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I have usually refrained from posting/hosting other people's scanlations, mostly because I'd rather focus on MYSELF (yes, the ego knows no bounds!). Seriously though, it's fairly easy to do a little detective work and find other scanlator groups tackling various genres, with a wide variety of specialties and philosphies. (For folks that dig what we've done in the past, I'd recommend the blog Mangaijin for thoughtful scanlation recommendations and commentary.)
But, this week I've decided to start up a new category of posts (aptly tagged other people's scanlations) to highlight comics that rattled/impressed me or were just simply too strange and interesting to not pass on to you guys. The impetus for this was a 16-page comic I just found when trolling Blog Search for manga gossip, posted on one of those "DUDE, CHECK OUT HOW WEIRD JAPAN IS" forum threads. This one hails from infamous Ero-Guro manga maestro Shintago Kago. Kago's short 'Punctures' is probably his most famous (and least explicit) comic English-speakers know, and was featured in Secret Comics Japan.
I'm gonna keep this short, because ABSTRACTION is a comic you simply have to see to believe. It's distilled surrealism and fourth wall smashing, like Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch meets Animal Man, as filtered through some strange Dali-meets-Scott McCloud formal and experimental impulse. YEAH-- I WAS SCRATCHING MY HEAD TOO. BUT JEEEZ, IS IT GREAT.
Kago caveat: While this strip doesn't include the kind of mutilation/incest/sexual violence junk you might rightfully associate with his manga, this one is definitely NSFW due to some sex/nudity and gore imagery--- on par with a Lynch flick or Un Chien Andalou at worst.
OK, JUST READ THIS THING, AND THANK ME (and Anonymous K, the scanlator who worked on this) LATER!
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(lower-res version hosted on someone's nifty LJ gallery here)
Click HERE for other Shintaro Kago comics on Same Hat!
This is a quick post before the weekend starts. Most of you have probably read volume two of Junji Ito's Gyo, and would agree that the bonus story The Enigma of Amigara Fault is absolutely horrifying and great. If you haven't read it, you can click here and/or pick up a copy of the Viz re-release of Gyo this Fall.
On 4chan and other imageboards, the haunting DRR DRR DRR sound effect became a faddish meme for a while, and someone created this parody; I just found it on someone's LJ this week and wanted to share the wealth.
HAHAHAHA
On Tuesday I caught a great radio program on my local NPR station, KQED. They featured an hour-long discussion with a few of my favorite mangaologists on the legacy of Osamu Tezuka and the current state of manga in America.
Forum explores the growth of Manga, a form of serialized comics extremely popular in Japan.
Host: Michael Krasny
Guests:
Carl Horn, the Manga editor for Dark Horse Comics
Fred Schodt, author of "Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics" and "The Astro Boy Essays." Schodt is also a translator and Tezuka Osamu historian.
You can stream the show from their page or download it as an MP3 (right-click to save).
My impressions from the program (SPOILER ALERT!):
- Schodt has a awesome voice. Also, he would make a really cool uncle.
- Schodt is the go-to guy for discussing Tezuka, and talks anecdotes both here and in his latest book, The Astro Boy Essays, about his personal friendship with The God of Manga.
- Horn compares & contrasts the American and Japanese comics industries. In the US, the '50s comics code killed off their "ability to create stories that ordinary people could relate to" and also "contributed to a narrative stereotyping of comic books in which the acceptable types of stories you could, not just in terms of nudity of violence but of world view, gradually narrowed."
- Schodt says that translating manga into English has gotten easier and easier in the past 20 years. There was a time when early manga translators worried that American audiences wouldn't be able to handle the cultural details and exotic minutiae. There has been a mindmeld between young Americans and young Japanese in the past 15 years; American kids grow up eating sushi, sleeping on futons and are raised on a lot of Japanese ideas filtered through cultural exports. Gags, language puns and visual puns are very hard to translate, sure, but it's much easier to pitch things now than when he originally was translating Phoenix, etc.
- Horn notes the difference in geopolitical discourse about the Japanese in the 80s, which was always about Japanese politics and economy, and never about pop culture. Now it's the exact opposite, and the only thing the US media covers is Japan's "soft power" AKA pop culture. In response to an aside from the host about the Rape of Nanking, Horn notes that an upcoming issue of Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service has the crew going to Harbin, China and raising discussion about Unit 731 and other Japanese war crimes during WWII.
- Schodt talks about flipping comics, and how the young, sophisticated readers of nowadays prefer the unflipped editions (that's you guys).
- Schodt makes the point that what most Americans see as 'MANGA' is a few steps removed from how Japanese would describe it, for two reasons. One is the inherent (but shrinking) time lag between a manga's release and popularity in Japan and it's release in English in the U.S. The second is the natural filter of what is profitable and gets picked for release in the US; Looking simply at that, Schodt notes, Americans would think that manga is weighted heavily toward technology, atomics bombs, the internet. What is hard to see from here is that manga is much more broad in Japan that what bit of it we get exposed to here. American publishers are forced to focus on works that they think there are a market for; this means the most manga in English until now has been focused on young male readers.
