Toren Smith, RIP (1960 - 2013)

I learned the sad news today that Toren Smith has passed away at the young age of 52.

Toren was a fascinating guy, the founder of Studio Proteus and arguably one of the most important figures in the entire history of the English-language manga industry. Please take a few minutes to read this personal tribute from his friend Jonathen Clements - it paints a picture of a unique and exciting life, and fills in details about the earliest days of manga and anime fandom in America. The instrumental role Toren had in American comics history (alongside folks like Same Hat heroes Fred Schodt, Fred Patton, and others) can't be overstated.

If you were a manga/anime nerd in the '90s like me, and enjoyed any of the following Studio Proteus-powered titles, please remember Toren Smith today and keep his family and friends in your thoughts:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

RIP JERRY FELLOWS

[My first post back! I've been working on zines and translations and mostly my day job, but have plans to get this jam up and rolling again--- with guest posts and some long-planned essay posts. We are also just about a month away from finally releasing our first Same Hat shirt--- a joint-design by Michael DeForge and Jonny Negron that I think you will love. My goal is to get posting regularly on here again before that happens, so you and I won't be ashamed to don the shirt!]

I read last month that early fandom contributor and zinester Jerry Fellows passed away -- my condolences go out to his friends and family. I never had the chance to meet Jerry, but he sounds like a dude after our own hearts and the kind of person I'd like to highlight here on Same Hat.



Jerry came to my attention a few years back, when I was reading Fred Patten's personal history of the development of Anime/Manga fandom in America, "Watching Anime, Reading Manga: 25 Years of Essays and Reviews". In Patten's timeline of anime fandom, he noted the following about February 1983 (the same month that Nakazawa's I Saw It was published in English by Educomics):

Space Fanzine Yamato is published by Steve Harrison, Ardith Carlton, and Jerry Fellows in Michigan as "the ultimate information source" on Space Battleship Yamato/Star Blazers. This is the first American fan effort to produce a "Roman Album"-style complete information guide to a particular anime title.

Manga fandom is a strange and fascinating thing to me, and treads somewhere between the two (formerly-overlapping) worlds of early SF fandom and comic book fandom. Manga (and more specifically, Anime) fandom developed along similar timeframes as the SF scene, but remained the realm of very devoted enthusiasts for a long time; the scene was, perhaps happily, kept small initially by the double-whammy limitations of 1) a physical barrier to getting your hands on the actual media you wanted to consume-- first 16mm films, then later more easily VHS tapes-- and 2) a language barrier to understanding the anime/manga, in a time before the "boom" in Japanese Language programs at US universities that happened alongside the Japanese economic bubble of the mid-to-late 80s.

Interestingly enough, a "collector" market of manga/anime (as distinct from toys, models, vinyl) remains mostly non-existent to this day; you can find old VHS tapes and 1st editions of early Viz floppies for under a buck easily at used book shops. The fan translations, early dubs, and fanzines at the start of the scene were simply labors of love, currency of in-group identification between folks "in the know" but mostly invisible and valueless to folks outside of fandom--- and now mostly forgotten to all but the hardest core/weirdest of current anime/manga fans.



In the context of typewriters and expensive/early Xerox technology (and no access to things like InDesign or um, the internet), the gleeful and thorough devotion of fans like Steve, Ardith and Jerry impresses me and inspires the little zine projects I want to work on. Steve wrote a detailed and very personal recounting of the experience creating Space Fanzine Yamato on his blog, Let's Anime!, and it details the dorky/poignant way in which friendships blossom and wither over the course of a long project. Please take a second to read it!

This excerpt from my interview with Fred Schodt in 2007 gives a little more context to the scene that Jerry was a part of, the pioneers of fandom from which all weeaboos are descended:

ANT: There’s some stuff written about other early fandoms – whether it’s science fiction fandom or American comic book fandom – that thing when a sub-culture scene later turns into a big business. I’m always curious about how that gets started. The people you knew in the US who read your first book were probably part of a sort of vanguard of manga or anime fans. Who were those people? Were they science fiction fans? Dungeons and Dragons people? Or Japanophiles?

FRED: I knew a lot of those people in the very beginning, the people from the really enthusiastic manga and anime fans were very unusual people. Jared and I were actually working and interpreting for Tezuka on an early trip – I think ’79 or 1980, I don’t remember the exact date, but I know that we went to see the C/FO folks (Cartoon Fantasy Organization) and I had never met people like that in my life. It was almost frightening. [LAUGHS] I had never met people who were so dedicated to something which was so obscure in the United States at the time, and it was a very small group. But they were people who became quite big in fandom, such as Fred Patton in particular, he was a real central figure in American fandom, and still is.
They were people who were obsessed with anime – more anime than manga, very few people could read it because there weren’t any English manga available. So their entry point had been actually the early 60s anime that was shown in the United States, such as Astro Boy and Kimba the White Lion. Fred Patten's good friend Robin Leyden from the C/FO was a huge Astro Boy fan, the likes of which you’d rarely see. He later on became a special effects animator. Robyn actually made a model of Astro Boy and presented it to Tezuka...

