3 MINOR DETAILS...

• The most exciting news first: Evan and I are flying out to attend NEW YORK COMIC CON!
  
  
  This was a last minute decision, but despite the potential FEET of snow and frigid temperatures, we've decided to take a trip to visit our buddy at Columbia, hang out with friends from Vertical, meet Stephen King (!), and eat pommes frites & sing karaoke. YES!
  
  Is anyone else attending the con? We're mostly hoping to score new and/or free comics, meet Jeff Smith (this time in America), Wes Craven, Public Enemy, Jim Steranko, and hopefully chat with David Kalat.
  
  Let us know if you'll be around-- we'll be there all-day Saturday, probably hanging out at Vertical or Giant Robot's booths during down time.


• After looking at their schedule for upcoming horror comics, I decided to start a a thread on the Dark Horse manga message board.
  
  
  
  I applaud DH for releasing so many good horror titles, but wanted to bitch about the increasingly frustrating pattern in which they abandon a series at the Volume 3 mark, leaving the rest of the books in limbo (Most notably, Museum of Terror, School Zone and Scary Book...)! The text of my initial post is here:
  
  Hi Dark Horse,
  
  I'm an avid reader of comics, and my tastes run the entire gamut from american mainsteam and indie comics to european graphic novels to all things manga. I've met a few people from Dark Horse/DH at book fairs over the past year, and with my good friend, run the underground manga site Same Hat (samehat.blogspot.com)
  
  I'm a huge fan of what you've been doing lately in horror manga, and we noticed a real upswing in the quality of your books and the titles you were licensing in 06 and into 07. I've talked extensively about your great work on Museum of Terror, Octopus Girl, Lullabies from Hell, and most recenly Mail & Kurosagi on our site:
  
  http://samehat.blogspot.com/2006/10/trans-europe-express-2-dar_116184320429170570.html
  
  THAT SAID, we've been really sad to notice that MANY of your horror manga titles are only making it to volume 3 before they get killed/discontinued or left off the schedule. Right now, I know that School Zone, Scary Book, Octopus Girl, Musuem of Terror, Mail and Kurosagi have only been scheduled through volumes 3, with further issues nowhere on the schedule.
  
  This is a major bummer as a reader. I assume this is a mix of sales figures not meeting expectations and a slew of other reasons, but it's turning into a really bad trend that leaves us readers frustrated.
  
  Having read some of these titles in Japanese, I know that series like Museum of Terror, Scary Book and others go much longer--- Museum of Terror has 15 total volumes, I believe. Can you please let us, as the rabid fans who pick up your books each week, know what is going on with these? More transparency please on this issue. Also, as much as I do applaud you licensing titles like these, it will be for naught if Dark Horse ends up pulling the Miramax route of grabbing something good and not releasing it, keeping it away from readers indefinitely .
  
  I know that sales are what really matter, but other companies like Tokyopop and ADV seem to be making their books work and fulfilling their committment by publishing the entire series of Dragon Head & Cromartie. Not sure about Dragon Head, but I know from ADV folks that Cromartie's sales for Vol. 3 were not strong compared the best-selling manga titles (naruto, etc) but they've decided to stand by the title because they believe in it (and there is a dedicated group of fans that feel the same and think VERY highly of them for putting out Cromartie).
  
  Readers of our blog were so delighted by your pulishing of Museum of Terror (especially when you consider how poorly ComicsOne originally handled the series), but we want to know... what's next for these series that you've left in limbo? I am very excited for more good news and good books from you guys
  
  Appreciatively,
  Ryan
  
  A lively debate is starting up (with our friend Tina and others) and hopefully someone from DH will reply soon to give some explanations and let us know what to expect in coming months. Head over and take part in the conversation!



• Thanks to the readers that have written us recently! We've gotten a few extremely generous and nice emails from readers all over the globe-- cool folks with equally twisted, equally peculiar tastes. Thanks for reading Pedro, Radek & everyone else we've heard from!

ALL THINGS CRAPPY DRIFTING CLASSROOM MOVIE

Clay, gaijin abroad and Same Hat reader, has (perhaps unwittingly) become the internet's star expert on the laughably awful, ridiculous movie adaptation of Kazuo Umezu's Drifting Classroom.



