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I missed (skipped?) Comic-Con this year, but followed the details vicariously through friends' tweets. I was actually relieved to not have to deal with the mash of BO and lines, the dehydration and sterile air, and cramping 5 people into one hotel room.
That said, I am bummed to have missed a chance to kick it with a lot of the Electric Ant Zine crew, and high-five Moto Hagio-- who was brought as a special guest by Fantagraphics to celebrate/promote the release of A Drunken Dream and Other Stories. I also would've loved to congratulate in person MBQ and Peepo Choo artist Felipe Smith for his much-deserved success.
[As a side note, I highly recommend folks read my friend Deb Aoki's interview with Felipe Smith at About.com. He drops lots of REAL TALK about what it takes to make it as a professional creative, and in the Japanese manga industry specifically. It made me like a guy I was already a huge fan of even more than before. Oh yeah, and pick up a copy of Peepo Choo v.1 from Vertical, fucking duh!]
During the week of madness, a few exciting licenses were announced by our buddies at Vertical and Drawn & Quarterly. These are old news by now, but I thought I'd do a quick round-up and link dump for anyone that missed them:
1) DRAWN & QUARTERLY RELEASING SHIGERU MIZUKI!
Original announcement on the D+Q blog.
Drawn & Quarterly has acquired North American English rights to two graphic novel memoirs, Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths and NonNonBā, by one of Japan's most acclaimed and legendary manga-kas, Shigeru Mizuki
In addition to the licensing of these works filling a glaring and long-present gap in the English manga scene, Shigeru Mizuki himself is an amazing dude. How can you not love this guy?!
2) VERTICAL TO RELEASE FURUYA'S LYCHEE LIGHT CLUB IN 2011
Were you feeling sad because CMX crashed and burned and it become painfully obvious that the first new Usamaru Furuya manga in English wasn't ever coming out? (Me too). Well, despite his post-apocalyptic survival shonen (seinen?) seres 51 Ways to Save Her getting killed in the CMX meltdown, we have a lot of stuff to look forward to...
Haters gonna hate (on Viz's forthcoming Genkaku Picasso), but my buddy and editor wunderkind Ed Chavez announced that he and Vertical have picked up the license for Furuya's Taisho madness tale, Lychee Light Club. The hilarious thing about this to me is that I actually first got a copy of this manga (in Japanese) from Ed himself about two years ago!
The book is a whopping 320 pager, and the English edition (softcover) is coming out next April, 2011. As described deftly by ANN (because I'm too lazy to summarize things properly, sorry!), the story is about:nine students at an all-boys school who create a god-like Lychee machine — that runs on lychee fruits — to seek out the beautiful women of the world. However, the machine eventually becomes self-aware "and is soon equally capable of measuring beauty and executing justice."
The look of Furuya's lines and inks in this book will (happily) remind many Same Hat readers of a mix of Suehiro Maruo, and also a grimier version of the Showa aesthetic in Koji Kumeta's Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei. Furuya's manga is quite goofy(?) at times, but seriously grim and gory too. It's a mixed bag of good elements, and I think Same Hat folks will really love it.
3) PRISON PIT #2 HAS ARRIVED
Johnny Ryan, a friend of Same Hat and all-around great dude, released the second volume of his battle epic Prison Pit at Comic-Con. It is amazing, nasty, and Lovecraftian. It also features a direct allusion to a scene from Tetsuo Hara's CYBER BLUE!!! Did anyone spot it?
Johnny Ryan & Calvin Wong, power-twins unite!
If you're not already on board with this series (What's wrong with you?) check out the cover to #3.
I missed (skipped?) Comic-Con this year, but followed the details vicariously through friends' tweets. I was actually relieved to not have to deal with the mash of BO and lines, the dehydration and sterile air, and cramping 5 people into one hotel room.
That said, I am bummed to have missed a chance to kick it with a lot of the Electric Ant Zine crew, and high-five Moto Hagio-- who was brought as a special guest by Fantagraphics to celebrate/promote the release of A Drunken Dream and Other Stories. I also would've loved to congratulate in person MBQ and Peepo Choo artist Felipe Smith for his much-deserved success.
[As a side note, I highly recommend folks read my friend Deb Aoki's interview with Felipe Smith at About.com. He drops lots of REAL TALK about what it takes to make it as a professional creative, and in the Japanese manga industry specifically. It made me like a guy I was already a huge fan of even more than before. Oh yeah, and pick up a copy of Peepo Choo v.1 from Vertical, fucking duh!]
