LAST GASP TO PUBLISH TOSHIO SAEKI ART BOOK

Some exciting news for fans of Pop Art, bloody muzan-e imagery, and the deviant sexual arts!


Last Gasp will be publishing a hardcover, large-sized book (11¾" x 14½"), showcasing the art of master erotic draftsman, Toshio Saeki! Onikage is 56 pages of vibrant colors and nasty surrealism. Check out details and preorder it on Last Gasp's Onikage site.

I got to see an advance proof of pages from this book, and it's really lush and funky! Fans of the genre definitely know of Toshio Saeki (or at least, recognize his visual style from the internet or from visits to Japan / Kinokuniya shops in the US). But he's mostly been woefully unavailable and unknown in the United States. It's a shame, since Saeki's sensibilities and style influences and relates so closely to the aesthetics of some our favorites: Suehiro Maruo, Kazuichi Hanawa, and Hideshi Hino.

The book is notable, not only for being the first art book properly released by an English publisher, but for its super-unusual format. To show off not just Saeki's art, but also his process, the book features a number of vellum overlays. From the site:

While most images are shown here in full color, we have presented some in their original black and white format, with overlays reproducing Saeki's method for adding color to these pictures. Saeki typically does not apply color directly to his black and white artwork, but instead uses these overlays to enumerate the precise values of the colors he wants. He works with the terminology of the four-color printing process: cyan, magenta, yellow and black (CMYK).

For example, he indicates a woman's skin tone should be reproduced with 10% magenta, while her nipples should be 60% magenta. Most of the men in Saeki's artwork have a skin tone that is 30% magenta, 20% cyan, and 50% yellow (no black). He calls this method chinto printing - the picture is complete only after it has been printed. It is a modern version of the ukiyo-e, a genre of Japanese woodcut prints or paintings produced between the 17th and 20th centuries. Ukiyo-e were works of collaboration between the eshi (artist) and the surishi (printer). Saeki is paying homage to this style, and considers himself an eshi. It is our hope that by illuminating this technique, it better helps the reader to appreciate Saeki's unique style, deep philosophy as an artist, and his immense talent

Though it's a pricey book, it seems like a great addition to any fan of surrealist, ero-guro-nonsense art. I am hoping to get some pics of the physical book itself to show the overlays and size. According to their Twitter, Last Gasp shipped advanced copies of Onikage to the New York Art Book Fair. I'm not sure when the actual release date is-- will update this post once I find out :)

TAKASHI NEMOTO, JUN HAYAMI EVENTS AT TACOCHE

Two events happened last month at TACO che, featuring two artist on the Same Hat wavelength. Both of these events featured signings and original goods-- unfortunately, nobody I know was able to attend (were they?). Here are the photos of art and goodies from the Taco Che blog!

First up: JUN HAYAMI [beauty labyrinth of razors, etc]
This event happened on March 22, 2009, with an in-person signing with Hayami-san.

Second artist of note: TAKASHI NEMOTO [monster men bureiko lullaby, etc]

This event happened on March 28, 2009, with an in-person signing with Nemoto-sign. Throughout March, TACO che has been featuring numerous one-of-kind t-shirts, hats, pencil cases, bags and cards created/painted by Nemoto. WISH I COULD GET MY HANDS ON ONE OF THOSE LOU REED CARDS!

Check out these badass, handmade Nemoto goods:

TRANS-EUROPE EXPRESS 3: A preponderance of Maruo

It's hard to know where to start on a post about Suehiro Maruo, even when aiming to keep it brief and on point. I mean, he's the unofficial godfather of Same Hat (along with our...er, godmother Yoshida Sensha). And, as the site stats point out, Maruo is one of the main reasons people check out this blog. His fans are rabid and hail from all over the place (especially Eastern Europe, Brazil and South Asia), and even beyond just fans, he continues to influence American artist, like Trevor Brown (edit: He's actually British, whoops!), Johnny Ryan, Gea, and tons of other weirdos.



Despite all this, America seems to be one of the hardest places to get ahold of his work. The translated books and stories that have been released can be counted on one hand, and are all out of print at the moment. It seems baffling that while magazines like Juxtapoz and The Comics Journal run features on him (most notably last year in conjunction with the Japanese art books Maruograph I & II), you can't buy any of his comics in bookstores. This underlines the fact that while bloggers, magazines and artsy-types are happy to invoke Maruo's name as a form of cultural currency, the publishers aren't convinced that he's worth the sales risk, the controversy, or simply being associated with Uncle Maruo's dirty pictures. It isn't hard to see why scanlators have stepped in to fill this lust for more of his stuff, and many are currently available online. They include:

+ Farewell Showa - scanlated by us
+ Totally Scary - scanlated by us
+ The Gold Notebook - scanlated by us
+ Poison Strawberry - scanlated by us

