LOOKING BACK AT SECRET COMICS JAPAN

Last week I spent a lovely couple of hours re-reading back issues of PULP off my shelves (for research for my Usamaru Furuya post). While most all of the series that ran in PULP have been collected in their own trade paperbacks (though I believe they are all out of print other than Uzumaki), and some of the best essays and columns were collected in "Fresh Pulp", there really is nothing quite as fun as reading these comics in serialized form, running alongside each other!

As an extension of the PULP experiment/enterprise, the editors (including Jason Thompson, Izumi Evers, Carl Gustav Horn and others I'm surely forgetting) worked with Chikao Shiratori (an ex-GARO editor) to put together an anthology called Secret Comics Japan. I've previously posted about this important collection which (along with Comics Underground Japan and, to a lesser degree, Sake Jock) is a key piece of reading for any Same Hat reader.



I have really distinct memories of first encountering this book when Evan brought it along on our cross-country road trip to get me out to Stanford in 2001. This book is where I first encountered Shintaro Kago, as well as Furuya's PALEPOLI strips and Makoto Aida's groundbreaking MUTANT HANAKO. At the time of Secret Comics Japan's publication, PULP ran an overview of the state of "indie manga" in Japan in the early-2000s, as well as detailed notes on each story included in the anthology. I found it pretty fascinating to revisit this stuff, and have included large scans for your reading pleasure below:

CLICK EACH PAGE FOR THE FULL-SIZE IMAGE:

(Interview about PULP x SECRET COMICS JAPAN, page 1)

(Interview about PULP x SECRET COMICS JAPAN, page 2)

(LOOKING AT: The Life of Momongo, Gedatsu Man)

(LOOKING AT: Swing Shell, JR.)

(LOOKING AT: Heartless Bitch/Painful Love, Punctures)

(LOOKING AT: Mutant Hanako)

(LOOKING AT: Editor Woman, Palepoli)

(A hilarious "rating" of each story in terms of Gore, Porn-ness, Huh?, Laffs, and other traits)

MET USAMARU FURUYA IN TORONTO!

Last month, I took a lovely trip to Canada and attended the fantastic Toronto Comics Art Festival. I was there specifically to sell my zines, including a book of erotic indie comics titled THICKNESS #1. The book was created and edited by me and my buddy Michael DeForge, and includes original comics by my favorites: Jonny Negron, Ze Jian Shen, Derek Ballard, Katie Skelly and a new color strip by True Chubbo.

[PS: You can buy a copy for $10 (+shipping) right now.]

I'm going to write about the zines and comics I picked up at TCAF over on the EAZB this weekend, but for Same Hat I wanted to post about a dream coming true... having the opportunity to meet genius mangaka USAMARU FURUYA!




[Furuya photo via this site]

Usamaru Furuya was at TCAF as a "Guest of Honor", and promoting both Viz's Genkaku Picasso and Vertical's release of Lychee Light Club. I feel intimidated by the task of explaining Furuya's importance/talents in a simple Same Hat post due to both my deep fondness for his work and the variety/breadth of genres and types of cartooning he has produced over his career. For a primer, this profile of Furuya does a great job of introducing his work if you've not read anything by the dude.

I first encountered Furuya's work back when I was in high school, in the now-defunct PULP Magazine. PULP was a monthly manga magazine, which functioned as a primer on all things "indie" for English readers in the late '90s. I spoke at length (along with Chris Butcher and David Welsh) about the importance of this book on my reading habits and sensibilities on this episode of Inkstuds, and Furuya's kogal-skewering SHORT CUTS strips were a focal point of that teenage excitement about what manga and comics could set out to achieve.

Ostensibly, a 2-page formal gag strip skewering Kogals, SHORT CUTS was a funny gag comedy about youth culture with great timing, cute girls, and surprisingly beautiful art; but it also was an avenue for literary and internationally-minded Furuya to namecheck Dali, Yoshiharu Tsuge, Kazuo Umezu, Aphex Twin, and Osamu Dazai (along with boob jokes!). It's an absolute delight to read and a collection of gags that I come back to every few years and find another reference or angle I had missed previously.

