro Kuroda from the late 1960s, putting a rough uneven line into advertising, magazines and record sleeves where tidy design had been the rule.
- - 特殊漫画家・根本敬 #014. An essay by Nemoto read aloud over music, one instalment of a series working through his prose rather than his drawings.