- Schodt discusses 'gekiga' as a reaction to Tezuka, as a realist movement read by construction workers and college students.
CALLERS AND THEIR WEIRD QUESTIONS:
- Otaku culture notes from the guy who helped design the Hotel Tomo in San Francisco. The hotel is totally themed in anime/Japanese '90s pop culture, and is basically way over the top and insane.
- Why do nerds and computer geeks specifically also like anime and manga?
- Why do the humans all have big "Betty Boop" eyes in manga? (DERRRR) Short answer from Schodt: Blame Tezuka's love for Disney and early American animations.
- Questions about Adolf series-- Was Tezuka anti-semitic? Schodt dismisses this and talks about the breadth of subject matters in contemporary manga. He also mentions that he's re-reading an autobiographical manga by "an aquaintance of mine" about his time in Japanese jail: Sounds like he's talking about Kazuichi Hanawa's Doing Time. Dang, Schodt knows everybody!
- What do you recommend for a teenager studying Japanese that wants to try to read a manga in the original Japanese? Schodt says read a manga about something that you already like so it's easier to follow. Horn recommends the dude reads a Japanese manga magazine directed at young kids for practice.
- Caller asks about anti-war themes in Tezuka's work, and Schodt expands on these themes in Astro Boy and Jungle Emperor. Schodt also says that in America, the manga that is very popular is about robots, destruction and conflict, but that this is based more on supply & demand than prevalence and reiterates that Japanese manga covers board games, salaryman life, etc.
All in all, it was a pretty excellent hour of radio. Man, I've never heard something mispronounce the word manga so many times in one hour though. MAIN-ga, MEHN-ga but never 'manga'-- Not to be the otaku king who gets fussy about that sort of thing, but jeeez.
ENJOY!
First, many, many thanks to all entrants for your gag comics! We got a huge kick out of reading each one, and are working on a thank you gift for your guys (we'll email you soon with details). But, like Highlander and America's Next Top Model, there can be only one!
And the winner is... Sophia! Huge congrats to her for creating the winning 4-panel gag strip! We received 12 excellent entries, and found Sophia's strip to be the funniest and to best capture the spirit of yonkoma manga (and it's beautifully drawn too!).
Click this panel to read the full-sized version.
Sophia wins our love and admiration and, most importantly, her own copy of the very out-of-print Junji Ito horror collection, Flesh-Colored Horror. We are mailing your prize out to you today!
The runner-up for the contest came from Griffin, for this awesome strip:
Click this panel to read the full-sized version.
While we only had one copy of the Ito book to send out, we're mailing Griffin a copy of our scanlation booklet, The World of Same Hat! as his runner-up prize.
Thanks again to everyone for entering. I've already found a few more rare books that might become prizes in the future; YEP, we're definitely planning on holding another contest again soon!
Get thee to a comics bookery! I heard (through the grapevine) that despite a July 3 release date on Amazon, the final volume of DEATH NOTE will be hitting stores today!
'The battle ends here!'
I read Wikipedia and spoiled the ending for myself LONG AGO, but I'm still incredibly geeked to devour this final volume. And, can we please raise our hands in applause to Viz (and editor Pancha Diaz)? This marks a complete manga series (that doesn't suck) getting released without cancellation or year-long delays. That makes today an auspicious day!
More posts later today, including the GAG CONTEST WINNER announcement!
Quick update for peeps on the booklet list-- I've heard from 12 of you so far, and have already mailed out booklets to such exotic locales as Australia, Canada, New York, Texas, Georgia, and Utah. I'm still waiting to hear from the following folks, so please send me your contact information soon:
Chris Mautner, Jack, Erin, Yoshi, John Thomas, Ian Smith, Flemming
Looking forward to getting this out; I will post about extras once I hear from everyone on the first list.
I came up with the idea for a snazzy regular feature on Same Hat (NEW COMICS DAY!), but then promptly forgot to keep it up and got way behind. Goddamn it. This is fairly typical of how things operate around here. I think the main problem is that I hate writing manga reviews, and would rather stick to the type of posts you're used to: "OMG DIS MANGA IS THE FOOKIN' COOLEST THING EVARS LOLBBQ!!>?1!?" And really, isn't that more effective than like, thoughtful commentary and objective weighing of qualities that might inform your purchasing decisions?
But the last few weeks have included some quality goods, and I wanna get back on track. So, here's my roundup of the past few weeks of horror manga releases/purchases:
MPD PSYCHO Vol.1 from Dark Horse
THE GOOD:
+ The quality of the book production is impressive. Dark Horse had made it clear that they were taking MPD very seriously, promoting it online and talking about their commitment to the series in various places. It shows in the book itself, which features a beautiful, semi-embossed cover, really crisp images on a nice paper stock, and keeps the first few color pages of the volume intact. The book feels good in your hands. They also included an afterward and notes from creator Eiji Otsuka.