WARNING: Stuff on the following links are extreme and NOT for the faint of heart!
+ The Laughing Vampire - scanlated by GuroFan folks
+ Rose Colored Monsters - scanlated by GuroFan folks
+ Most of Maruo's major collections! - scanlated by various folks via Caterpillar.voiea.net

Disclaimer: This next bit is my own opinion, so excuse me for putting on my amateur, art-critic dork hat. But since we linked to GuroFan here (yes, a first) I thought it'd be worth adding a few things. It's definitely true that lots of people who get into our site are also into GuroFan and some of the, well... grosstitude that floats around there. In my mind, Suehiro Maruo is really a cut above nearly all other writer/artists working in the erotic-grotesque-nonsense scene. And while his comics are absolutely depraved, just as often as they are beautiful, his art is in a different class than Jun Hayami and even Shintaro Kago, whose work exist beyond subtlety, or whatever else. Suehiro Maruo, to me, lies (visually at least!) right on the borders (or would that be the intersections?) between art, satire and vileness.

As I was saying above, American continues to lag behind the rest of the world; The last new thing published in English was 2001's short story collection Ultra-Gash Inferno from Creation Books, which is very out-of-print and averages around 50 bucks used. (The good news is that they are working to make an ebook version of this available in the near future!!) Perhaps it's easy for people like us, who are in love with his comics, to overstate the possible English audience. But it seems clear that America is due for another shot of Suehiro Maruo. Sadly, I haven't heard any talk of American companies licensing his stuff or planning new releases. But there is a magical place where Suehiro Maruo is actively promoted, and his translated books are not only available, but win major awards. And that magical place is Spain!



The company to thank is Glénat, a huge France-based comics and manga publisher that also publishes in most Western European languages, and is home to the plentiful Spanish editions of Suehiro Maruo's books. (They also do a hell of a job in French, with other favorites like Kazuo Umezu's Baptism and Drifting Classroom.) Some really awesome stuff there, if you take the time to dig through their various catalogues.

At Frankfurt Book Fair (you were wondering when I'd tie this whole thing back to my trip, right?) my coworker and I visited Glénat's booth and checked out a copy of their Spanish Edition of Maruos' Dr. Inugami:


So FRESH!


Big format, nice softcover edition-- just like the Japanese releases


A dog's bloody head and a voodoo doll?? SIGN ME UP!


TU ALMA!! (translation: Grant me your soul, dude!)

Suehiro Maruo has his own author page at Glénat, as you'd expect. From there, you can check out the following translated books:


Gichi Gichi Kid (ギチギチくん)


La Sonrisa del Vampiro (笑う吸血鬼 : The Smile of the Vampire)


MIDORI: La Niña de Las Camelias (少女椿 : Midori: The Girl of the Camellias)


Lunatic Lover's (月的愛人LUNATIC LOVER'S)


El Monstruo de Color de Rosa (薔薇色ノ怪物 : Rose Coloured Monsters)

Along with Glénat's great catalogue, another publisher in Spain called Ediciones Otaku Manga has put out DDT and New National Kid (our scanlated stories were sourced from the Japanese edition of this).

As if all this wasn't cool enough! : Glénat flew Maruo out to Spain as the featured artist at their booth at the Barcelona Comics Festival in 2004. The trip is detailed on his page, and looks like one of the rare recent appearances by the dude outside of Japan in past years. As my coworker explained at FBF, Maruo's The Smile of the Vampire won a major Spanish comics' award upon its release. AWESOME!



FINAL NOTE: On Sunday, Evan and I were doing purikura and comics shopping in J-Town and had a great discovery at Kinokuniya. They had copies of the very very recently re-released 夢のQ-SAKU (yume no Q-SAKU : The Dream of Q-Saku) collection by Maruo!! As Nate pointed out, the title is a play on Yumeno Kyusaku, the name of a famous mystery/suspense writer from the early 1900s, and a contemporary of Edogawa Rampo. He wrote tons of short stories, and one of his most famous novels was Dogura Magura, which is supposedly a 600 page novel about mental hospital torture. Thanks for the details Nate! This just came out in Japan on 9/25/2006. The art in this book is amazing!

New Edition

This collection was originally released in 1982, and the re-release includes mostly SM and Guro stories originally published in erotic and fetish manga magazines in the early '80s. They've included two extra stories, one from 1996 and another from 2000, as an update to the collection. The thing is beautiful, and Evan and I are already considering a few for future scanlation projects :)

Original edition

Please leave any comments, news, questions below! We're always anxious for more Maruo news!!

BEAUTY LABYRINTH OF RAZORS

1. SO MANY RAZORS



There's been talk about this new collection of Jun Hayami's comics being released by Creation Books for a while now. It was supposed to come out September 1, but seems to have been delayed so far. BOOOO!

