ORIGINAL PAGES OF ABSTRACTION NOW ON SALE

Exciting news for Shintaro Kago fans... The original pages of his cereberal & formalist (dare I say?) masterpiece, ABSTRACTION are now on sale. The first two pages are priced at 10,000YEN each, while the remainder of the pages are 30,000YEN each. Big pieces with stunning & intricate line work, these would incredible piece of original art to have and hold.


Ordering instructions are available via the page listed above, along with many more original drawings still available on his site. I actually got a second original by Kago this past week, so my art coffer is all tapped out :)

I emailed with Kago again this week, and he let me know that you can buy copies of a few of his manga directly from him as well. The following titles are available (+ shipping). Simply send a list of what you want to his email and he'll give you an estimate of cost. I've found he gets stuff in the mail within a day or two once you Paypal the money.


アリ地獄vsバラバラ少女 - Arizigoku vs Barabarasyoujo 1,260JPY


おばあちゃんが死体くさいよ - Obaachan ga shitai kusaiyo 1,260JPY


飛び出す妄想 - Tobidasu Mousou 1,565JPY

Happy holidays! I'm heading to the Midwest to visit family starting tomorrow. Will try to write a few posts on the plane(s) and get them up before Christmas. Hope all of you guys are doing really well and have relaxing breaks ahead of you!

LINKS AROUND THE INTERWEBS

The weekend's completely over and it's been rainy and now feezing cold in San Francisco. Totally bogus. Here are some heard-warming links to interesting reads from the past weekend.

• Tokyo Scum Brigade vs. Kazuo Umezz Parts 1 & 2 The big news! My friends at TSB have begun serializing their in-depth interview with Kazuo Umezu! They were lucky enough to visit the Makoto-chan house in person, have lunch with Umezz & Demerin, and interview him on camera a few weeks ago. By everyone's reckoning, this is Umezu's first English language interview. In the first two parts, the TSB boys talk to Uncle Kaz about his childhood, and early encounters with Tezuka's manga and drawing Shojo weeklies. These are a MUST-READ for Same Hat horror junkies!
  [PART 1] & [PART 2]



(Kazuo Umezu in high school showing off a drawing!)


• Jog dissects the '80s MANGA anthology (and in doing so, drops major science on the definition of "manga" among Western audiences). This was a fascinating read from pretty much the best comics/manga reviewer on the internet. Jog uses this odd collection of manga (featuring Keizo Miyanishi , Noriyoshi Olai, Otomo and others) as a jumping off point for a long discussion of publishing trends since the early 80s.
  [PART 1] and [PART 2]





• I DRAW YOUR SHIT series on the Electric Ant Zine Blog! It's a series of posts where we take turns doing tributes/covers to each other's characters. It's admittedly self-referential, but has become a great excuse for the extended EAZB readership to get off out butts each week and draw. So far, we've done TING & TERNG, the conjoined twin bullies from Hellen Jo's Jin & Jam #1, and MAX GUY from Lamar Abrams' Remake. It's open to anyone that wants to join, so check 'em out and take part in the next round (starting on Monday)
  [LINK]





• The Drifting Classroom: The Game: The Soundtrack OTAKU USA games/anime editor and Same Hat buddy Joseph Luster created a chiptune tribue to an imagined 8-bit game adaptation of Kazuo Umezu's child/anarchism nightmarescape manga Drifting Classroom.
  [LINK]





• Daul Kim, RIP Not necessarily relevant to everyone here, but I wrote up a short memorial post for the passing of supermodel / blogger Daul Kim, who died by suicide last month. Among other things, Kim was a cool girl and into the same stuff as us: blogging, zines, Shinya Tsukamoto, Wong Kar-Wai, Klaus Kinski, etc.
  [LINK]





• Who is Makoto Takahashi? Same Hat BFF zytroop has been on a role lately at KURUTTA (despite a tragic hard drive crash), but this post was a stunning gem for me- a collection of art from a "1957 shōjo manga called The Rows of Cherry Trees (さくら並木) by a man named Macoto, or Makoto, Takahashi (高橋真琴)."
  [LINK]

I also share a bunch of random posts on Google Reader, which you can see on the links on the left or can view/subscribe to them here.

MY SHINTARO KAGO ORIGINAL!

I had the thrill of the year this afternoon, when my original Shintaro Kago illustration arrived in the mail! The large piece came packaged lovingly in a hard plastic folder and another plastic bag, then stuffed in a padded envelope hand-address by Kago himself.

The piece I bought is called Bikkuri Mokuziroku / びっくり黙示録 and is absolutely amazing in person. I can wait to get this puppy framed! Please enjoy the pictures below!

If you're still interested in snagging one, Kago continues to add new pieces to his original art sale page, which was recently updated to say that he will begin selling the original pages of Abstraction soon.

Based on the sales notes on his pages of pieces we already blogged about, I reckon that Shintaro Kago has made well over $3000 in just a week of selling his art to overseas fans.



DETAILS:



SIGNATURE:


And for size comparison (that's next to a copy of Vertical's Black Jack 7):


[If you bought an illustration from Kago, post your pics in the comments once it arrives!]

EARLY TATSUMI GRAPHIC NOVEL COMING OUT IN 2010

As unearthed by Travis McGee in the comments of a previous post, Drawn & Quarterly will be releasing Black Blizzard (黒い吹雪 - Kuroi Fubuki) in April 2010. The details are listed on Amazon and in the Spring 2010 catalogue of FSG (D&Q's distributor). For folks that have read A Drifting Life, the publication of Black Blizzard in Japanese back in the 1950s features in the plot of that autobiography.



From the listing on Amazon:

THE PREEMMINENT GEKIGA-KA'S FIRST GRAPHIC NOVEL FROM FIFTY YEARS AGO
Created in the late 1950s, Black Blizzard is Yoshihiro Tatsumi's remarkable first full-length graphic novel and one of the first published examples of Gekiga. Tatsumi documented how his love for Mickey Spillane and hard-boiled crime novels led him to create this landmark genre of manga in his epic, critically acclaimed 2009 autobiography, A Drifting Life. With Black Blizzard, Tatsumi explores the dark underbelly of his working-class heroes that five decades later has made him one of the best-known Japanese cartoonists in North America.



Susumu Yamaji, a twenty-four-year-old pianist, is arrested formurder and ends up handcuffed to a career criminal on the train that will take them to prison. An avalanche derails the train and the criminal takes the opportunity to escape, dragging a reluctant Susumu with him into the blizzard raging outside. They flee into the mountains to an abandoned ranger station, where they take shelter from the storm. As they sit around the fire they built, Susumu relates how love drove him to become a murderer. A cinematic adventure story, Black Blizzard uncovers an unlikely love story and an even unlikelier friendship.

According to their listing, it will be a $20.00 softcover book, 144 pages, coming out on April 27, 2010. We'll post more details as the release gets closer-- very exciting!