Artbook Spotlight: Poison
Posted: February 10, 2012 Filed under: Artbooks 1 Comment »You Higuri – Seishinsha – Japanese – 100pgs – ISBN 487892194
You might remember that I’m a big fan of You Higuri. I’ve featured her before, and since then, I’ve read Gorgeous Carat, so my admiration has only grown. What can I say, I have a weakness for books that are both BL and Indiana Jones. I didn’t even think that was possible, but I find that I like it quite a bit.
She writes wonderful period pieces. The stories are great, and very well-researched as well, which is one of my favorite parts, of course. Ludwig II and Angel’s Coffin are both quite interesting because they include so many facts on historical figures now mostly lost to history, overshadowed by the events that transpired after their deaths. Granted, their lives didn’t have much to do with demons, but Angel’s Coffin in particular had quite a bit of history I was unaware of, and reading it was far more interesting than it would have been had the story been about a generic prince rather than Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria.
But along with her research, Higuri draws wonderful, wonderful period illustrations. She puts a lot of work into researching clothing and setting, and she draws it all in a lot of detail. It really helps bring her stories to life that much more, and makes the fictitious lives of Cesare Borgia, Mary Vetsera, or even her actual fictional characters like Ray and Florian a pleasure to read, whether the setting is historical Italy, Austria, or France.
Thus, I was very interested in seeing her artbooks. She has two. Poison is the older of the two, and the newer is called Jewel. I badly wanted the latter, as Higuri’s artwork becomes more polished and elaborate with age, but I thought I would snap up Poison while I could.
The Eroicaverse: El Halcon
Posted: February 3, 2012 Filed under: Eroicaverse Leave a comment »This is the fourth in a series of articles discussing From Eroica With Love and its spinoffs. For the index, go here.
Continuing on with the theme of pirate manga, the next From Eroica With Love spinoff chronologically is El Halcon – The Hawk. It ran in Seventeen magazine from October 1977-February 1978, and once again focuses on Tyrian Persimmon and his naval exploits in the late 16th century. It is a prequel to Seven Seas, Seven Skies, and it attempts to make a more sympathetic character of the cold and calculating character in the earlier work. Flashbacks to an unhappy childhood are interspersed through a story that begins with his first officer assignment and continues as Tyrian gains more power through the English Navy, hoping to one day defect to Spain. Does it succeed in making him a sympathetic character? It’s hard to like Tyrian, but his life story is dramatic, swashbuckling, and lavishly illustrated, so it makes for a great read.
English, Please!: Palepoli
Posted: January 27, 2012 Filed under: English, Please! 5 Comments »I know I promised Eroica content this week, but I had to switch my schedule for the next license request when I found out that the Manga Moveable Feast for this month featured Usamaru Furuya. It’s hosted by Ash Brown over at Experiments in Manga.
Usamaru Furuya is an infinitely interesting artist. I like what I’ve read of his stories, too, but his art gets me in every single book that I’ve read by him. Be it the surreal pencil sketches that Picasso enters in Genkaku Picasso, the occasional random but elaborate 2-page nonsequitor illustrations in Short Cuts, or the amazing throwback work unlike his usual style in Lychee Light Club, every single one of his books is interesting to look at. He’s constantly using unusual imagery and a plethora of styles to convey the story visually, and there’s nobody quite like him when it comes to this. It’s fine art in manga form, and I wish like nobody’s business that more of his work would be licensed.
Palepoli is his first published volume of manga, and the best showcase for his visual vernacular. He also has a knack for elaborate visual puns and gags, and breaks the fourth wall constantly. Not with dialogue, but with image. It’s something one rarely sees.
You can read a handful of these in the compilations Secret Comics Japan and Japan Edge, but even with no knowledge of Japanese, Palepoli is worth owning. It’s just so much fun to look at. Still, I would dearly love to see a full English translation of it.
Artist Spotlight: Arina Tanemura
Posted: January 21, 2012 Filed under: Artist Spotlight 2 Comments »Very rarely do we get to see a mangaka’s entire body of work in English. I can’t think of very many instances, actually. We’ve seen all of CLAMP, save for a few side projects. Rumiko Takahashi has had all her series translated into English, with the notable exception being the last 2/3rds of Urusei Yatsura. We’re missing a volume of short stories from Eiichiro Oda. We’ve seen almost all of Fumi Yoshinaga’s work, save for two one-shots and her newest series. All but the newest volume of In the Walnut may be available from Toko Kawai. So Arina Tanemura is in rare company indeed, as all her books have been translated into English at this point, save for a one-shot that came out at the end of last year in Japan.