During the week of madness, a few exciting licenses were announced by our buddies at Vertical and Drawn & Quarterly. These are old news by now, but I thought I'd do a quick round-up and link dump for anyone that missed them:
1) DRAWN & QUARTERLY RELEASING SHIGERU MIZUKI!
Original announcement on the D+Q blog.
Drawn & Quarterly has acquired North American English rights to two graphic novel memoirs, Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths and NonNonBā, by one of Japan's most acclaimed and legendary manga-kas, Shigeru Mizuki
In addition to the licensing of these works filling a glaring and long-present gap in the English manga scene, Shigeru Mizuki himself is an amazing dude. How can you not love this guy?!
2) VERTICAL TO RELEASE FURUYA'S LYCHEE LIGHT CLUB IN 2011
Were you feeling sad because CMX crashed and burned and it become painfully obvious that the first new Usamaru Furuya manga in English wasn't ever coming out? (Me too). Well, despite his post-apocalyptic survival shonen (seinen?) seres 51 Ways to Save Her getting killed in the CMX meltdown, we have a lot of stuff to look forward to...
Haters gonna hate (on Viz's forthcoming Genkaku Picasso), but my buddy and editor wunderkind Ed Chavez announced that he and Vertical have picked up the license for Furuya's Taisho madness tale, Lychee Light Club. The hilarious thing about this to me is that I actually first got a copy of this manga (in Japanese) from Ed himself about two years ago!
The book is a whopping 320 pager, and the English edition (softcover) is coming out next April, 2011. As described deftly by ANN (because I'm too lazy to summarize things properly, sorry!), the story is about:nine students at an all-boys school who create a god-like Lychee machine — that runs on lychee fruits — to seek out the beautiful women of the world. However, the machine eventually becomes self-aware "and is soon equally capable of measuring beauty and executing justice."
The look of Furuya's lines and inks in this book will (happily) remind many Same Hat readers of a mix of Suehiro Maruo, and also a grimier version of the Showa aesthetic in Koji Kumeta's Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei. Furuya's manga is quite goofy(?) at times, but seriously grim and gory too. It's a mixed bag of good elements, and I think Same Hat folks will really love it.
3) PRISON PIT #2 HAS ARRIVED
Johnny Ryan, a friend of Same Hat and all-around great dude, released the second volume of his battle epic Prison Pit at Comic-Con. It is amazing, nasty, and Lovecraftian. It also features a direct allusion to a scene from Tetsuo Hara's CYBER BLUE!!! Did anyone spot it?
Johnny Ryan & Calvin Wong, power-twins unite!
If you're not already on board with this series (What's wrong with you?) check out the cover to #3.
Over the past week, I was reminded about two upcoming books by a friend at D&Q and Same Hat reader Adam that I wanted to share here. Below are the details gathered from Amazon, and I'll continue to add links/images as I come across them.
(BTW, if you haven't seen Adam's manga review blog Complelely Futile, I strongly encourage you to check it. It's a bit light on visual stimulus but full of insightful reviews and essays on various untranslated manga).
Anyway, time to get stoked about the Fall!
1. GENKAKU PICASSO by Usumaru Furuya
Details here from the listing on Amazon
# Paperback: 256 pages
# Release: VIZ, November 2, 2010
Product Description
Hikari Hamura, nicknamed Picasso because of his natural artistic abilities, survived a horrible accident, but his friend Chiaki wasn't so lucky. Suddenly, Chiaki appears in front of him and tells him in order to keep living he must help the people around him. Can Hikari save people with his sketchbook and a 2B pencil?
About the Author
Furuya debuted as a manga artist in an avant-garde comics magazine called Garo in 1994. Since then, his manga have appeared in Young Sunday and other major weekly magazines. His work has also been published in English in VIZ's PULP magazine and Secret Comics Japan. VIZ published his book Short Cuts in 2003.
2. A SINGLE MATCH (Red Kimono) by Oji Suzuki
Details here from the listing on Amazon
# Paperback: 240 pages
# Release: Drawn & Quarterly, October 12, 2010
[This book was originally scheduled for a March 2010 release, under the title Red Kimono. My original post]
Product Description
In this collection of hauntingly elliptical short stories, Oji Suzuki explores memory, relationships, and loss with a loose narrative style, filling each tale with a sense of unfulfilled longing. He plumbs the dissolute depths of human psychology, literally bathing his characters in expansive shadows that paradoxically reveal as much as they obscure. A young man catches a cold after being soaked in the rain and is tended to by his grandmother. He drifts, dreaming of a train trip with an older brother he doesn’t have. A traveling salesman comes across a boy lying in the middle of the road and stops to have a cigarette and tell a story that sifts through memories of faces and places before settling back on the boy and pretending to not look at the stars. A young woman walks along the river with her bicycle and a friend who is nothing more than a disembodied head—discussing past times together, memories they have of each other.