Here's a bonus Short Cut strip (which is fantastically NSFW and hilarious): Page 1, Page 2.

SECRET COMICS JAPAN: PALEPOLI
Furuya's silly and quietly amazing strips for Short Cuts were predated in his bibliography by a series of 4-panel gags published under the name, PALEPOLI. I'm prone to hyperbole, and biased by encountering these comics at an extremely impressionable phase of my teenage years, but I've found Palepoli holds up extremely well to repeated re-reading. A selection of the Palepoli strips were published in English in the fantastic Viz-published indie anthology, SECRET COMICS JAPAN. Here is how editors Jason Thompson and Izumi Evers described Palepoli:



At TCAF, Furuya mentioned that his biggest challenge when starting out was around paneling and pacing his manga to tell effective stories. With Palepoli, Furuya purposely constrained each strip to 4-panel/"yon-koma" format. Within that format, Furuya soars artistically and slams formally against the visual language of a four-panel grid. It's full of hilarious sex jokes and pop culture references, as well as formal experiments rivaling Shintaro Kago's Abstraction.

Here is an example of one kind of approach the strip took, with a juxtaposition of Furuya's Makoto-chan stand-in Takashi pondering his own hand:



As I started the post off saying... Usamaru Furuya was a Featured Guest of the festival, and a number of events highlighting his work were scheduled throughout the weekend. As part of this, Furuya signed books for fans for a few hours on Saturday... I had a chance to talk to him, shake his hand enthusiastically, and have him sign my ongoing Autograph book!!



(Furuya and a red-faced with excitement Me)

Furuya was incredibly sweet in person, and was nice enough to take a photograph with me (below). He had his wife and baby (both were insanely cute) in tow, and later after his signing Furuya walked around the festival checking out minicomics and booths on display.

In addition to the signing, Festival Director and master blogger Chris Butcher hosted a Spotlight Panel and interview with Usamaru Furuya. I haven't seen video surface yet, but this summary of the Spotlight Panel over at Kuriousity does a great job of summarizing the event. (The mentioned "audience member" who asked about Plastic Girl is me, haha). My buddy Ikki Nikki also conducted a fantastic interview with Furuya for the Shonen Jump Magazine site that includes further great details about his process and thoughts on comics.

The most interesting and crazy points to me were:

• Furuya created his ground-breaking PALEPOLI comics when he was only 24 years old(!!). This was the #1 holy shit moment of TCAF for me.
• He described drawing layouts and panels as a muscle that needs to be flexed and can only be honed via repetition. 'Someone once said "you can master any kind of skill with 10,000 hours of practice." I also find this to be true.'
  
  
• Furuya talked extensively of the influence of Suehiro Maruo on his work, and that he idolized Maruo and wanted to be a part of GARO after seeing his short stories printed in the magazine. Furuya called Lychee Light Club his tribute to the Grand Guignol theatre and Suehiro Maruo.
  
  
• There wasn't a real point to my question, except that I got to say out loud to Usamaru Furuya in public that he was one of my all time favorite cartoonists and a genius, and that Plastic Girl is an amazing and beautiful piece of work :)
  
  
• Furuya is very interested in digital publishing and integrating social media into the experience of sharing his work with an audience. He mentioned how other than conventions (which he doesn't really attend) he never has the experience of experiencing an immediate reaction to his works. As part of this, Furuya is serializing his newest manga online, allowing users to comment directly on individual panels (more below).

After hearing Seth and other cartoonists talk about their weariness of the internet and ebooks, it was surprising and exciting to hear that Furuya was the one that drove his publisher to serialize his prequel to Lychee Light Club for free online. You guys are all reading this new series, right? If not, you gotta check out BOKURA NO HIKARI CLUB.

Ah, it feels good to finally be back posting on Same Hat! I missed you guys.

UPCOMING TITLES ANNOUNCED AT SDCC

I missed (skipped?) Comic-Con this year, but followed the details vicariously through friends' tweets. I was actually relieved to not have to deal with the mash of BO and lines, the dehydration and sterile air, and cramping 5 people into one hotel room.

