LAST GASP TO PUBLISH "THE STRANGE TALE OF PANORAMA ISLAND"

NOW IT CAN BE TOLD! We are extremely excited to share the news that Last Gasp has licensed and will be publishing Suehiro Maruo's beautiful masterpiece "The Strange Tale of Panorama Island" (パノラマ島綺譚). Kudos to readers that guessed the book already! :)



As with Tokyo Zombie, Evan Hayden and I will be adapting the title for English audiences-- with Evan handling the book production, design and lettering, and me tackling the translation (with friends' help) and editing the book with Last Gasp's Colin Turner.

The Japanese edition was published by EnterBrain and is around 275 pages. This English edition will be only Suehiro Maruo's third book released in English (after Creation Books' "Ultra-Gash Inferno" and Blast Books' "Mr. Arashi's Amazing Freak Show"). The publication is planned for Spring 2010, and some of the book release details are still being hammered out. Generally speaking, it's rare for a publisher to announce a title license this early in the process, but we are all so excited we wanted to share the news as soon as possible.

About the book, from previous posts:

Panorama is an 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!

Evan, Colin and I will be working hard over the coming weeks and months, and I probably won't have any updates in the immediate future. But later on, I'll be sharing tons of details on the process and title here at Same Hat.

So um... is anyone excited?!

NEW MARUO BOOK: "RAMPO PANORAMA"

As some of you have perhaps already seen on my twitter or on the EnterBrain site, a new book was released by Suehiro Maruo this month in Japan! Unlike his last two works, this release is more of an art book than a proper manga. But like his last few published works, the theme of this collection is the world and works of the king of Japanese noir & macabre, Edogawa Rampo!

The book is titled RAMPO PANORAMA, and looks really stunning:

I've ordered a copy via my local Kinokuniya, and will be picking it up after work tomorrow. Full details on the book size/cost are all on the EnterBrain online shop. From my understanding (and hearing from Same Hat buddy Ho-Ling), the book includes the following things:

• A collection of various Rampo-inspired paintings, drawings, album art, etc. from Suehiro Maruo's long career.


• Sketches and designs from Maruo's work on The Strange Tale of Panorama Island and Caterpillar, his previous longer-form adaptations of Rampo stories.


• Maruo's third manga adaptation of an Edogawa Rampo story, a shorter manga this time of 踊る一寸法師 (Odoru Odoru Isshunboush - Dancing Dwarf).


• Nice art book paper stock and a great painted cover.

I'm not sure exactly how long it is or more specifics yet, but I'm planning to post pictures of this book over the weekend, once I've gotten my hands on my own copy! Have any of you seen the book in person? What do you think of it?

ALL THE NEWS THAT'S FIT TO TYPE IN 5 MINUTES

Trying to stick to a more frequent posting schedule, so here's three separate tidbits from the past week.

+ NEW COMIC BY SUEHIRO MARUO!

Via the TACO CHE blog, I learned that BEAM COMIX released a new Suehiro Maruo book on 2/25/2008! The new manga is an adaptation on the of Edogawa Rampo's infamous classic, パノラマ島奇談 (The Strange Tale of Panorama Island - panorama-tou kidan).

Rampo wrote The Strange Tale of Panorama Island back in 1926, during the height of the erotic-grotesque nonsense literary stew of the Taisho era. From what I gathered on Maruo's site, it's partially a faithful adaptation of Rampo's story, and partially a visual reinterpretation-- perhaps akin to his take on The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, or Philip K Dick's stories?

Maruo seems indebted to Edogawa Rampo's themes and style more than almost any other figure, so this seems like an perfect match. I'm DEFINITELY gonna pick this up during my trip, and will post some images when I get back. Has anyone checked it out yet?

+ RED-COLORED ELEGY AND THIRD TATSUMI COLLECTION DELAYED

Heard this week from Drawn & Quarterly that their two big announced (so far) manga titles for 2008 have been delayed. Instead of April releases, Seiichi Hayashi's Red Colored Elegy and Goodbye, the third in their series of Yoshihiro Tatsumi collections, have been delayed until July.

This change is already reflected on Amazon, which shows both titles coming out on July 8. I'm bummed that we have to wait two more months for these books, but if it's to finalize the production and get everything ironed out just right for the release, then it'll definitely be worth the wait.

