4 YEARS OF SAME HAT!

I had lost track of the date at some point, but yesterday I realized that this weekend marks the four year anniversary of Same Hat! How crazy is that?

I distinctly remember pitching the idea of a blog covering weirdo manga to Evan back in 2005, and our feverish work on those initial scanlation strips by Yoshida Sensha. I had just graduated college and was looking for a place to talk with friends about weirdo manga... and have an excuse to use my Japanese degree for something non-evil. Now, 405 posts later, the site's focus has morphed and shifted since the very early days, but I hope we're still going strong.



I wanted to take a second to sincerely thank everyone who has been reading and commenting and emailing since we started. I think of Same Hat as a community more than as simply my blog, and I couldn't ask for a better vehicle for meeting awesome people and learning about cool books, artists, and assorted weirdness from around the globe. Thanks also to everyone for putting up with side-projects and diversions I post here, like the zine, Evan's photography work and other random projects.

To add a little something to this post (other than me waxing nostalgically and getting all teary-eyed), here are a few blasts from the pasts from the Same Hat archive. In the coming weeks (month or so?) I'm gonna work with Evan and friends to launch a proper site on samehat.com, which will include easier browsing of old posts, along with a home for the Same Hat Guide To Everything and other community features. In the meanwhile, enjoy these nuggets:

+ The ORIGINAL Yoshida Sensha strip that launched the site and gave us our name. [link]
+ Subsequently, fan parodies of the ORIGINAL Yoshida Sensha strip! [link] & [link]
+ A massive & ultimate English guide to Umezz's website [link]
+ Our first ever Suehiro Maruo fan scanlation... [link]
+ Long-ass treatise on Junji Ito, Dark Horse and the state of horror manga in 2006 [link]
+ Photographs of the first American Edition of Japanese Manga [link]
+ Our final scanlation from 2007, The Young Bandit by Yoshida Sensha [link]
+ Evan and my first original comic together: THE BIBLE! [link]
+ Umezu-style guide to horror manga makeup [link]

I hope folks continue to dig what I'm doing here (and the manga projects that Evan and I are working on) for coming months and... years!? If there's a specific type of thing you would like to see more of on the site, I wanna hear about it! More text-heavy essay posts? Highlights of different artists or specific series? More of Nate, SH's man-in-Japan? Just let me know and I'll work to make it happen. The site ain't shit without you guys, the readers!