ANT: What was Tezuka’s reaction to that, to these strange American anime fans?

FRED: Oh, he was overwhelmed. [Tezuka] had been in contact with some of them even before Jared and I met him. But they were the first Anime fans in the US, to such a serious degree. Almost scary. These were not people who were interested in Japanese business or technology or anything like that. They were just focused on anime, the characters and the stories, they just loved it. So it was actually very touching.

ANT: It seems like a lot of those people in the early 80s were the ones that eventually drummed up interest in anime, and a lot of them were the people who first ones that did fan subtitles.

FRED: That’s right. And organized the first conventions.

Here are a few more images from Steve's post, I gotta take a minute and track down a PDF/scans of this great piece of fandom history sometime soon.


RIP, Jerry Fellows... and hats off to all the early fandom pioneers!

(The staff of Space Fanzine Yamato)

[More soon: Gyo manga, tons of Vertical releases, my dumb projects, Umezz Carnival 2011, etc!]

PEACE OUT, SATOSHI KON

Satoshi Kon died yesterday in Japan at age 46 from pancreatic cancer. This is some bullshit is what's up.



I was late to getting into his work-- somehow missed it during the first half of college when everyone else was first freaking out over Millennium Actress -- but was an admirer of his films and the wide-ranging inspiration to 2D animators and illustrators he wrought. In retrospect, I first saw his "Magnetic Rose" as part of Otomo's Memories, and have fond memories of the cerebral impact of watching Paprika's insane imagery unfold in front of my eyes. There's been no word yet on the status of his ongoing most recent project, THE DREAM MACHINE [Yume miru kikai].

+ Details via ANN
+ A nice tribute from LA Weekly
+ We're posting up Satoshi Kon art and works on the Same Hat Tumblr

"It's not that anime will never be the same with Satoshi Kon gone. It's now much more likely that anime will always be the same." - Jeff Betteridge on his twitter.

UPDATE: ANN has reported that Satoshi Kon's final message (written in May 18 after his terminal diagnosis) has been posted to his site today. The site is crashing from traffic, but you can read a copy here (in Japanese).

さて、ここまで長々とこの文章におつき合いしてくれた皆さん、どうもありがとう。
世界中に存する善きものすべてに感謝したい気持ちと共に、筆をおくことにしよう。

じゃ、お先に。
今 敏

With feelings of gratitude for all that is good in this world, I put down my pen. Goodbye now. Satoshi Kon

Kiyoshiro Imawano, RIP

Got an email from Nate last night with the news that rocker/actor/leftist Kiyoshiro Imawano (忌野清志郎) died yesterday at age 58 :(

Kiyoshiro was a musician in the 70s band RC Succession, and later played solo at the Fuji Rock Festival and Free Tibet concerts in the 90s and 00s. Outside of his long music and activism career, Kiyoshiro might be best known to English-speaking audiences from his hilarious role as Richard in the Takashi Miike film, Happiness of the Katakuris. He also performed in another Miike film, The Great Yokai War.

Here is a clip of one of Kiyoshiro's finest film moments, in one of my all-time favorite movies:


Kiyoshiro Imawano singing Kimigayo:

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, EDOGAWA RAMPO

Getting this one out before the end of the day... I wanted to take a second to note that today marks the birthday of one of my absolute favorite authors, Edogawa Rampo. Dude is well-known and beloved in Japan as the godfather of mystery and detective fiction.



114 years ago today, he was born Hirai Taro in Mie Prefecture. As a young author, he turned his love of the macabre master (and America's favorite anti-transcendentalist) Edgar Allan Poe into his nom de plume, Edogawa Rampo. Hint: say it 5 times fast, let the syllables blur together and the verbal connection should become clear.

Rampo has long been one of my favorite authors, and even if you haven't read the translated stories collected in Japanese Tales of Mystery & Imagination or The Beast in the Shadows (And if so... what is wrong with you, lazypants?), most everyone reading this blog has surely felt the influence of his works via some of their favorite manga, film and fiction from Japan...


(Amazing flyer for a museum exhibiting celebrating Rampo's influence)

+ Do you like the kid detective manga, Conan? (His full name: Conan Edogawa!)
+ Do you like the nihilistic realism of contemporary detective fiction writers like Natsuo Kirino or Miyuki Miyabe?
+ Did you see the film Gemini by Shinya Tsukamoto? (Based on one of the short stories in JTOM&I)
+ Are you a Mishima nerd who checked out his cameo in the psychadelic, psycho-sexual film version of Rampo's Black Lizard?
+ Did you see the art horror film Rampo Noir (Adapting four of his short stories) or the fictional and fantastic biography film Rampo?

and most recently...

Remember the newest Suehiro Maruo manga, a sprawling and faithful adaptation of Rampo's The Strange Tale of Panorama Island?


(Homey's grave, with his given name Hirai Taro on the headstone.)

