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Quick update, Tom Spurgeon at The Comics Reporter has posted a great review of Tokyo Zombie. In brief, he says (among other things),
Hankuma's art is crude and evocative and funny in and of itself, something you might see from an artist angry that his well-rendered work didn't sell and so he's set out to create an entire comic for his own benefit while sitting in the garage high on rubber cement. I could have 200 more pages.
In other news, here's a picture of disheveled Evan and tired-ass, bleary-eyed me at San Diego! (thanks, pegs!)
After a short but needed hiatus, our friend Rizzah over at Wanted: Cheap Manga has just posted the latest chapter of Dance! Kremlin Palace! by Shintaro Kago.
This time around it's SPREADS, SPREADS, SPREADS. This chaper focuses on grisly and fanciful visions of the fall of the USSR, and features seven amazing (but gnarly) two-page spreads to tell the tale. I don't think it's just because I often have him on the brain, but I definitely feel a heavy homage here to Suehiro Maruo's infamous Planet of the Jap, especially in the final page.
As Rizzah describes this chapter,
The newest chapter of DKP is an apocalyptic future prediction for Kago’s surreal USSR. As usual, he takes stereotypes to the extreme, causing the utter collapse of the country. Some pretty brutal images (see above), so don’t read this at work (save it ’till your mom walks in the room!).
Click to download Chapter 5 from Wanted: Cheap Manga!
ENJOY!
On the trip to San Diego Comic Con, I managed to take only a mere 15 pictures the entire time. Ridiculous, I know. This always seems to happen when Evan and I travel, as he's the one with the 12x zoom handheld and the massive SLR. I rely (happily) on homeboy to capture everything. On account of that, I don't yet have my San Diego post ready, but will work on it tonight. In brief, it was: Exhausting! Great to see a bunch of our buddies and so many kings and queens of indie comicsdom! Extremely satisfying to see folks buying copies of Tokyo Zombie! Also, did I mention exhausting?!
A better summary post (with pics of folks we meet, a comic debut by friends, and new goodies from the con and Book Off) soon. In the meantime, I'm happy to report that the "Official" Disneyland Autograph Book was in full force at SDCC. Here are the newest additions to the batch from MoCCA earlier this year:
Gary Baseman. He signed at the Last Gasp book to promote his newest book.
Adrian Tomine. I've met him a few times through friends-of-friends, and finally got him to put down a sketch for me!
Edgar Wright! Director of Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz and one of the greatest TV shows of all time (HOLY CRAP). I sadly missed the Spaced panel (more on that in the trip report post) but ran into him on the floor. I tried to give him a copy of Tokyo Zombie but he claimed to already have it (I think he meant the original Japanese edition!?) and was familiar with Hanakuma's comics :)
Jim Woodring. I was retardo dumbstruck to have him sign my book. Seriously. (Also, Pupshaw looks adorable, no?)
Dame Darcy. The Dame signed at Fantagraphics, and was promoting her upcoming post-apocalyptic graphic novel, Gasoline.
Dash Shaw. Indie cartooning prince and author of the impressive Bottomless Belly Button. Dash shocked me by revealing he reads Same Hat and is heavily into manga. He sketched a scene of Tatsumigaoka (where he spent a year abroad in high school) and a Hanakuma homage.
Johnny Ryan. Our American patron saint, Johnny signed at both Fantagraphics and Buenaventura, and debuted Loady and Sinus figurines at the con. He's also working on editing the upcoming Comics issue of Vice, which may include some international materials right up Same Hat's alley.
Esther Pearl Watson. Like Gary Panter and Tom Neely, she stuck with the Disneyland theme. I try to buy any and everything she and partner Mark Todd put out, and managed to grab 4 issues of HERO LAND and her new Romeo & Juliet comic.
THE DISNEYLAND AUTOGRAPH BOOKS MAY BE COMING TO A CON NEAR YOU: SPX in October, APE in November!
Thanks to everyone who has already started adding shops and hot spots to the SAME HAT GUIDE TO EVERYTHING. I realize that I could have provided better details in yesterday's post on how to actually add places to the map. Here is a quick step-by-step on using the map, with the New York takoyaki stand Otafuku as an example.
STEP 1: When you're viewing the Same Hat Guide to Everything, click on the [Edit] button on the left side to start adding stuff or making changes to other people's stuff on the map.
STEP 2: When you click [Edit], new little tools will show up at the top of the map frame, including a icon marker thingy, a line tool for drawing routes, and a blobby-looking tool for drawing areas and shapes. In this case, I know where Otafuku is on the block, and clicked the icon marker thingy there on the block in the East Village.
STEP 3: Now that the placeholder is there, it's time to start the magic. I'm sharing as much detail as I have, which in this case is my experience there and a picture from Yelp. If I know the hours they were open or had specific recommendations on times to go or what to order, I should add them too.
I also clicked the upper right icon to bring up a menu to choose other icons. This is a "restaurant" so I'm using the food icon that's already there. You can also use the Same Hat-specific icons Evan and I made, or upload your own. Once I'm all done, I clicked Save (I actually saved a few times along the way so I wouldn't lose my progress). Then click Done to stop editing the map, and view it as everyone else will see it. Booyah, you are now officially an altruistic, contributing member of the Same Hat community!