A few weeks ago, Clayton did a video review of the late-80s, multilingual film adaptation of this infamous horror manga. The review is hilarious, and is only outdone but the utter SHITTINESS and CRAZINESS of this film:



You can also view the review directly on his site. Most recently, Clayton was somehow able to score an interview with one of the child stars of this film, Arthur Johnson, who talks about his experience as an African-American kid in Japan starring in a Umezu adapation. in the Eighties. that was in English. Stuff like this is the why internet is teh best!!

Thanks again for the links and patronage, Clayton!

Here are 10 minutes of selected shorts from the film:

Death Note as Simpsons FTW

A few weeks back, Journalista and other blogs posted about a deviantART site member who had posted fan art of the Simpsons and Futurama characters done up her own 'Anime-style'. Turns out spacecoyote (aka Nina Matusmoto from Vancouver) did the drawings as a joke for a few of her friends, and the digg/del.icio.us/fark machine took over, granting Nina the coveted and surreptitious honor of Internet famousness.

Here are the two pics (click for full-size):





Holy shitballs, in this case it seems that Internet famousness has alchemically mutated into fame IRL, as she's now received job offers from Bongo/Groening to work on a comic for them, along with possibly the upcoming relaunch of Futurama (DANG!). According to her livejournal, she's also been contacted by a yet-unnamed US manga company about doing a comic with them. Oh, and Nina was also recently interviewed by the Toronto Star, which you can click here to read.

To be totally honest, at first I was sortof, well... MORE enamored with the story of fan-art turning into a real job (it's like a Harry Potter slash fiction piece getting turned into an actual TV pilot!) but LESS taken with the actual piece. Something about the SIMPSONZU pic creeped me out (though, the Futurama one is pretty damn nifty). Well, I've come across ANOTHER piece by Nina that basically affirms her position as geek-made-good starlet, deserving of her luxurious job offers: The cast of Death Note as Simpsons characters!



Okay, I'm sold!

PS: Dorkdom omake, Nina's redux of My Neighbor Totoro in the Simpsons' style:


PPS: I have to wonder, did the person who did the Battlestar Galactica characters in Simpsons style get any job offers?

TRANS-EUROPE EXPRESS 5: German gem, Insekt by Sascha Hommer

Okay, okay-- So I've read over our last, hmmm 3 or 4 posts, and I DO see that we basically have devolved into hyperbolic "OMG!1, you HAVE 2 check out this AWESOME [fill_in_the_blank]!~#@" ravings. But jeez, I think we're at a historic comics/cultural epoch, where there is basically a rapidly and exponentially exploding amount of cool graphic novels/manga/publishers, and the number of hours outside of work to nerdily blog about them is, sadly, not increasing any time soon.

BUT we're doing our best, and splitting leisure between a goal of posting at least once weekly, and slaving away on more long-form scanlations and an original comic for APE 2007 (More details later). Right, OK... back on the COOL SURPLUS tip, this post is about our newest cartoonist crush, this time hailing from Germany: Mr. Sascha Hommer.



Sascha Hommer (real name = Pascal Bohr) is a German cartoonist, currently residing in Hamburg. He's a young dude, born in 1979, and has been busy and active in the German comics scene for a few years. For one, Sascha founded and edited the German comic anthology/magazine, ORANG, which is still going strong but no longer under his tutelage.



He also guest edited issue 82 of the luxurious and thick publication, STRAPAZIN, from Zurich. STRAPAZIN is like a weirder, more avant stepsister to The Comics Journal, and I wish something like this was being published in US. You can check out the one issue I picked up here, which included Same Hat staples like Tatsumi, Maruo, Takano Fumiko, Tsuge Yoshiharu, and Furuya. D-D-DANG.

Sascha has published shorts in ORANG and other places, but his first major release was just this past year, with his graphic novel INSEKT, put out by Reprodukt. Stroke of weird luck for that trip #217-- I got to meet him at Frankfurt Book Fair's giant comics pavilion. He spoke quietly in English and was really generous, and we talked briefly about European & American indie comics. He also signed the copy of Insekt I bought directly from him (that always feels nice).