+ TOMINE'S NEXT COMIC WILL BE... IN COLOR?
According to a friend who was at a recent signing and talk by Adrian Tomine, his next comics project will be a story for the next volume of Kramer's Ergot, and it will be a color comic. It sounds like Tomine is consciously trying to break from his previous materials, habits and subject matter, and told attendees of the talk that he won't be using his usual materials on this story either.

Tomine all loosey goosey and in color? I'm actually pretty interested to see how that'd turn out. He's already shown he can do funny and spontaneous (in his Scenes from an Impending Marriage mini comic that was given out to wedding guests), but can he do... experimental stuff? We'll see...

CHAPTER 3 OF SUEHIRO MARUO'S IMOMUSHI

Another month, another creepy and disturbingly good chapter of Suehiro Maruo's fantastic Imomushi was released. Chapter 3 debuted in the August issue of COMIC BEAM, which came out in July and arrived at my local Kinokuniya last week.



Check out my first post for details on the plot of Edogawa Rampo's short story, The Caterpillar.

I heard from Moni again, it turns out that Chapter 4 is the final installment of Imomushi. It came out last week in Japan, and that issue of COMIC BEAM features a commemorative Maruo clear file insert thingy. Four chapters doesn't add up to a full-length book, so I wonder what Maruo has up his sleeve next. Perhaps another Rampo adaptation to publish together in a Panorama Island-length book from EnterBrain? Here's hoping!

ENJOY THESE PAGES/PANELS FROM CHAPTER 3:


Like in Panorama Island, the new chapter of Imomushi starts with parallels to Taisho spectacle and technologies to make its points. Here, Tokiko visits a fair featuring peephole painted scenes.


The peephole scenes depict events from famous stories and dramatized news accounts.


Subtle and disturbing scene of Tokiko encountering a used condom on her walk back to her home (and her disfigured husband Lt. Sunaga).


Trouble brewing on the home front. Maruo employs an interesting mix of formal panel layouts on some pages and broken, jagged flow on others.


DOSUN! The sound of a limbless man falling over and flopping angrily?


Many opportunities are taken to depict 1920s storefronts and urban life.


Don't try to look away from Sunaga's disfigurement.


Did I mention this comic is way more NSFW than Panorama Island? SEMI-METAPHORIC SEX FANTASY TIME.


DEVIL'S IN THE DETAILS


DEVIL'S IN THE DETAILS (part two)

I heard from my friend Moni that the September issue features the fourth and final chapter of Imomushi. This issue came out a few days ago in Japan, I should have it in my hands the second week of September :) It doesn't seem long enough to make up a book... I wonder what Maruo is planning for his next manga?

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, EDOGAWA RAMPO

Just wanted to give a quick happy birthday shout-out to one of my all-time favorite authors, Mr. Edogawa Rampo. October 21 marks his 115th birthday, and with the recent Japanese releases of Suehiro Maruo's manga adaptations of The Strange Tale of Panorama Island and Caterpillar, Rampo continues to be relevant and prevalent in Japanese popular culture.

Here was my tribute post last year, with a photo of his grave (marked with his birth name, Hirai Taro).

As it's already 10/21 in Japan, Google has marked the godfather of Japanese mystery fiction's birthday with a commemorative doodle:

I actually have that exact book (少年探偵団 - Shounen Tanteidan, Youth Detective Squad) sitting on my desk in front of me. I've been reading it slowly to try to get steeped in Rampology this month as I get back to work on Panorama Island.

Which was also made into a Japanese TV show:


With accompanying toys:


UPDATE: Same Hat friend Ho-Ling has just posted his translation of Edogawa Rampo's One Person, Two Identities. Check it out right here. 

SUEHIRO MARUO WINS OSAMU TEZUKA CULTURAL PRIZE!

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.

DID IT JUST GET HOT IN HERE?

Hey guys, so um... I have been waiting to post news about this until it was really real, because of the near-mythical status is has accumulated after many false starts and anticipation over the last few years. 

But listen up now finally:

THE STRANGE TALE OF PANORAMA ISLAND by Suehiro Maruo is coming soon from Last Gasp. I will have copies for sale at my booth at Toronto Comics Art (TCAF) in May! That's the cover above, except the actual book will have gold-foil printing for the text. And it's hardcover and 274 pages. Will be available online and through stores in the U.S. officially soon after, starting in late-June.

And in case you still don't believe me, here are some proofs from the overseas printer that we approved yesterday: 

Also: I just posted on the Same Hat Tumblr the logo designed by my extremely talented friend Jillian Tamaki for "Frontier" - a quarterly art and comics zine I'll be putting out as part of my new publishing house I'm starting this year.

