Tuesday, March 27, 2007

BLOODY UKIYO-E prints by MARUO & HANAWA

Here is an amazing find from our man in Japan, Clay-- Sorry to be so slow to post this!
Warning: This graphic stuff may be unsuitable for some!



Just to paraphrase a few other posts, NeoSamurai reported that Hugo strikes back, one of the great Japanese guro/horror blogs, has posted the entire scans of the fantastic 1988 book, 江戸昭和競作無惨絵英名二十八衆句 -- aka "28 Famous Scenes of Murder and Verse." This book features gory and outrageous Muzan-e scenes illustrated by Same Hat favorites Suehiro Maruo and Kazuichi Hanawa!!



You can download it in its entirety (86.7MB) here, at least for now.

Muzan-e "無残絵" (Bloody Ukiyo-e) is a subcategory of ukiyo-e prints depicting sex, gore and cruelty. The book is a homage to the famous 1866 series of the same name by artist Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, who is often names as the last great master of Ukiyo-e.

This book couples Maruo & Hanawa's contemporary prints with Yoshitoshi's 19th century Muzan-e, along with commentary on each piece in both English and Japanese. Some of my favorite prints include a few by Suehiro Maruo depicting Hitler & Eva in the bunker, Marc Bolan hanging from a helicopter toting a machine gun, and a scene inspired by Kazuo Umezu's Snake Girl manga! Hanawa's prints are more classically-informed, but the one of a woman strangling her lizard fetus (I know, WTF) is perhaps the most disturbing of the whole bunch.

WHAT A FIND! We name-dropped Yoshitoshi and his bloody Ukiyo-e way back in early posts on this blog, and so we're especially pleased to hear about this and bring it to you. For those that don't want to download the entire .RAR, you can find some scans of Hanawa's prints from the book here.

Many thanks again to: Clay, NeoSamurai and Hugo strikes back!

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

That bottom one is...gorgeous. 0_0.

Anonymous said...

Yeah, this stuff is great. Of course the book is one of my favorites. ^^

Ryan said...

Tina: Amazing, isn't it? It's hard to say if I like the Maruo or Hanawa prints better...

Ben: Well, DUH--- of course you have a hard copy of this book :) PS: I'm writing a post about German-language manga for my next post, and I hope you'll weigh in and fill in the gaps!

-RYAN!

Aeron said...

Fantastic, I gave this a shout out at Monster Brains. Sometime in the next few months I'm going to be doing a week long post about monsters in manga comics and I'll be devoting a large amount of time to the works of Maruo.

Anonymous said...

I've been reading Hanawa's "Tensui" in French, and it's absolutely brilliant. It's in dire need of an English translation.

D

Anonymous said...

Ryan and Evan,

As usual, you guys are amazing.

P.S.: Have you checked out the latest volume by Junji Ito, entitled "Voice in the Dark vol.2" ? I read a Chinese scanlation of this and IT SUCKS BALLS -- completely derivative and rehashed stuff.

Anonymous said...

WHOA. Thanks for that.

I feel the Hanwa prints are more successful, in that they're more grotesque and bizzarre and better composed. However, I actually prefer the Maruo ones overall. I think a little bit of humour goes a long way. I partciularly like the mark Bolan one, for sheer WTF!?- ness. If you care.

ADAM.

Anonymous said...

I don't have the ability to read rars. Could somone just post them all?
or email me at sonofsamtheman@hotmail.com