Tag: Manga

Manga pioneer Yoshihiro Tatsumi has passed away at age 79, according to a letter received by Paul Gravett. Tatsumi had been battling cancer for several years. Tatsumi is best known as the pioneer of the "gekiga" style of manga (a term be invented), true to life stories of ordinary people. He own work featured haunting adult themes of alienation, dread and obsession. His autobiography A Drifting Life, depicting his struggles as an artist, won the Eisner award for Best Reality Based Work in 2010. He also won the World Outlook Award at Angoulême and the Osamu Tezuka Cultural Prize.

There's no question but that in American culture the predominant view is one that is rich, white, male, straight and Christian. And while "The male gaze" is pretty well known, we're getting to learn about the "white gaze" as well. Have you ever wondered what it looks like? Now we know. Except it’s from peace loving New Zealand AND America.

A week's worth of reading: § Has Manga Become a Niche Category? Johanna Draper Carlson examines some opinions on this, and quotes comments by Vertical's...

If you have room on your shelf for ONE MORE omnibus series, make a little room for Dark Horse's just announced omnibus series for...

Diamond released a bunch of year end charts yesterday including the top 1000 comics and GNs. I may load those up at some point but...

Junji Ito! Junji Ito! Junji Ito! Japanese horror master Ito has been avoiding the genre of his greatest triumphs—Uzimaki, Tomie, Gyo— for eight years, but...

Americans can't get enough Tezuka! Well sort of. The Japanese comics pioneer was as prolific as he was influential and recently we've recently seen a pretty ambitious attempt at getting a bunch of his works into print here in the US from DMP. But a lot of primo Tezuka's work was already published here via a series of very attractive volumes published by Vertical which ranged from Black Jack—perhaps his most accessible series and one of the best known—and standlone volumes like Ode to Kirihito. Sadly many of these books are out of print, but not to worry, Vertical is bringing them back in digital form:

Manga isn't all awkward schoolgirls and giant robots. There has long been a very strong alternative and literary thread of manga, and two recent articles give you some perspective on it. I would call Ryan Holmberg's Proto-Gekiga: Matsumoto Masahiko’s Komaga a must read, but I have to confess, it is very long and involved, and I have set it aside for weekend reading. BUT the important thing is that he compares and contrasts Yoshihiro Tatsumi, who is kind of credited as the father of "gekiga" or realistic manga, with Matsumoto Masahiko, a figure who appears in Tatsumi's autobiographical A Drifting Life under another name. Masahiko's work went down a slightly different path than Tatsumi's but Holmberg shows that it was equally important:

Manga isn’t all awkward schoolgirls and giant robots. There has long been a very strong alternative and literary thread of manga, and two ...

Digital Manga has been successfully Kickstarting publication of several books by God of Comics Osama Tezuka for a few years now. So far they've done Barbara, Swallowing the Earth and more. But Tezuka drew some 150,000 pages of comics in his lifetime, so this is a pretty big task to bring all his comics to English. The new project has ambitious goals: to publish the following titles:

I know we've been slacking a bit with 31 Days due to the horrors of New York Comic-Con, but it's full sped ahead to the pumpkins now. And here is the best thing you will hear today, tomorrow or possibly in a lifetime: Japanese Horror master Junji Ito Is doing a Pokemon collaboration. Yeah that's right. The creator of Uzumaki, Museum of Terror, the Long Hair in the Attic and much more, is doing POKEMON. The news was announced in Japan as a "Collaboration," you know, like Tokidoki doing Marvel, except terrifying and unspeakable. It's called “Kowapoke,” which means “Scarypoke” and a single phone wallpaper image has been released thus far. That's Banette, cute little Banette, admittedly not the nicest Pokemon, now all Kowapoke'd up. T-shirts are being given away in Japan now because life is unknowable and terrifying.

According to a French press release, and Google translate, manga master Jiro Taniguchi will be one of the main guests for the 42nd Festival...