ANN and other sites are reporting that Asahi Shinbun recently announced the winners of the 13th Annual Osamu Tezuka Cultural Prize, which honors the highest achievements each year in manga in Japan.
The grand prize was shared between two worthy and cool titles, Ooku by Fumi Yoshinaga and A Drifting Life by Yoshihiro Tatsumi.
The coolest part? Suehiro Maruo's book, Panorama-tou Kidan (The Strange Tale of Panorama Island) won the New Artist Prize! CONGRATS, UNCLE MARUO!
As I've blogged about before (and any self-respecting Same Hat reader should know), the book is a ~300 page adaptation of a novella by Japanese detective fiction godfather, Edogawa Rampo. The story takes place at the end of the Taisho era, and follows an unsuccessful science fiction author with an uncanny resemblance to a former classmate/son of a rich industrialist family. When the industrialist's son dies, the author fakes his own death, digs up and hides the other man's body, then washes himself up starving on a beach in a town where the dead man's family lives. After some more intrigue and scheming, he proceeds to take redirect all of their money to build a mysterious pleasure palace island, and live like a sensual weirdo king. Crazy and amazing stuff!
I've read this book 4 or 5 times now, and I absolutely love it--- It's by far Maruo's most elegant and beautiful line work to date, and his pages coupled with Rampo's excellent (albeit crazy/abrupt at the end!) and twisted tale = TOTAL WIN.
In addition to the prestige and bump in book sales, "1 million yen (US$10,000) goes to the winner of the New Artist Prize. The prize will be awarded to the winners in person on June 5 in Tokyo. FRESH.
Here is a nice change of pace around these parts-- another set of rad Suehiro Maruo tattoo photographs!
These come from SH reader Matt, who had them done by artist Jane Laver at Chapel Tattoo in Melbourne, Australia. Thanks, Matt!
As usual, RSS folks please click through to view the PictoBrowser galleries! Mouse over the gallery for captions.
Do you have a cool manga tattoo that you want to share with the community? Shoot me an email at samehat [AT] gmail [DOTCOM]. Click to see other posts featuring [tattoos] on Same Hat. I'm just sortaaa starting to think about maybe getting one myself later this year with my GF-- have a few ideas but I'm still too gunshy and have my doubts. What do you guys thinks would make a rad indie/horror manga tattoo?
This past weekend, my buddy Nate was in town from Tokyo and we had a blast catching up. In between eating burritos, drinking beers, and a metal show in Oakland, Nate handed over some amazing Shintaro Kago presents he picked up for me last Fall!
As you might recall, Nate met Kago twice last year- first at a gallery show/signing on Halloween, and then again at Design Festa. Between the two events, Nate managed to wrangle me a signed Shintaro Kago digital print, a bunch of postcards, and a copy of the Paranoia Street DVD!
As usual, RSS folks please click through to view the PictoBrowser galleries! Mouse over the gallery for captions.
(At my bequest, he was also rad enough to get Kago to sign a card for Johnny too!)
In addition to the goodies for me, Nate brought with him a present for our buddy Ben- a Kago self-published mini featuring a bunch of krasue gags! This book is en route to Ben right now, but Nate let me snap these photos before he dropped it in the mail:
I'm still figuring out the what & when, but plan to give away some of the postcards as Same Hat contest presents in the near future. I'll keep you guys posted!
After all the KagoTube posts, I wanted to revisit Kazuo Umezu's own YouTube channel. Umezz (with Demerin's help, naturally) has continued to post goofy and interesting clips.
Here is his most recent clip, featuring a bevy of paper masks, GWASHI hands and a strange giant-sized naked Umezu cut-out! (The cut-out feature Umezu's face on a big reproduction of a naked figurine. YES). Enjoy:
I'm a day late in posting, so many of you probably have already seen this... Shintaro Kago added a new short to his YouTube channel, じゃんけん/Rock, Paper, Scissors. Enjoy!
PS: In related news, Nate brought me some Kago goodies I'll post about soon: A DVD of animated shorts, Kago postcards for a contest, and... a signed print!
I have to take a second to give a shout-out to an awesome and auspicious blog debut by longtime reader and Same Hat friend, zytroop! He has launched a brand new weirdo manga/Japan blog called KURUTTA!
Kurutta launched with a Jun Togawa clip (awesome) and for its first legit post, collects a HUGE gallery of record covers and liner art by Suehiro Maruo over the years. This is a fucking wild collection, with many I had never seen before. He also includes a YouTube clip of a video from "Michiro Endo's old project VIDEO STALIN" that is a real treat.
