Haven't done one of these in awhile. Biography is hard because I often want to say so much more than can fit in the one page, but if I don't keep it quick, brief, I won't actually DO the comic. That being said, Murakami is a troubling figure for me. He goes along in the tradition, since Warhol, of artist as more director than anything else. The top artists of the day, him, Koonz, and Hirst all do it this way. With sculpture, I can understand it as pretty much no sculptor cast their own work. It's a very specialized field. That being said, they DID actually make the thing that was being molded or produced. These days, the top tier folks make sketches and hand things off entirely to others. Murakami, especially works with trappings of Japanese and other countries' pop culture. To be fair, there's a lot of commentary that's not so obvious to western eyes, especially on the role of atomic power in Japan's history. In a way, it's not unlike Godzilla, or at least the original film. What seems to be almost kiddie fare on the surface has more to say below it. Or does it? And again, how much of the final product, because it IS a product was actually made by Murakami? Approval is not the same as actual decision in the art making process. Is this how art is to be made from now on, appreciated or am I just a stick in the mud when it comes to stuff like this? I prefer to see a single person's thoughts on a given subject. It's that sincerity I crave. And for an art world that gets SO uptight when they find out that the painting they touted as being 'genuine' is in fact a forgery, I'm surprised that this kind of turnabout is not only accepted but even promoted. So, like Warhol before him, I'm still struggling with what I think about all this. I guess Biography is more like a book mark on thoughts and feelings I had at the time; it's not meant to be the full thought itself, it's just to remind me what was going on.