He described his two main influences for this book as CHARLES BURNS & CHARLES SCHULTZ. Can you see it? (duhhh) The main drag of this entire post is that I DON'T SPEAK German, and so I've only been able to pore over the pictures. But like many fanboys before me (Evan in high school with unreleased Battle Angel Alita, Commodore Perry whacking it to kick ass Hokusai tentacle shunga) I can still tell that the book is some damn amazing cartooning. Thanks to babelfish, I know that it's about an insect-boy who lives a bearably normal life in a town laden with fog/smoke, where it's basically always night. Only when he has to leave (escape?) with his mother to the countryside, does he have confront his differentness. You know, because he's a giant bug-boy. You can check out free previews here: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. Oh god actually, a quick search just found the whole thing online! UPDATE: Upon closer inspection (DUH), this fully-available link is the english scanlation of the Insekt. HOT DAMN!

This is another example of me wishing I had more clout-- Throw my sweaty weight around and petition that this book gets bought, translated and released in the States. It seems like a perfect fit for either Dark Horse or Fantagraphics, depending on which way you packaged it. I actually mentioned Insekt to the guys at Reprodukt's booth and they said that there had been some early interest from a few US publishers, but no official action yet. Sucks, doesn't it?

Here are more pictures from Sascha's site that you should check out. You can also download min-comics as free PDFs on his page, including the short but awesome "Reach out and touch someone.... undead" comic Telefon (right-click for PDF download). Another great find (and awesome person we've met), thanks to a corporate, work-funded book fair trip. I'm all for mixing business & pleasure. Can't wait to see his next book (slated to be released in 2007)!



Next up: A PREVIEW OF VERTICAL'S UPCOMING TO TERRA by Keiko Takemiya. Oh, and the conclusion (finally) of the TRANS-EUROPE EXPRESS posts.

We're knee deep in HP LOVECRAFT WEEK over at MONSTER BRAINS

An astounding wealth of fucking weird stuff is being accumulated by our friend (and spiritual cousin) at Monster Brains! This week, he's posting any and all things LOVECRAFTIAN, which (of course) warms my heart. The collection of images and links is growing each day, and my favorites so far have been the gnarly Michael Whelan covers that continue to gross me out, ready-to-screenprint size comparisons of the monsters in the mythos, and Michael Komarck's paintings for a Cthulhu CCG (Isn't Magic: The Gathering that already?)... DANG!



Go over to Monster Brains now and pay your respects!

ALL HAIL THE KING OF THE COSMICLY CREEPY

Oh, one last thing-- for another example of why Monster Brains is one of our favorite blogs, check out this massive post on The Temptation of St. Anthony. He's collected dozens and dozens of representations of St. Anthony and the beasties he encountered / hallucinated, including an utterly terrifying tryptch by Hieronymus Bosch, along with many more paintings, etchings, and murals. All that, along with some commentary on the influence of this biblical freakfrest on contemporary horror. I love it.

Thomas Ott: My current favorite horror illustrator?

As the name of the post reveals, I wanted to take a minute and write about Swiss cartoonist Thomas Ott (billed on his books as simply T. Ott). Ott's books have been released stateside by Fantagraphics, and he is one of the too-small handful of European comic artists with books released/translated in the U.S. (although :01 and others have been changing this lately, thankfully).



Do people dig his stuff? Are you over it already? Here come the cliches my geeky-alter ago uses to describe Ott's comics: Channeling the dead ghosts of silent cinema (ooh!). Macabre morality plays with contemporary settings and repercussions (oooh!). Short yarns reminiscint of The Twilight Zone blended with the hard knocks zingers of EC's horror comics (ooooh!). BANG BANG BANG-- that shit is all true!

Some of the books that should be on your shelves:




I kept running into his stuff in really odd places in 2006, and I wish I knew more about him and his earlier work (ahem, European readers of this blog--a little help?). From what I gathered, he lives in France, and used to front a band called The Playboys. His work is getting more widely distributed, it seems, and I came across this awesome shirt from a Spencer Gifts-meets-Hot Topic style shop in Berlin, below a records store where I got early Malaria! and DAF records:


Don't pretend that you don't want this t-shirt


It was 25 Euro, but STILL--- why didn't I buy it?

In addition to this, some genius at Penguin tapped Ott to do one of the covers for their Graphic Classics editions-- a series of luxury reprints coupled with covers by indie cartoonists. Radical ones include Akutagawa's Rashomon and other stories, translated by Japanese PopLit all-star Jay Rubin and illustrated by my main man, Yoshihiro Tatsumi, and Charles Burns' nasty meat slab cover for The Jungle, and Kerouac's Dharma Bums with a cover by Jason.