Anyone who enjoys this blog (and specifically, you Maruo-freaks who keep showing up!) will dig this collection of depraved, erotic-grotesque-nonsense comics. Hats off to Creation, who were responsible for the (in)famous Ultra-Gash Inferno collection by Maruo, for going ahead with this books-- the first time Jun Hayami's stuff has been translated and made available in English. Determined types (read:otaku) can call or visit their LA store, info here.

Here is a quote about Jun Hayami's stuff-- "Readers thought Jun Hayami must be mentally ill until the reclusive artist was discovered two years ago." What the hell kind of quote is that? I'm guessing that this book will be extreme-to-the-max, and not for soft-stomached/sane folks.

Has anyone read this book yet? It has been released in the UK (I believe), so I'd love to hear how other people like this book. I'll be lined up (electronically) for when it becomes available on the Creation site or Amazon.




2. NEW COMIC: CHURCH OF MUTILATION by aaronk!



Our friend aaronk has started selling his new comic, Church of Mutilation. It's a 15-page B&W, available direct from him for $3.00 > I posted my dollars to him today, and can't wait to see this thing. Check out his site for more information on ordering it!

Coming next from him: "A romance story called "Fort Purgatory" and will contain no sex or violence or shit"

3. WE ARE POSTING A NEW KOJI AIHARA COMIC TOMORROW!
wheeeeee!

on the road, in some holes

Just heard from Evan last night-- he was in Wendover, Utah just about to reach the Nevada border. From what I remember from our crosscountry drive 3.5 years ago, there ain't nothing out there except salt flats and desert. As promised, we will be updating as soon as he gets back and we can put finishing touches on a few more strips.

Since we won't have any new comics online until SATURDAY, I wanted to share a few morsels of awesomeness with you all. If you haven't seen or read these strips yet, I do recommend making an Amazon order, or doing some scouting of ebay or your local used book crypts for the collections they can be found in.

SECRET COMICS JAPAN

This book is the lesser of the two books I'll mention here, but definitely has a few moments of brilliance. There is an early strip illustrated by Junko Mizuno (but thankfully not written by her-- sorry, not a HUGE fan of her storylines, just her aesthetic!) and a few other grotesque jems. The huge winner here is a story by Shintaro Kago called "Punctures."

This story freaked me out quite thoroughly when I first read it as a freshman in college (borrowed the book from Evan, naturally), and it has been one that I find myself mentioning and describing to friends often. The story revolves around a man so stricken with anxiety of accidental injury or damage to his property that he begins drilling (and later CARVING) holes into things like his milk carton, books, automobile and eventually his own body. (Afraid of being poked by a fellow commuter's umbrella, he stabs a preemptive hole into his own eye!).

The climax of the story takes the irrational, hyper-paranoid concept to frightening ends and really pleased me (in a sick sortof contentment that Kago actually went THAT FAR). Okay, okay-- the purpose of this blog isn't to post comic reviews, but I wanted to whet appetites enough that everyone would track this one down. It is right up their with Sakyo Komatsu's short story "The Savage Mouth" as chilling stuff that really opened up my eyes and still feels as visceral and speculatively fantastic today.

more info on his newer works here. I've also added his official site (in japanese) to our links!

Comics Underground JAPAN

man, what a winner! This book is the one that really blew the doors open for me, the book that showed me that manga wasn't just CLAMP and RANMA (right, right... takahashi rumiko is GOOD, like, maison ikkoku made me cry alright?-- but her stuff IS LIMITED in scope-- it's just soap operas, really awesome soap operas mind you!, but still) and wretchedly masculine/boring stuff like GTO and SLAM DUNK.

How is this for a primer?-- this book contains stories by Suehiro Maruo, Hideshi Hino, Carol Shimoda and Yamada Hanako!! Not every single story is perfect, but this book was where I first read Maruo's classic "Planet of the Jap" and saw "Mary's Asshole," an refreshingly femme and depraved blackcomedy strip (and the author is a radical, middle-aged woman!). Also, I remember Evan used to have a "Mary's Asshole" keychain for his bookbag, depicting a woman nursing a chimpanzee. wheeeee!

The comics in this book (along with "Punctures") feel like they should be pieced together with Lynch, Chronenberg, Miike (especially "Gozu"), "atrocity ukiyo-e" of the 19th century and all that is great about short gag strips. OH, and the sexiness of Weimar/Taisho uniforms.

To tide you over until we are back to updating new strips, here is Selfish Carol's Summer Vacation ENJOY!

ps. if anyone knows of places other than these two books to find translated stories by Carol Shimoda or Yamada Hanako, we would love to hear about it in the comments' section!