ALSO: If you are using Google Maps for something unrelated, but look up a place that'd be good for SHGTE, you can simply click "Save to My Maps". This will automatically create a placeholder in that spot in SHGTE (with the address and details if available pre-loaded) and you can simply customize and save the entry from there.
Let me know if you have any questions. Otherwise:
CLICK HERE TO START ADDING STUFF
Writing this on a plane returning home to San Francisco from a weekend back in my hometown, I'm feeling contemplative about where I "exist" and how I connect with people I care about. Like probably everyone, I have my own rituals, reminders and rules for trying to keep up-- on family, on friends, on my projects, on information (Damn you, Google Reader! You are both a boon and a CURSE). Hand-in-hand with all that jazz, I've been thinking about Same Hat and what role "community" should play in our site.
At this point, I've been writing Same Hat for more than 2.5 years and our traffic is beefier than I ever imagined it'd get. But, we're not a huge site by any measure. Through the blog, I've been able to make some awesome IRL friends and exchanged emails and passed on reading recommendations with similar-minded weirdos. We've also gotten hooked up with a wild bunch of cartoonists, writers and artists from around the world, and in some cases introduced these people to eachother; The latest and best example being the badass T-shirt collaboration between master shirtmaker David (SEIBEI) and comix demigoddess Hellen Jo, which debuted recently at Renegade SF and will be on sale online as soon as David is back from Europe.
Despite all this, I'm not sure that Same Hat or its readership is quite hefty enough to sustain a forum just yet. I'd love to have a place to dish with everyone, but nothing is more depressing and hideous as running a ghost town forum with no posts (except by the moderator, sometimes under fake names desperately attempting to seed threads). The best stand-in for a forum in the meantime is the comments, and I'm sure I can speak for all the regular readers when I say thanks to the hardcore folks leaving updates, questions and links for us all to check out. The comments seriously make my day and often lead me off on crazy hyperlink goose chases for even more stuff to read up on. You guys are awesome.
So what should come next? I've been talking to Evan about a project to tackle after Electric Ant #1 is final-fucking-ly finished, and before we start work on the next book (oh shit!)... The plan is to finally migrate over to samehat.com, which I've been squatting for over a year while being too lazy to build a proper site. In the meantime, I wanna get started with what is the first Same Hat community project, something I plan to turn into its own section of the new site. Without further ado, let me invite you to take part in...
THE SAME HAT GUIDE TO EVERYTHING!
The Guide (or um...SHGTE) is an open and editable Google Map, detailing any and all spots of interest to rabid Same Hat geeks.
View Larger Map
Anyone can participate and edit any entry, and anywhere in the world is fair game for inclusion. The only requirement is that you sign in with a Google Account (your gmail or blogger username, etc) so that it knows to attribute your entry to you.
If you haven't used the Google Maps My Maps feature, it's basically a way to create custom maps by pinpointing specific spots (think: The Kazuo Umezu Makoto-chan house), insertings overlays (think: A scanned floorplan to the Nakano Broadway mall's shops) or drawing custom routes and shapes (think: A walking tour of Brooklyn or Berlin, hitting the best comic and used-book stores in a neighborhood).
You can choose the icon associated with each entry you add, and Google provides pre-made icons to denote shops, train stations, and shopping. Evan and I also whipped up a few Same Hat icons for Sentai toy shops and Umezu, Maruo and Kago-related hot spots. You are also totally and completely welcome to add your own custom icons as well!
So, what should you add to the map? I envision this map to be in partially a guide to Japan for visitors heading over, and partially a repository of local tips from where you like to hang out. I've started adding things to San Francisco, Tokyo and Kansai to seed some ideas on formatting. If you need some tips on writing entries, I strongly recommend Schutlz's Tokyo Damage Report Guide to Tokyo, which is some of the funniest and smartest guide writing online.
With the SHGTE, the focus isn't on duplicating the work of others, but thinking about what your fellow readers would have in common with you and wanna know about; Basically what is the shit you'd send in an email to a friend going to that/your city for the first time? Some ideas include:
+ The best manga shops in Sao Paolo
+ A custom doll shop and gallery in Akihabara that displays Suehiro Maruo's paintings
+ The Osamu Tezuka museum (and the train route to get there from Kyoto)
+ A club with a monthly gothic lolita cosplay night in Athens
+ The restaurant in Kichijoji where you spotted Demerin out eating soba and playing gameboy
I won't be moderating the map per se, but might remove wildly off-topic or spam entries or fix formatting on confusing text. Otherwise,I leave it to you guys to play with and fill up. There is now a link on the sidebar ,and I plan on adding a few spots a day as we build the site. This is OUR resource, and I'm geeked to benefit from you sharing the wealth.
CLICK HERE TO START ADDING TO IT!
If you have any questions about how to use the map or suggestions on how to improve it, leave them here! After SDCC I'm planning to roll out Same Hat community feature #2.
[UPDATE]: I've posted a brief "How-To" on adding stuff to the map here.
