ALL THE NEWS THAT'S FIT TO TYPE IN 5 MINUTES

Trying to stick to a more frequent posting schedule, so here's three separate tidbits from the past week.

+ NEW COMIC BY SUEHIRO MARUO!

Via the TACO CHE blog, I learned that BEAM COMIX released a new Suehiro Maruo book on 2/25/2008! The new manga is an adaptation on the of Edogawa Rampo's infamous classic, パノラマ島奇談 (The Strange Tale of Panorama Island - panorama-tou kidan).

Rampo wrote The Strange Tale of Panorama Island back in 1926, during the height of the erotic-grotesque nonsense literary stew of the Taisho era. From what I gathered on Maruo's site, it's partially a faithful adaptation of Rampo's story, and partially a visual reinterpretation-- perhaps akin to his take on The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, or Philip K Dick's stories?

Maruo seems indebted to Edogawa Rampo's themes and style more than almost any other figure, so this seems like an perfect match. I'm DEFINITELY gonna pick this up during my trip, and will post some images when I get back. Has anyone checked it out yet?

+ RED-COLORED ELEGY AND THIRD TATSUMI COLLECTION DELAYED

Heard this week from Drawn & Quarterly that their two big announced (so far) manga titles for 2008 have been delayed. Instead of April releases, Seiichi Hayashi's Red Colored Elegy and Goodbye, the third in their series of Yoshihiro Tatsumi collections, have been delayed until July.

This change is already reflected on Amazon, which shows both titles coming out on July 8. I'm bummed that we have to wait two more months for these books, but if it's to finalize the production and get everything ironed out just right for the release, then it'll definitely be worth the wait.

+ TOMINE'S NEXT COMIC WILL BE... IN COLOR?
According to a friend who was at a recent signing and talk by Adrian Tomine, his next comics project will be a story for the next volume of Kramer's Ergot, and it will be a color comic. It sounds like Tomine is consciously trying to break from his previous materials, habits and subject matter, and told attendees of the talk that he won't be using his usual materials on this story either.

Tomine all loosey goosey and in color? I'm actually pretty interested to see how that'd turn out. He's already shown he can do funny and spontaneous (in his Scenes from an Impending Marriage mini comic that was given out to wedding guests), but can he do... experimental stuff? We'll see...