Friday, January 05, 2007

HAPPY NEW YEAR 2007 (or, Johnny Ryan is AWESOME!)

Welcome to the future. After a hiatus for visting family and relaxing, we've reared our heads for more crazy-ass posts. We've got news, gossip, recommendations, rants and tons more original scanlations and original comics coming your way this year.

For those of you that don't know, we are big fans of Johnny Ryan. Honestly, if you're into the weird shit we write about here, you've probably already read his Angry Youth Comix (published by Fantagraphics), seen his gag strip Blecky Yuckerella in your local weekly, or seen his cartoons in Mad or Vice. My old roommate Oli first got me into Johnny's AYC, and we'd check out the newest issues over cheeseburgers and comics as part of our saturday agenda.

Evan ran into Johnny at Comic-Con this past summer, and we were flabbergasted to hear that he had checked out Same Hat! and knew who we were-- turns out Johnny is a big fan of Junji Ito, along with other underground favorites like Suehiro Maruo and Shunji Enomoto (we've put his stuff on our scanlation agenda, per his suggestion), and enjoyed our scanlation, Falling.

This past fall, I bought a piece by JR: a small painting of Chucky that now decorates our apartment:



So, for XMAS 2006, I commissioned two pieces from Johnny as presents: one for Evan, one for myself :) The first was an ensemble shot of 4 characters from a comic Evan was drawing when we were buddies in high school, called Neo-Necropolis. I tricked Evan into scanning and sending some character sketches, and Johnny took it from there. Evan was totally surprised and absolutely LOVED it:


We framed it and it's hanging by Evan's desk right now :)

For myself, knowing that Johnny had said he loved Gyo in an interview recently with The Comics Journal (and this compounded by my intense, intense fear of sharks and love of that comic), I commissioned this:


Me being eaten by the shark-machine from Gyo

Seriously, the best money I've spent in a long time. If you are interested, there are details on his site for ordering your own custom art. Thanks again, Johnny!

More posts coming soon! Hope everyone's 2007 is off to a good start!

3 comments:

Claytonian said...

Hey same hat folks, I did an interview with a star of The Drifting Classroom movie, thought you might like it.
http://surrealu.blogspot.com/2007/01/my-first-interview-with-international.html

Anonymous said...

holy shit, that johnny ryan gyo ryan sands commission is AMAZING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Ryan said...

clayton:
this is very awesome! we've been slightly slow with posting lately (!) but i'll do a post on this (and the video) sometime soon :)

hellen:
fuck yeah!! i love it. you should come over and see it on the wall. wheee

-ryan