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...it's a possibility, if you are in Tokyo!
Posted on Shintaro Kago's site comes news that he'll be appearing at a opening reception and screening at Tokyo's avant-gallery, Cafe FLYING TEAPOT.
This event is the highlight of 2-week gallery show of works by Shintaro Kago. Kago will be in person at the Halloween night show, featuring a screening of new animated works, along with some ghastly figurines and toys. Entrance is 1000円, and doors open at 6:30pm.
Also, for sale at the event will be:
Manga collections, new dojinshi, his dvd of animated films, post cards, prints, limited edition toys and original drawings and works.
My buddy Nate (who just moved to central Tokyo for a year, and authored the "DEPARTMENT FOR IMPLEMENTING 15 KINDS OF VIOLENT DEATH" feature in Electric Ant #1)) will be attending the event in my stead, and sending pictures and details over the weekend. Cafe FLYING TEAPOT is located in Nerima-ku, a little north of Nakano and west of Waseda. Full event details at Kago's site (link above).
THANK YOU FOR HOOKING US UP, NATE!
Just saw these yesterday on Mr. Butcher's always informative comics212. Here are the retro-stylish covers for the first two English editions of 20th Century Boys (shout out to my buddy Kit who is editing this great series). Viz will begin serializing Naoki Urasawa's epic 20th Century Boys on February 17, 2009-- and also launching his Pluto series that same day. Begin preparing your wallets now...
Volume 1: 2/17/09
Volume 2: 4/21/09
PS: Happy wedding anniversary, Chris!
Interesting news, courtesy of Johnny:
It seems that starting in the current October issue of Vice, Shintaro Kago now has a monthly comics page in Vice. He joins Johnny, Ted May and a scant few other cartoonists who've been give this opportunity.
I'm gonna hunt around this week for a copy, but shoot me an email in the meantime if you grabs it and wants to send me scans. Vice should be posting the page on their site sometime in the next week or so.
Short post here, checking in on an old thing I blogged about last year. Remember that huge and lovely Midori tattoo, gracing the back of Suehiro Maruo fangirl Beth?
Back then, Evan had spotted her tattoo in a Japanese tattoo magazine at New York's Kinokuniya bookstore. Well, on a Snowblood Apple forum thread, I heard that the same tattoo now graces a tattoo portrait book! The book is called, Permanence: Tattoo Portraits by Kip Fulbeck.
Here is thumbnail of the book cover:
In it, each subject has a hand-written note about the meaning and story behind their tattoo, which is displayed next to their photograph. I tried Amazon.co.uk but wasn't able to view the page with the Maruo tattoo. If anyone has this book or could photograph that page, I'd love to see what Beth said about it...
For a few other manga tattoos, please click the label link below (or here). Do you have an interesting manga tattoo you'd want to share? Send me an email at samehatATgmailDOTcom!
I wanted to share a good read from one of the absolute best blogs about Tokyo, the infamous Tokyo Damage Report. TDR is written by a Bay Area expat named Schultz. Schultz is a renaissance man-- a singer, photographer, punk, and even nihongo rapper. The dude does it all!
TDR is my favorite in-country blog about Japan for a bunch of reasons, but the main one is that it's free from the self-obsessed, boring and often orientalist bullshit perspective of a lot of blogs about Japan by foreigners. Schultz doesn't forget that he's a white dude living abroad, but he's learned the language, lived there for years, been in Tokyo bands, and really knows his shit.
His blogging specialities include a guide to Tokyo (where I originally heard about Nakano Broadway!) metal and punk show reports, insane japanese trade show photojournalism, fetish club and disco parties, and the occasional interview. He also created an unique Kanji-learning dictionary, which I recommend if you're past the intro levels in your studies.
This week, he's published an intriguing and right-on interview with Hiroko Yoda and Matt Alt, the writer/translator couple responsible for the book, YOKAI ATTACK.