Tanemura debuted in 1997, and has been working steadily ever since. She specializes in shoujo fantasy/romance, and her work is very much a textbook example of exactly what a shoujo manga should be. Lots of romance, action, excellent character development, a little bit of humor, unusual plot twists, and very, very pretty art.
While it’s true that her character designs are in a Ribon Magazine house style (particularly the hair and eyes), even in her very first story she uses an unusually ornate style that, while a bit stiff, was still overflowing with cute details and lacked the usual composition and flow problems young artists often have. Over the years she polished her art and made it more organic, more detailed, and now lavishes a lot of attention in particular to costumes and settings. Her books really are a feast for the eyes, and few can measure up to the insane amounts of adorable that flow off of every page.
Her work always appears in Ribon magazine, and the age range on that tends to skew slightly younger. That’s apparent in her early work, but later series become surprisingly mature, and she has a depth to her writing that makes it appeal to shoujo fans of even my age. While most of her books were published by Viz and are still in print and widely advertised, still, Tanemura is worth discussing and celebrating, and this guide can hopefully shed some light on why.
Artbook Spotlight: The Art of Hideshi Hino
Posted: January 13, 2012 Filed under: Artbooks 1 Comment »Hideshi Hino – Presspop Gallery/Last Gasp – 2007 – 80 pages – ISBN 9784903090054
If you enjoy horror manga, odds are you’ve run across Hideshi Hino at some point. He specializes in gory thrills. Quite a few of his one-shot volumes have been translated into English. The selection of books here is an interesting balance between stories written for children, like Oninbo and the Bugs from Hell, and more mature and deranged stories, like The Red Snake. Many stories are both at once, such as Zoroku’s Strange Disease from the Lullabies from Hell compilation. It’s about a mentally handicapped man in a remote Japanese village that begins to rot and develops colorful sores all over his body. The townspeople eventually banish him to a swamp by himself, then later show up to kill him when the smell from the disease reaches the town anyway. The ending is bittersweet, but also a bit morally ambiguous and shockingly dark for a story that ran in a magazine for grade school children in 1969. In an interview, Hino says he received letters from children for years stating that they had to staple the pages of his story together so they couldn’t see the images of Zoroku rotting. This story, incidentally, is also the first of Hino’s horror stories. He mentions being inspired by Kazuo Umezu and Yoshiharu Tsuge, but the fable-like nature of Zoroku was directly inspired by The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury.
Hino’s also quite fond of writing “autobiographical” work starring artist characters (sometimes named Hideshi Hino) that have bizarre things happen to them. The best of these, and one of the best volumes of horror manga I’ve ever read, is Panorama of Hell. Panorama of Hell is mostly fiction, but contains shades of truth, such as his family’s exile from Manchuria after World War II and details about his yakuza grandfather.
Anyway. His art style is highly unusual, and I was shocked the day I found this book in the comic store completely unlooked-for. While a tad expensive for what it is (the paper stock is pulpy instead of glossy, and it’s very short), it’s odd to see an artist like Hino with an artbook of his own, and it’s worth having for Hino fans. Most of the artwork represented is from stories that have been translated into English, and there are also three short color stories in the back of the book.
I’ve scanned less images than normal this time around because I don’t want to show off too much. The book is short, so the more you see the less there is to discover. It’s worth supporting this release, which I believe is a joint Japanese/English publication.
Also, one of the images below is NSFW.