+ MPD Psycho is a scanlation-turned-legit success story. Despite what Dark Horse may or may not say on this point, it's clear that the original scanlations of MPD created a huge cult following that eventually helped convince Dark Horse to license and release it. I have a sense that DH, which as you guys all know have cancelled most of their other (non-Otsuka - Mail, Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service) horror titles, are putting all their horror manga tamagos in one basket. I have a feeling that MPD will be a success, and we'll see the entire run come out. The prevalence of the scanlations might be one factor encouraging DH to go all out on the production and quality of the MPD releases, and this is a good thing for consumers. Shorthand: YAY SCANLATORS-- You DO have an influence on the licensing and publishing decision process.
+ The story freaked me out and has a lot of promise. I had never read any of MPD Psycho (or seen the Takashi Miike series based on the manga), and a few of the sequences (cannibal public suicide, depotting a brain from a skull) really made me squirm and grossed me out. I'm interested to see where Otsuka takes the characters and setting he established in this first book.
THE BAD:
+ Exclusively gendered violence is not a good sign. I know that MPD is a famously gory and depraved manga, and that wouldn't be something to turn me away. What I really didn't like, however, was the exclusive depiction of one kind of fetishistic violence toward women depicted in this first volume. By my count, we meet two serial killers in this short book that both seem to put women in similar bondage gear, displaying them in stages of torture, before chopping them up and publicly displaying their corpses. I found the repetition of this visual (a tamer form of which also pops up often in Otsuka's Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service) a bit tiring and blech-making. You could argue that there WERE male victims at the hands of the aforementioned cannibal killer midway through the book, but all we get of these victims are a few shots framed as autopsy photos. The gore itself in MPD is not a problem, but I'm not going to stick around if we're facing volume after volume of the same type of rape-y violence against women.
+ The bold & italic font used through the book. This sounds like a dumb complaint, but after seeing the awesome production on this book, I was put off by the gnarly always bold, always italicized font they chose for the entire book. I really wish they would have gone with a more typical Comic Sans type font, and made wading through the confusing first few chapters a little easier.
VERDICT: I want to support this book because it's a scanlation-gone-legit, it's one of the darkest and creepiest mainstream titles available, and the book itself is really gorgeous. That said, I honestly didn't enjoy reading this first volume that much and hope the story improves in volume 2.
THE DRIFTING CLASSROOM Vol.6 from Viz
THE GOOD:
+ Time travel logic taken directly from Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure. My favorite part in that movie is when they're in the police station and make a mental note to go back in time later and place a radio to distract Bill's dad... and then, POW!, it's come to be just by the act of making that mental note. Except in Umezu's imagination, that same logic applies to stuffing medicine into a mummified corpse.
+ More present-day sequences with Sho's mom. She is extremely sympathetic, even as she: i) attacks a pro baseball player as he is running toward home plate, ii) spits on grieving mothers and throws the incense and flowers for their 'dead' children on the ground, and iii) cuts her own arm up in order to sneak into a hospital. You are awesome, Mrs. Takamatsu.
+ Killing off 1/2 of the entire school population in a 10 page sequence. Mr. Umezu, you amaze me.
THE BAD:
+ This intensity is NOT sustainable. With 5 more volumes left, Umezu has left me wondering how he can POSSIBLY keep up this shit without it unraveling.
+ People's heads and arms aren't supposed to fly off during a flash flood. This was awesome but HONESTLY??
+ That's about it. This series is radical. The only bad news is having to wait a few more months for volume 7!
VERDICT: Drifting Classroom is Umezu in rare form, and each new volume of this series is a serious treat to tear through.
THE ART OF HIDESHI HINO from Last Gasp
THE GOOD:
+ Tons of previously unseen art and paintings. The book contains about 30-40 pages of full-color paintings depicting Hino's usual suspects: Urban hellscapes, mutated bug boys and hell babies, lizards fucking humans, landfills and annihilation. Ridiculous and awesome stuff.
+ New comics in translation. After the paintings, you get three complete horror tales, "Memories of the Mermaid," "The Red Fruit," and "The Snow Flower." I especially dug the mermaid one, which looks especially nice in full color!
+ Blurbs and introductions from Maruo and Mizuno mean you are a badass. I'll try to scan Maruo's insane introduction, titled "Pseudo Amida Sutra of a Dreaming Embryo." It's very short, but something to behold.
THE BAD:
+ The quality of the pages is not great. Sadly, when you look at the painting reproductions, on some of them you can make out blurriness and what looks like the edges of inket printing. It's fantastic to see this stuff in color, but the actual images and book production is lacking in crispness and quality.
+ I love Hino, but I want to see underrepresented horror manga-ka in English. Hino has seen a LARGE share of his manga translated into English (for better or for worse), and I'd love to see others get their chance to reach and English-speaking audience.
THE VERDICT: This isn't the book I'd recommend to a casual manga fan, but for the Hideshi Hino fanatics and completists this is a MUST GET.
In other news-- we're still accepting submissions for the 4-Panel Gag Manga contest! Send yours tonight to beat the deadline!! Evan and I will decide a winner tomorrow and post the results (and ship out that copy of Junji Ito's Flesh-Colored Horror) on Tuesday morning.
As for the World of Same Hat booklets, I put 11 copies in the mail on Friday, and have a few ready to drop at the post office tomorrow on my lunch break. Once I've heard from people on the original list, I'll try to come up with a fair way to get rid of any extras. Thanks again!