About the Author
Although he touches on many of the same themes as his contemporaries in the field of postwar alternative manga—Yoshihiro Tsuge (L’Homme Sans Talent) and Seiichi Hayashi (Red Coloured Elegy)—Suzuki uses an ever shifting narrative approach and dashes of surrealist humor to distinguish his work from that of his peers.
Oji Suzuki was born in 1949 in Nagoya, Japan. He moved to Tokyo in 1967 and within two years his first short stories were published in the avant-garde Japanese comics magazine Garo. Throughout the 1970s and ’80s at least ten collections of his short stories were published. Suzuki has produced short films and has written and drawn children’s books.
From the French edition:
Over the past week, I was reminded about two upcoming books by a friend at D&Q and Same Hat reader Adam that I wanted to share here. Below are the details gathered from Amazon, and I'll continue to add links/images as I come across them.
(BTW, if you haven't seen Adam's manga review blog Complelely Futile, I strongly encourage you to check it. It's a bit light on visual stimulus but full of insightful reviews and essays on various untranslated manga).
Anyway, time to get stoked about the Fall!
1. GENKAKU PICASSO by Usumaru Furuya
Details here from the listing on Amazon
# Paperback: 256 pages
# Release: VIZ, November 2, 2010
Product Description
Hikari Hamura, nicknamed Picasso because of his natural artistic abilities, survived a horrible accident, but his friend Chiaki wasn't so lucky. Suddenly, Chiaki appears in front of him and tells him in order to keep living he must help the people around him. Can Hikari save people with his sketchbook and a 2B pencil?
About the Author
Furuya debuted as a manga artist in an avant-garde comics magazine called Garo in 1994. Since then, his manga have appeared in Young Sunday and other major weekly magazines. His work has also been published in English in VIZ's PULP magazine and Secret Comics Japan. VIZ published his book Short Cuts in 2003.
2. A SINGLE MATCH (Red Kimono) by Oji Suzuki
Details here from the listing on Amazon
# Paperback: 240 pages
# Release: Drawn & Quarterly, October 12, 2010
[This book was originally scheduled for a March 2010 release, under the title Red Kimono. My original post]
Product Description
In this collection of hauntingly elliptical short stories, Oji Suzuki explores memory, relationships, and loss with a loose narrative style, filling each tale with a sense of unfulfilled longing. He plumbs the dissolute depths of human psychology, literally bathing his characters in expansive shadows that paradoxically reveal as much as they obscure. A young man catches a cold after being soaked in the rain and is tended to by his grandmother. He drifts, dreaming of a train trip with an older brother he doesn’t have. A traveling salesman comes across a boy lying in the middle of the road and stops to have a cigarette and tell a story that sifts through memories of faces and places before settling back on the boy and pretending to not look at the stars. A young woman walks along the river with her bicycle and a friend who is nothing more than a disembodied head—discussing past times together, memories they have of each other.
About the Author
Although he touches on many of the same themes as his contemporaries in the field of postwar alternative manga—Yoshihiro Tsuge (L’Homme Sans Talent) and Seiichi Hayashi (Red Coloured Elegy)—Suzuki uses an ever shifting narrative approach and dashes of surrealist humor to distinguish his work from that of his peers.
Oji Suzuki was born in 1949 in Nagoya, Japan. He moved to Tokyo in 1967 and within two years his first short stories were published in the avant-garde Japanese comics magazine Garo. Throughout the 1970s and ’80s at least ten collections of his short stories were published. Suzuki has produced short films and has written and drawn children’s books.
From the French edition:
I'm finally getting back to my photos and goodies from my trip to Japan earlier this year; I planned to post these things earlier, but then got sidetracked by the Early Manga Days posts and the Prison For Bitches zine.
I've got a few huge photodump posts coming, but in looking through the stacks of manga and magazines a sick and hilarious short by Usamaru Furuya stood out and I wanted to share it now.