English, Please!: Tokumu Sentai Shinesman
Posted: January 6, 2012 Filed under: English, Please! 5 Comments »Kaim Tachibana – Gakken/Futabasha – 1993 – 9 volumes
I have a special place in my heart for manga about sentai and tokusatsu. Sentai manga aren’t released in English nearly enough, so I don’t get to talk about it much. I can count the ones I’ve read on one hand – Duklyon: CLAMP School Defenders, Heroes are Extinct, Ratman, Dokkoida, and Imperfect Hero. It’s a tragedy that these series are never more popular (Ratman and Heroes Are Extinct, in particular, are fantastic), because they are among the few series that actually make me laugh out loud. Most sentai manga I run across are comedies that poke fun at the inherent strangeness that is a team of color-coordinated superheroes beating up giant monsters. It’s really hard to make jokes about sentai fall flat, and easy to come up with increasingly ridiculous situations for them to be in. Serious tokusatsu-type/superhero series exist (Kikaider Code 02, MD Geist, maybe Apocalypse Zero), but they are way less fun than the sentai humor variety.
The Spinal Column
Posted: December 30, 2011 Filed under: Miscellaney 6 Comments »When you have a ton of manga, you spend a lot of time staring at the spines. In addition to relevant information, most spines have a small or cropped version of the cover. Surprisingly, very few artists take the opportunity to make their series stand out on the shelf by doing something special on the spines. There might be a few good reasons for this, perhaps the best one is that bookstores usually stock multiple copies of recent volumes, so a continuous image would be spoiled in the best setting for it anyway. But still, I love it when collections take advantage of the fact I’m going to be staring at the spine, and not the cover, for a long time after I buy it. Plus, getting to add another piece to a continuous image appeals to obsessive-compulsive collector types like me.
Here’s a look at the handful of series I’ve spotted with something special running along the spine.
The Eroicaverse: Happy Holidays
Posted: December 24, 2011 Filed under: Eroicaverse 7 Comments »
This is my week for an Eroica post, but unfortunately the further adventures of The Man in Purple will have to wait, as I have no scanner nor access to my volumes of El Halcon. Instead, please enjoy some seasonal scarf yanking. Well, mostly scarves.
Year’s Best 2011
Posted: December 16, 2011 Filed under: Miscellaney 8 Comments »On one hand, I dislike the flurry of best of lists that appear for all mediums this time of year. On the other hand, it is nice to see a shorthand list of stuff I may have missed, and it’s a good way to spotlight things that should’ve gotten more attention. I’ve never done one of these here before, and I prefer to contribute to other sites (that’s also forthcoming), but there’s a first time for everything. Plus, my manga is packed away in preparation for its twice-annual move to Ohio, so other topics are a little difficult to cover at the moment. So here’s a Best Of List for the Friday Feature!
I read a lot, and I have a hard time making lists like this. Saying, for instance, Lychee Light Club is better than Sakura Hime is hard, because I like both, and there’s no way to compare those two series. They’re just different. So for more fun, my categories are arbitrary. And since I wound up with so many categories, I’m just going to link my reviews rather than explaining again why I like them.
The only requirements are that the series had to have at least one volume out this year, and that I loved it for whatever reason. There’s a lot of latitude after that. And keep in mind I like some pretty terrible series. Also, I couldn’t think of a funny title, but Wandering Son is a pretty fantastic book, too.
Artbook Spotlight: Alice Addict
Posted: December 9, 2011 Filed under: Artbooks Leave a comment »Mitsukazu Mihara – 2003 – 103 pgs – ISBN 4-86048-068-6
Here’s a more unusual book. Mitsukazu Mihara might be more well-known for her illustrations than she is her manga series. She was the main illustrator for the Gothic & Lolita Bible, a fashion publication that focused on those two styles and was primarily photos and articles, with some of Mihara’s illustrations featured.
Tokyopop published 4 issues of Gothic & Lolita Bible in English, but I’ve never seen one myself. Tokyopop also published about a dozen volumes of Mitsukazu Mihara’s manga, and those are all worth checking out. All of them are josei, as far as I can tell, so are of interest for that reason alone since very little josei work has been published in English. Her most famous manga is probably Doll, a 6-volume series that examines the relationships between humans and very sophisticated robot servants in a somewhat more grown-up way than, say, Chobits.
This book, published only in Japan, is a collection of the illustrations that appeared in The Gothic & Lolita Bible and Doll (in Feel Young Magazine), with illustrations from a manga called Happy Family and a few other sources (mostly fashion magazines) spread throughout. Alice Addict is only 100 pages long, it doesn’t really tie into the content of any of her series, and I’m no fashion expert. All I offer is a look at a very strange fashion/josei hybrid artbook.
Some of these illustrations are NSFW.
