COVERS FOR THE NEW PICTUREBOX TITLES

These have been updated and reflected on the PictureBox site for a few weeks now, but I wanted to highlight them here--- covers for their upcoming 2008 books!

Travel by Yuichi Yokoyama


I picked up Travel on my recent trip to Japan and had fun reading it. It's an entirely wordless comic, in the geometric and dynamic style Yokoyama employed in New Engineering, and definitely has a bit of mental learning curve of a few pages before I could wrap my head around it.

Like New Engineering, the back of Travel includes pages and pages of supplemental, panel-by-panel commentary; I assume they'll again been translating all these details for English readers. I'm excited to have a second book by Yokoyama available, and hopefully this will be the next step in him gaining the popularity he deserves. Dude is continuously fantastic and cerebral.

Monster Men Bureiko Lullaby by Takashi Nemoto


The cover design was done by King Terry, and it's Takashi Nemoto's first book available in English. Nemoto is a king of heta uma grossness, like an SF-influenced, psychadelic and political step-brother to R. Crumb. You've probably seen his work in Comics Underground Japan, or Fantagraphics ill-fated collection of international comics, Bete Noir.

In addition to these translated books, PictureBox is selling some rad imports like Painting by Yuichi Yokoyama, a collection of color works. This is just one of the many Japanese titles they sell directly through their web site (and now, at their brick & mortar store in Brooklyn).


My one big beef with PictureBox is that they don't clearly make a distinction on their site between Japanese books and comics they import and sell and the licensed and translated comics. For example, they sell copies of Yusaku Hanakuma's original (Japanese) manga, but if you didn't look closely you might think they've licensed and translated everything by him. Not the case, as Last Gasp is the only one that's licensed his work with Tokyo Zombie (at least, so far!).

That said, PictureBox is definitely working on some crazy interesting projects, and I love the place they have staked out for themselves in the art/indie manga corner of the world -- A nerdy and awesome corner we like to find ourselves in often. I'm hoping to meet Dan (the publisher) at MoCCA in a few weeks and find out more about what they've got planned for 2008 and beyond.