Rampo passed away on July 28, 1965, but his works are continually reprinted and collected in Japan. On a personal note, my first translation of a Japanese work was during my senior year of college, and the story I translated was his short mystery, "The Death of a Sleepwalker". My translation was not very deft or well-done, but I spend many weeks reading and living with Rampo's original texts and came to really love the dude and appreciate his gentle wit and writing craft.

Ending this on a high note... For English readers, the rad indie press Kurodahan is putting a brand new collection of translated short stories and critical essays, The Edogawa Rampo Reader, in 2009!

RORY ROOT (1958 - 2008)

Rory Root, Bay Area comics guru and owner of the legendary Comic Relief shop in Berkeley, passed away yesterday after complications from an emergency surgery over the weekend. This is extremely sad news for the Bay Area and for comics & manga fandom.



Folks who were friends with Rory from across the comics world have begun posting lovely remembrances of a guy who was, by all accounts, both an intellectual and talkative comic retailer and a generous but sometimes rough boss. You can find tons of memorials in the comments at Newsarama and Comics Reporter, along with posts from Fantagraphic's Eric Reynolds, Warren Ellis, and on PW's The Beat.

I didn't know Rory personally, but I knew about him via his famous store. More than almost any other shop I've been to, Comic Relief evangelizes the kind of comics we love to talk about on Same Hat-- indie comics, European arty-farty imports, fucked-up manga and zines & minis by up and coming cartoonists. A number of my friends spent their college years at Berkeley working at his store, and at cons like APE when they all got together to man Comic Relief's massive booth, they all seemed like a big family. The shop was also one of the only places early on during college where I could find minis by friends like Jason Shiga, Derek Kirk Kim and Hellen Jo.

For folks that want to share memories or just learn more about the guy, please visit the Comic Relief site, which has been converted into a memorial page.

Here are some thoughts from Dark Horse's Carl Horn, about his early years working in manga at Viz Comics and interacting with Rory:

I remember buying issue #1 of the Epic edition of AKIRA at Comic Relief in 1988. Its original site was only three blocks from where Animag, the ancestor of Animerica magazine, was edited, and four blocks from the meeting site of Cal-Animage Alpha, then the largest anime club in the English-speaking world. Rory would come by the Viz office in San Francisco (back when it was called Viz Comics) to give advice and input on promoting manga in an often dubious comics market, and he himself always supported Japanese artists; his was the first store I saw to move the manga graphic novels to the front. Even this last year, Jason Thompson’s Eisner-nominated “Manga: The Complete Guide” was researched with the generous assistance of Rory Root and Comic Relief, which allowed their unsurpassed backstock to be used as a library of the last two decades of the field.

I haven’t even had the chance to visit their new, expanded store these past few years, but there is no doubt Comic Relief’s success has come about because of Rory’s outward-looking vision and belief in comics of all kinds and for all readers, a vision that more and more came to share. He was as hardcore a fan as they come, but the complete opposite of the “Comic Book Guy” in mentality. Despite being a mecca for the collector, the store was always ready for the newcomer and the questions of the curious passer-by, who may have known little about comics at first, but might soon end up a regular customer. Some comics retailers learned from Rory’s example, and for the many who haven’t, they still can. There’s no reason a comics store can’t be a successful part of the community and a progressive cultural force–I saw it work with Comic Relief.

I feel selfish to remember Rory Root only in terms of what he did to support manga and anime fans such as myself, and especially so when I reflect that I have an industry to work in partly due to his support. But he did do these things, and it was only a small part of a life, for which I am grateful, and that I won’t forget.

What a major bummer of a week for comics nerds.

Professor Miriam Silverberg, RIP

I usually don't post much related to the world of academia (even though I still try to keep my head in that world when possible), but I wanted to share a bit of sad news.

This past weekend, author and Japanese popular culture scholar Miriam Silverberg passed away after a lengthy illness. I never had the luxury of meeting her in person, but I first encountered her work in an undergraduate course and was captivated by her discussions of sexuality, gender and modernity. More recently, I have been working my way through her fantastically detailed book, Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times.



I know a few other Same Hat readers have checked out this book, and I've found it's filling in the gaps in my awareness about a subject I find increasingly interesting. Her book deals directly with the 1920s and 1930s period, when Japan went through a particularly interesting stage of its rapid modernization and mass culture awakening. This is the time period from which grotesque fiction like Edogawa Rampo & Yumeno Kyusaku, the Moga ("Modern Girl"), the Takarazuka Revue all sprung. This quote from Laura Miller's book blurb serves as a good summary:

"Unlike other scholars who merely view ero guro nansensu in its literal meaning, Silverberg brilliantly documents it as a complex cultural aesthetic expressed in a spectrum of fascinating mass culture forms and preoccupations"

If you want a guidebook for piecing together these cultural artifacts in their specific and compelling historical context, I highly recommend the book, along with Prof. Silverberg's other essays. (You can preview some images from the book here or download the first chapter as a PDF here.)

Miriam Silverberg's work tackled the exact type of questions, periods, and topics I like to think I'd have feebly tried my hand at if I'd managed to go the graduate school route. All of us (especially us nerdy fans of the weird descendants of the Taisho era cultural stew) are worse off having lost this vital and unique intellectual.