In the comments of the 4th anniversary post, jimpac asked for a post sharing pics and details about TACO che. I've had dozens of photos saved up and now that I've been kicked in the pants (and found a happy solution for hosting lots of pictures with PictoBrowser), it's time to post everything!
Folks reading on RSS: PictoBrowser doesn't play nice with you, so please click through and come see the 100+ photos! Mouse over 'Notes' to read the photo captions.
If you've been reading Same Hat for a while, you've probably heard me talk about the Nakano Broadway Mall. It's located just west of Shinjuku, and home to a sprawling complex of strange, otaku stores-- including the massive 15+ Mandarake shops. It's like a more underground and less commercialized version of Akiba, minus the foreign tourists with cameras and with more of the stuff we all like. How to get to Nakano Broadway and maps/pics from the Mandarake shops can be found here.
Last Spring, my GF and I went to Japan for two weeks, and I managed to fit two trips to the greatest shop in Nakano Broadway (and quite possibly, my favorite shop of any kind in the world), TACO che!! I was originally told about the shop by my German buddy Ben (who gavee me the Shintaro Kago Bullying kit from there back in 2007). TACO che is pretty much THE underground manga shop of your dreams. They don't have a specific tie to any one publisher, but I heard that the owner is close with the folks that fun Seirinkogeisha. The shop carries fan zines, dojinshi, along with nearly every title by Seirinkogeisha, EnterBrain/Beam and all the other indies we love.
The shop is located on the 3rd floor, in the general vicinity of the northwest end of the Nakano Broadway mall. Here are some shots from inside the store. The place is tiny, but every square foot is something cool and tempting:
These photos are all from March 2008, and reflect the books and goods that were hot at the time. Kazuo Umezu's 50th Anniversary (of his career in manga) celebration was in full force, and the store was crammed full of incredible Umezz goods:
In my two trips to the shop, I spent (eeek) over 300 bucks and filled a suitcase with books. I didn't really have 300 bucks to spend on comics, but I. JUST. COULDN'T. HELP. MYSELF. In addition to the bigger pubs and indie zines I mentioned above, TACO che also publishes their own occasional zines and pamphlets (which are insanely excellent, like this). Here is just a small smattering of the manga gems I am talking about:
Not content to be simply the BOOK store of our dreams, TACO che also carries limited edition shirts, toys and DVDs, including Suehiro Maruo posters made just for TACO che (sorry, I can't find that pic at the moment, will take one of the miniposter on my wall). Here are some of the shirts:
And here are some of the goodies:
They also carry lapel pins by all our favorites:
I tried to include good captions for all those pics, but if you have any questions (or corrections!) leave a comment here! You can see the photos directly at the non-flashy Same Hat flickr, which I'm using just to store pics for PictoBrowser to pull from.
TACO che continues to be the epicenter for all the manga and art we all love so much, so I'll keep my eyes ope on their blog and post interesting news. In the coming month or so, TACO che will be hosting signing events with Takashi Nemoto and Jun Hayami- hopefully Nate or Schultz can check those out for us!!
Here's another quick, stolen-from-Umezz.com article while I finalize some captions for the 108 Taco Che post pictures. According to a recent post, Kazuo Umezu created a piece and participated in the 101TOKYO Contemporary Art Fair 2009. The fair is an expo of pop and fine art, held annually in Tokyo and going on now from April 2 - 5.
For a "CHARART" (character + art?) comics exhibit, Umezz created a new art print with some Sony Digital tie-in. The piece is signed by Umezz and features a creepy, noir-ish image from a 1969 Orochi comic of his.
Rocking the Gwashi! in front of his piece.
I don't see Demerin, who are these other fools?
Signing the print... inside the Makoto-chan house!
Sony logo aside, this is pretty wicked.
If you happen to be in Tokyo, it's 10 bucks to check out the event, though their website didn't make it seem quite up our alley (beyond the Umezu-connection). Nate won't be attending because dude will be in California this week! We are hanging out this weekend, and I hear he's bringing signed Kago goodies for me (and stuff to give away via Same Hat). Will keep you guys posted!
Updated: SAME HAT stopped updating in 2013! For all new projects, please see Youth in Decline's sit and Instagram.
All fan translations of manga that you'll see in the archives are previously untranslated into English and range from comedy to horror to avant-absurd weirdness.
Same Hat is written & edited by Ryan. If you would like to contact me, please email: samehat @ gmail.com. Also, you can Ask me anything on the Same Hat Tumblr!