But the best, most-inspired edition is T. Ott illustrating the cover of Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle, with an introduction by the SF-turned-literary, Philip K. Dick-evangelizing author, Mr. Jonathan Lethem. Could you ask for a better team? Shirley Jackson is one of my favorite authors (she wrote a score of creepy stories, including The Lottery, along with claustrophic novels like The Haunting of Hill House) and this is one of her best (and surprisingly hard to track down) books. When I saw the mock-up for this cover back in June 2006, at Penguin's BookExpo America booth, my response was "NO FUCKING WAY!" Check it out:



And that is my squeeling lovefest. Long live the Swiss! Any Europeans have more info on him they want to send our way?

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!

TRANS-EUROPE EXPRESS 4: Jeff Smith and his Bone in deutsch

Holy crap. These posts are getting tougher to write as the time since my trip gets longer and the details are harder to remember. But I want to get some of these details (and pics) down on the blog. AND-- I want to get to the grand finale: GERMAN COSPLAY CONVENTION pics & videos!

This quick, pic-heavy installment is about a happy coincidence while I was working my company's booth at the Frankfurt Book Fair in October. FBF is the world's largest book fair, and the 10 huge halls there covered all genres, languages and types of printed media. As I've said, I spent all my down time navigating the Graphic Novels section, where European, Japanese, Korean and American comic publishers vied for geek attention, cosplayers roamed and comic creators signed their books. A great surprise was an interview and signing session with Jeff Smith, creator of Bone, who was there to celebrate the German publication of Bone (in both a manga-style B&W and a color version by TokyoPop DE).


German dude, Jeff Smith, German lady

This stop at Frankfurt was part of Jeff's month-long European sojourn, in support of his (near)-simultaneous release of Bone in Italy, Germany, Spain, Norway, Greece, France, and other western/nordic European countries/languages. It's hard to fathom so many people all reading the same title in all those different languages, but Bone definitely has that level of universal appeal. In high school, it was one of the comics that kept me excited about the form, and is my favorite american comic story ever. Jeff actually wrote up his take on the same Frankfurt Book Fair on his blog.

A side note-- I met Jeff in 2004 at WonderCon in SF, and got the chance to tell him how much I appreciated all his work on Bone, and showed him my ratty, broken-spine copy of Out From Boneville. He was super gracious, signed (and put a small drawing in) my book, and even ended a phone call with his wife to chat with me for a few minutes. I don't know too much about him, but I was impressed with his respect for his fans. And his upcoming Shazam miniseries is one of the scant few American superhero comics I plan on buying soon (okay, excepting Volume 4 of Seven Soldiers!!).

Okay, on to the pictures! In the main pavillion of the Graphic Novels section, there was a large Bone display, with numerous paintings, sketches, and behind-the-scenes details on the process of coloring the B&W original pages for the color edition (published by Scholastic in the U.S.) :


Page layout sketches from book 7: Ghost Circles (I think?)


The US Scholastic edition covers, in futuristic frames.

Jeff did a one hour interview with a German host that was well-attended-- lots of nerds and geeks of various ages asked questions in both English and German, and Jeff did his best to talk about the history and future of the Bone stories, along with upcoming projects and issues related to translating the comic.

On-stage interview with lots of translating between English & German.


Rapt audience of book and Bone lovers

As I linked above, Jeff did a detailed post on his take on FBF and this event, and a CERTAIN comic geek (dressed in my on-duty, work attire, no less!) was caught in an audience shot:

Am I picking my nose? We look like undercover cops or something!!

I shot a video and posted it on our new Same Hat channel on YouTube; Here are Jeff Smith's comments on the (not likely) possibility of a Bone sequel:


Finally, as a personal souvenir, I bought a copy of the TokyoPop "manga-size" edition of their Bone 1 (which combines Out From Boneville & The Great Cow Race into one edition).

Hmmm. It doesn't have quite the same ring to it as "STUPID STUPID RAT CREATURES!"


Valley of the uncanny, a page from Out From Boneville in German!


Next post in the series: Trans-Europe Express 5: German gem, Insekt by Sascha Hommer!