Holy hell, YES -- I'm finally taking the plunge and becoming "a publisher"...!?
I'm currently busy working on all the mundane and exciting preparations to make everything happen; I have very limited and modest goals for release in the first year or so of doing this, and I still am keeping my full time day job and Same Hat going all the while. I am extremely excited to be able to share more details on the company and first issue of this new series in the coming months. The current plan is to debut Frontier #1 at TCAF alongside The Strange Tale of Panorama Island. You should come to the festival... It's gonna be a doozy!

THE STRANGE TALE OF PANORAMA ISLAND: Now Available!

Guys, oh my god Guysssssss. GUYS!

The Strange Tale of Panorama Island by Suehiro Maruo is now on sale and available direct from the publisher, Last Gasp!!!


CLICK HERE TO ORDER

The book is hefty and sexy, and over-sized at 6" x 8.5" with gold-foil on the cover! 272 pages and hardcover, I'm SO EXCITED to share this book with the Same Hat crew. It was a long time in the making, but I am confident you will dig it.

Major thanks and adoration to Same Hat co-founder Evan Hayden for his masterful lettering and book design, and Colin at Last Gasp for believing in the project.

They are shipping direct orders now, and I understand book will be making their way to shops in the next 2 weeks in the United States, and then percolating out after that! If you'd like your local comics stop to carry the book, please have them contact Last Gasp directly via their site.

HERE ARE SOME PREVIEW PICS! (via our friend Deb Aoki's Twitter feed!)






STOKED, STOKED, STOKED.

LA EXTRAÑA HISTORIA DE LA ISLA PANORAMA

Great news for international Suehiro Maruo fans, the Spanish edition of "The Strange Tale of Panorama Island" debuted at FICÓMIC (Salón Internacional del Cómic de Barcelona) recently [UPDATED! - Thanks, Manuel!]. The book was published by Maruo's longtime Spanish publisher Glènat.



I don't know any specific details, but I assume Maruo/EnterBrain's long-running relationship with Glènat may be the reason this edition came out so quickly. The book is available now and sells for 15€. Enjoy, Spanish-reading manga fans!

MARUO ILLUSTRATES INUGAMI CIRCUS TROUPE ALBUM COVER

I'm working on organizing the 600+ photos I took on my recent Japan trip, and hoping to start posting a recap (with tons of pics of manga, t-shirts and other Same Hat-related oddities) this week. But before that, I wanted to first blog a flyer I scanned today featuring an illustration by Suehiro Maruo.

While at the Tower Records in Shinjuku, I came across a free flyer featuring Maruo's art and grabbed a pile of them. This piece is from a similar set of drawings in the opening section of Panorama-tou Kidan. (I'm hoping to send flyers to folks that buy Electric Ant or win a future Same Hat contest of some sort).

Here is a tour flyer, featuring Suehiro Maruo's cover illustration for the CD/DVD 呪恋 by the band 犬神サーカス団 (Inugami Circus Troupe):


I feel like I've read the name before (also known as Dog-God Circus Troupe online), but never heard their music. For more info you can visit Inugami Circus Troupe's website, or check out their videos on YouTube. Interesting to note, Wikipedia says that "They started in 1994 when Kyoko placed an advertisement in Garo, a manga magazine."

Other album covers by Inugami Circus Troupe include a parody of King Crimson's famous In The Court Of The Crimson King cover, and an album called Panorama of Hell, with a cover illustrated by Hideshi Hino:

CHAPTER 4 OF SUEHIRO MARUO'S IMOMUSHI

Four months, and four chapters of Suehiro Maruo's sick and exquisite Imomushi. Chapter 4 marks the conclusion of Imomushi, and was published in the September Issue of COMIC BEAM.


I was a bit sad to see the story end so quickly, but with such a short story as source material, Maruo was able to weave quite an interesting manga. Most of the substance and tension is stuffed into this final chapter, which is gorier and more violent than 99% of The Strange Tale of Panorama Island.

Maruo's adaptation of Imomushi pulls no punches in delivering Edogawa Rampo's bleak tale, though I have to admit the final moments of the story work slightly better in prose than manga form. That said, read as a complete manga, Imomushi is a steamy and great piece of upsetting work.

Check out my first post for details on the plot of Edogawa Rampo's short story, The Caterpillar.