YOKAI ATTACK is a illustrated trivia and guide book, breaking down all the Japanese yokai monster myths, along with some contemporary twists on the folklore. You should know yokai by now from Miike's The Great Yokai War, Umezu's Cat Eyed Boy and Tezuka's Dororo series, for starters. Here's a quick excerpt from the interview:
TDR: Earlier, you said that part of the motivation for the book was cultural exchange . . . did researching yokai give you some insight into Japanese culture? I mean, it must have taken a certain kind of culture to create folk-tales with these unique traits ?
MA: Normally when you see yokai illustrations and wood-block prints you see them in a museum, in a textbook, in a very academic setting very divorced from how they were actually consumed back in the 1700s. One of the things that really struck me is how cosmopolitan and well-developed the Japanese sense of humor was, even hundreds of years ago. They’re filled with gags, satire… These illustrations overflow with humanity. These books, particularly Sekien, weren’t some formal thing that was presented to the Emperor on some special holy day - they were like the best-selling manga of that time. People gathered around, reading and laughing. “Hey, I know a guy like that!!” kind of thing. So to take that and live it day in and day out, and appreciate it and experience it the way that the people at the time experienced it, was one of the great things about doing this book.
For more info about the book and authors, Matt runs a solid blog about Japan, and YOKAI ATTACK is available in bookstores (or you can get it from Amazon).
CLICK TO READ THE ENTIRE INTERVIEW!
I am very, very excited to share some fantastic news for Same Hat readers, and for all fans of indie manga and experimental cartooning... Top Shelf will be publishing a 400 page AX ANTHOLOGY, a selection of stories from the bimonthly underground manga anthology AX... all available in English for the first time!
(Here is the front and back cover to a 16 page AX Anthology sampler to be given away at Alternative Press Expo!)
We've posted extensively about AX before, but remember that it's an anthology book published by Seirinkogeisha, that took up the reins of GARO after they closed their doors and ran with the weirdness. Tokyo Zombie originally was serialized in AX, along with works and interviews of Suehiro Maruo, Shinichi Abe, Nishioka Kyoudai, Naoto Yamakawa(Oops, he was in Comix Beam), Usamaru Furuya, Toshio Saeki, Akino Kondoh, Yoshihiro Tatsumi, Toyo Kataoka, and many many many other amazing mangaka.
I don't have anything to do with this book, but recently learned about it and got permission to break the news to ya'll (and of course, am supremely jealous I didn't get to edit or translate for the book!). The full table of contents details have not yet been made available, but I hope to hear more specifics this Fall and post them here.
This gigantic book was co-edited by author Sean Michael Wilson and AX co-founder Mitsuhiro Asakawa. Sean is a comic book writer from Scotland, now an ex-pat living and working in Japan. He's published a number of books, nine graphic novels, and his first English- Japanese-language manga was published this past summer. Asakawa-san is an author and current editor of AX, and worked in the 90s on the staff of GARO, along with writing a number of books on alternative manga and gekiga.
At Alternative Press Expo next weekend, Sean will be doing an presentation on gekiga and presenting rare images from the early, emergent days of the genre. He'll also be there with a 16pg sampler of the AX ANTHOLOGY on hand to give away. I'll be helping run the presentation (and on hand to score my own copy of the sampler, duh!). Details from the APE Site...
SUN, 5:00-5:45: AX and Gekiga: Alternative Manga in Japan—Sean Michael looks at the roots and contemporary state of indy/alternative manga in Japan, using rare and unseen visuals supplied by the original Gekiga creators of the 1950s and 1960s and info from the editors of AX, the premier alternative anthology in Japan today. Plus, a preview of the upcoming book AX Collection (Top Shelf), which presents a selection of this indy manga for the first time in English.
I'm hoping to do an interview with Sean (and Leigh at Top Shelf) and post more details later this fall. What AX creators are you guys most looking forward to reading in English?
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!
