Japanese Monsters in Children’s Book Art by Gojin Ishihara

When we was a kid, we went through a phase where we was way into monsters — Draculas, Frankensteins, demons from the pits of Hell, all that good stuff — and, as these were the dark days before the Internet, I would hit the library on a weekly basis checking out books illustrated with the scarier pieces of pop culture and mythology. Well, I’ve got to say that right now, seven year-old Chris Sims is insanely jealous of his Japanese counterparts, because they had Gojin Ishihara, a manga artist whose work on numerous children’s books from the 1970s is both terrifying and awesome.

Here is a collection of wonderfully weird illustrations by Gōjin Ishihara, whose work graced the pages of numerous kids’ books in the 1970s. The first 16 images below appeared in the “Illustrated Book of Japanese Monsters” (1972), which profiled supernatural creatures from Japanese legend. The other illustrations appeared in various educational and entertainment-oriented publications for children.