CHECK OUT THESE PANELS FROM THE FINAL CHAPTER:


To celebrate the completion of the story, this month's Comic Beam came with a Imomushi folder :)


Things take a turn for the cruel and psycho-sexual immediately.


Three blind men in the street; all the secondary characters are super odd and malformed in this manga.


OUCH.


The doctor pays a visit, how will Tokiko explain what has happened?


Lt. Sunaga's descent into Johnny Get Your Gun-esque sensory deprivation


yurusu... yurusu... YURUSU!!!


That is what I call a moment of realization.


So goddamn good, Mr. Maruo! My hat is off to you on this panel.


Final moments.

Fans of this golden streak of Suehiro Maruo x Edogawa Rampo, fear not! The author's bio section in the back of the issue mentions that Maruo's next piece (serialized in COMIC BEAM) will be another Edogawa Rampo adaptation/collaboration. I wonder which short story it will be? The Twins? Red Chamber? The Finger?

I am guessing whatever Maruo chooses, it will be adapted another 4-chapter manga... with a book collecting it with Imomushi sometime early 2010 in Japan? That is just a guess though, we'll see what happense! Needless to say, I personally strongly hope that Imomushi will have the chance to see publication in English at some point in the future!

UPDATE: That was the fastest I've been proven wrong in a while. My buddy Monika posted in a the comments a link to a new release on the EnterBrain site. Seems I was wrong, they are releasing Imomushi as a standalone tankoban this month! 148 pages and the same size as their Panorama Island release. How cool- thanks Monika!! :) Time to send some emails!

book-off SCORE!

Got a call from nate who was out in NYC this weekend-- He was at
the Manhattan store of the AWESOME used-book chain BOOK OFF. (i had no idea that they had a u.s. store!?). Anyway, he picked up a copy of the Japanese version of Hideshi Hino's Panorama of Hell!

This was a totally awesome find and I gotta thank Nate for thinking of me and this blog while he was out there. This book has been translated into English, but the only version of it was put out by Blast Books in 1990-- it's actually really hard to track down a cheap version of it, so maybe we will try our own hand at translating and putting it online for free at some point down the line!

of course, if you can ever get your hands on either Hell Baby or Panorama of Hell (in english!) for cheap, we totally recommend these early Hino classics!

NEW SUEHIRO MARUO X EDOGAWA RAMPO COMIC!

I just read some very exciting news from Suehiro Matuo's site. Maruo announced that his latest comic will begin serialization in the anthology COMIC BEAM, starting with the current June 2009 issue. That issue came out in Japan on May 12, and features a cover illustration by Maruo.



The new comic is 芋虫 [The Caterpillar], which will be an adaptation of the 1929 Edogawa Rampo short story of the same name. The Caterpillar is a haunting psychosexual tale of Lt. Sunaga, a disfigured and limbless veteran of WWI who returns home to his young and beautiful wife. Sunaga initially is given a hero's welcome, but is quickly forgotten and shunned because of his injuries. Unable to speak or care for himself, he is completely at the mercy of his wife as she grows to loathe and toy with him. There's more, but I'll leave it there for now.

It sounds like this will be another collaborative project working in tandem with the Rampo estate, like Maruo's loving and beautiful adaptation of Panorama-tou Kidan.

Elements from Edogawa Rampo's original short story have already been seen in Suehiro Maruo illustrations and muzan-e works; Rampo's The Caterpillar was previously translated into English as part of the Edogawa Rampo short story collection, "Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination". (This is one of my absolute favorite books! If you have not read this book, YOU NEED TO GO BUY IT RIGHT NOW!)

Exciting news for Maruo/Rampo fans! I will be heading to Kinokuniya to try and get a copy reserved, and post more as I hear it.

UPDATE: Just got myself talked into a 6-month subscription to COMIC BEAM at Kinokuniya in SF. Will be picking it up in person each month starting with the June issue, SCORE! I also added a bigger image to this post.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, EDOGAWA RAMPO

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!

A GLIMPSE INSIDE THE NEW MARUO...

...and Shintaro Kago manga, courtesy of Trevor Brown!


Panorama-tou Kitan


Ana, Moji, Ketsueki ga Arawareru Manga

CLICK TO VIEW A FEW PAGES FROM EACH AT TREVOR'S BLOG...

Many thanks for posting these!

[UPDATE]: More pages can be seen at the Span Art Gallery shop here, which is selling an autographed copy it seems. (thanks for the link, Substrom!)