Nate and I spent the first Friday I was there digging around for rad and weird used manga at a book shop in Koenji. I had heard about the anthology Comic Cue, which was released for a while in the mid-1990s and focused heavily on gag manga, but also science fiction, humor and erotic comics. For under 5 bucks each I was able to grab the first and third issues:
The anthologies contain a lot of my favorite cartoonists-- some of which have been published in English, but most of which are sadly unfamiliar to Western audiences. The first issue includes cartoonists like Koji Aihara (who Evan and I did fan translations of at the launch of Same Hat 5 years ago!), Tori Miki, King Terry, Radio Wada, Yoshida Sensha, Yamada Naito, Taiyo Matsuomoto, Minetaro Mochizuki, Kiriko Nananan, Imashiro Takashi, Yoshimoto Yoshitomo, Katsuhiro Otomo, and others.
The third issue is the "PORNO SPECIAL" which means lots of totally dirty and sexy comics by the folks above, and also including Suehiro Maruo, Qta Minami, and an article comparing sex manga anthologies for men and women. As mentioned at the top of this post, there is a comic by Usamaru Furuya that is just out of control and I wanted to share a few panels. ENJOY:
Title Page: 天使のフェラチオ (Fellatio of the Angels)
It's a short comic, about an insanely dorky/gawky dude who is seduced by a beautiful "angel" that comes to his bedroom to seduce him. [Check the comments for a full synopsis from reader Adam!] Oh yeah, and leave it to Furuya to reference Dali's El Cristo de San Juan de la Cruz.
The dude can't believe his luck; she remains illustrated amazingly clearly while he devolves into a pile of limp squiggly, sweaty lines.
Receiving the full-body treatment from the angel
EXCEPT, OH SHIT DUDE! Left unawares, 3 STRAIGHT-UP CHERUBS come down and take over the errr sexual duties.
And yes, HE GOES THERE
CLICK FOR THE FUNNIEST/SICKEST PANEL
And just like that the cherubs return to Heaven, the dude is blissful and the Angel is embarrassed at being usurped.
Hope you enjoyed the hilarious depravity. More soon!
I'm finally getting back to my photos and goodies from my trip to Japan earlier this year; I planned to post these things earlier, but then got sidetracked by the Early Manga Days posts and the Prison For Bitches zine.
I've got a few huge photodump posts coming, but in looking through the stacks of manga and magazines a sick and hilarious short by Usamaru Furuya stood out and I wanted to share it now.
Nate and I spent the first Friday I was there digging around for rad and weird used manga at a book shop in Koenji. I had heard about the anthology Comic Cue, which was released for a while in the mid-1990s and focused heavily on gag manga, but also science fiction, humor and erotic comics. For under 5 bucks each I was able to grab the first and third issues:
The anthologies contain a lot of my favorite cartoonists-- some of which have been published in English, but most of which are sadly unfamiliar to Western audiences. The first issue includes cartoonists like Koji Aihara (who Evan and I did fan translations of at the launch of Same Hat 5 years ago!), Tori Miki, King Terry, Radio Wada, Yoshida Sensha, Yamada Naito, Taiyo Matsuomoto, Minetaro Mochizuki, Kiriko Nananan, Imashiro Takashi, Yoshimoto Yoshitomo, Katsuhiro Otomo, and others.
The third issue is the "PORNO SPECIAL" which means lots of totally dirty and sexy comics by the folks above, and also including Suehiro Maruo, Qta Minami, and an article comparing sex manga anthologies for men and women. As mentioned at the top of this post, there is a comic by Usamaru Furuya that is just out of control and I wanted to share a few panels. ENJOY:
Title Page: 天使のフェラチオ (Fellatio of the Angels)
It's a short comic, about an insanely dorky/gawky dude who is seduced by a beautiful "angel" that comes to his bedroom to seduce him. [Check the comments for a full synopsis from reader Adam!] Oh yeah, and leave it to Furuya to reference Dali's El Cristo de San Juan de la Cruz.
The dude can't believe his luck; she remains illustrated amazingly clearly while he devolves into a pile of limp squiggly, sweaty lines.
Receiving the full-body treatment from the angel
EXCEPT, OH SHIT DUDE! Left unawares, 3 STRAIGHT-UP CHERUBS come down and take over the errr sexual duties.
And yes, HE GOES THERE
CLICK FOR THE FUNNIEST/SICKEST PANEL
And just like that the cherubs return to Heaven, the dude is blissful and the Angel is embarrassed at being usurped.
Hope you enjoyed the hilarious depravity. More soon!