That said, I am bummed to have missed a chance to kick it with a lot of the Electric Ant Zine crew, and high-five Moto Hagio-- who was brought as a special guest by Fantagraphics to celebrate/promote the release of A Drunken Dream and Other Stories. I also would've loved to congratulate in person MBQ and Peepo Choo artist Felipe Smith for his much-deserved success.

[As a side note, I highly recommend folks read my friend Deb Aoki's interview with Felipe Smith at About.com. He drops lots of REAL TALK about what it takes to make it as a professional creative, and in the Japanese manga industry specifically. It made me like a guy I was already a huge fan of even more than before. Oh yeah, and pick up a copy of Peepo Choo v.1 from Vertical, fucking duh!]

During the week of madness, a few exciting licenses were announced by our buddies at Vertical and Drawn & Quarterly. These are old news by now, but I thought I'd do a quick round-up and link dump for anyone that missed them:

1) DRAWN & QUARTERLY RELEASING SHIGERU MIZUKI!

Original announcement on the D+Q blog.

Drawn & Quarterly has acquired North American English rights to two graphic novel memoirs, Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths and

NonNonBā, by one of Japan's most acclaimed and legendary manga-kas, Shigeru Mizuki

In addition to the licensing of these works filling a glaring and long-present gap in the English manga scene, Shigeru Mizuki himself is an amazing dude. How can you not love this guy?!

2) VERTICAL TO RELEASE FURUYA'S LYCHEE LIGHT CLUB IN 2011

Were you feeling sad because CMX crashed and burned and it become painfully obvious that the first new Usamaru Furuya manga in English wasn't ever coming out? (Me too). Well, despite his post-apocalyptic survival shonen (seinen?) seres 51 Ways to Save Her getting killed in the CMX meltdown, we have a lot of stuff to look forward to...

Haters gonna hate (on Viz's forthcoming Genkaku Picasso), but my buddy and editor wunderkind Ed Chavez announced that he and Vertical have picked up the license for Furuya's Taisho madness tale, Lychee Light Club. The hilarious thing about this to me is that I actually first got a copy of this manga (in Japanese) from Ed himself about two years ago!

The book is a whopping 320 pager, and the English edition (softcover) is coming out next April, 2011. As described deftly by ANN (because I'm too lazy to summarize things properly, sorry!), the story is about:

nine students at an all-boys school who create a god-like Lychee machine — that runs on lychee fruits — to seek out the beautiful women of the world. However, the machine eventually becomes self-aware "and is soon equally capable of measuring beauty and executing justice."

The look of Furuya's lines and inks in this book will (happily) remind many Same Hat readers of a mix of Suehiro Maruo, and also a grimier version of the Showa aesthetic in Koji Kumeta's Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei. Furuya's manga is quite goofy(?) at times, but seriously grim and gory too. It's a mixed bag of good elements, and I think Same Hat folks will really love it.



3) PRISON PIT #2 HAS ARRIVED

Johnny Ryan, a friend of Same Hat and all-around great dude, released the second volume of his battle epic Prison Pit at Comic-Con. It is amazing, nasty, and Lovecraftian. It also features a direct allusion to a scene from Tetsuo Hara's CYBER BLUE!!! Did anyone spot it?

Johnny Ryan & Calvin Wong, power-twins unite!

If you're not already on board with this series (What's wrong with you?) check out the cover to #3.

UPCOMING BOOKS: GENKAKU PICASSO & A SINGLE MATCH

Over the past week, I was reminded about two upcoming books by a friend at D&Q and Same Hat reader Adam that I wanted to share here. Below are the details gathered from Amazon, and I'll continue to add links/images as I come across them.

(BTW, if you haven't seen Adam's manga review blog Complelely Futile, I strongly encourage you to check it. It's a bit light on visual stimulus but full of insightful reviews and essays on various untranslated manga).

Anyway, time to get stoked about the Fall!

1. GENKAKU PICASSO by Usumaru Furuya



Details here from the listing on Amazon
# Paperback: 256 pages
# Release: VIZ, November 2, 2010

Product Description
Hikari Hamura, nicknamed Picasso because of his natural artistic abilities, survived a horrible accident, but his friend Chiaki wasn't so lucky. Suddenly, Chiaki appears in front of him and tells him in order to keep living he must help the people around him. Can Hikari save people with his sketchbook and a 2B pencil?

About the Author
Furuya debuted as a manga artist in an avant-garde comics magazine called Garo in 1994. Since then, his manga have appeared in Young Sunday and other major weekly magazines. His work has also been published in English in VIZ's PULP magazine and Secret Comics Japan. VIZ published his book Short Cuts in 2003.

2. A SINGLE MATCH (Red Kimono) by Oji Suzuki



Details here from the listing on Amazon
# Paperback: 240 pages
# Release: Drawn & Quarterly, October 12, 2010

[This book was originally scheduled for a March 2010 release, under the title Red Kimono. My original post]

Product Description
In this collection of hauntingly elliptical short stories, Oji Suzuki explores memory, relationships, and loss with a loose narrative style, filling each tale with a sense of unfulfilled longing. He plumbs the dissolute depths of human psychology, literally bathing his characters in expansive shadows that paradoxically reveal as much as they obscure. A young man catches a cold after being soaked in the rain and is tended to by his grandmother. He drifts, dreaming of a train trip with an older brother he doesn’t have. A traveling salesman comes across a boy lying in the middle of the road and stops to have a cigarette and tell a story that sifts through memories of faces and places before settling back on the boy and pretending to not look at the stars. A young woman walks along the river with her bicycle and a friend who is nothing more than a disembodied head—discussing past times together, memories they have of each other.

About the Author
Although he touches on many of the same themes as his contemporaries in the field of postwar alternative manga—Yoshihiro Tsuge (L’Homme Sans Talent) and Seiichi Hayashi (Red Coloured Elegy)—Suzuki uses an ever shifting narrative approach and dashes of surrealist humor to distinguish his work from that of his peers.

Oji Suzuki was born in 1949 in Nagoya, Japan. He moved to Tokyo in 1967 and within two years his first short stories were published in the avant-garde Japanese comics magazine Garo. Throughout the 1970s and ’80s at least ten collections of his short stories were published. Suzuki has produced short films and has written and drawn children’s books.

From the French edition:

JAPAN 2010 TRIP: FURUYA'S TENSHI NO FELLATIO [NSFW]

I'm finally getting back to my photos and goodies from my trip to Japan earlier this year; I planned to post these things earlier, but then got sidetracked by the Early Manga Days posts and the Prison For Bitches zine.

I've got a few huge photodump posts coming, but in looking through the stacks of manga and magazines a sick and hilarious short by Usamaru Furuya stood out and I wanted to share it now.

Nate and I spent the first Friday I was there digging around for rad and weird used manga at a book shop in Koenji. I had heard about the anthology Comic Cue, which was released for a while in the mid-1990s and focused heavily on gag manga, but also science fiction, humor and erotic comics. For under 5 bucks each I was able to grab the first and third issues:



The anthologies contain a lot of my favorite cartoonists-- some of which have been published in English, but most of which are sadly unfamiliar to Western audiences. The first issue includes cartoonists like Koji Aihara (who Evan and I did fan translations of at the launch of Same Hat 5 years ago!), Tori Miki, King Terry, Radio Wada, Yoshida Sensha, Yamada Naito, Taiyo Matsuomoto, Minetaro Mochizuki, Kiriko Nananan, Imashiro Takashi, Yoshimoto Yoshitomo, Katsuhiro Otomo, and others.



The third issue is the "PORNO SPECIAL" which means lots of totally dirty and sexy comics by the folks above, and also including Suehiro Maruo, Qta Minami, and an article comparing sex manga anthologies for men and women. As mentioned at the top of this post, there is a comic by Usamaru Furuya that is just out of control and I wanted to share a few panels. ENJOY:

Title Page: 天使のフェラチオ (Fellatio of the Angels)



It's a short comic, about an insanely dorky/gawky dude who is seduced by a beautiful "angel" that comes to his bedroom to seduce him. [Check the comments for a full synopsis from reader Adam!] Oh yeah, and leave it to Furuya to reference Dali's El Cristo de San Juan de la Cruz.