Mark Evanier passes on the sad news that Ric Estrada has passed away at the age of 81.

Estrada was perhaps best known for his work on Amethyst: Prince of Gemworld, Karate Kid, Wonder Woman and numerous DC war and romance comics. Later in his career, he moved into animation with such 1980s TV series as He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, Jonny Quest and Bionic Six. He was an Ink-Pot Award winner, a friend of the late Ernest Hemingway, a contemporary of Fidel Castro, and I believe he was ambidextrous as well, and could draw with both hands at the same time.

Estrada is the subject of an upcoming feature-length documentary being produced by his son Seth. You can read more about it here.

Our condolences to his family and friends.

A Drifting Life
By Yoshihiro Tatsumi
Drawn & Quarterly, April 2009, $29.99

It’s hard, sometimes impossible, to avoid a tunnel-visioned view of the world – not to have one’s mental map of things resemble that famous Saul Steinberg New Yorker cover, with familiar things reassuringly large and the rest of the world a small, distant blur. And so everything we learn gets filtered through that initial world-view, with each fact setting itself into place like a brick and used as shorthand for huge swaths of that surrounding blur, and a few isolated facts pass for “knowledge” of something far away.

For most of us, the history of manga goes like this: Tezuka sprung, fully-formed, sometime after the war. There were other creators, but hardly anybody can remember any of them. Eventually, the shonen-shojo gulf appeared, in the ‘70s, and real manga history started, with series that we can usually remember and some that we’ve actually read. Maybe we believe that because so very little of the first generation of manga has ever been translated into English, and maybe that’s because most of those stories are utterly ephemeral and best forgotten even by the Japanese. Or maybe not – but how would we know what was good, what the artistic movements, the creators, the publishing lines and magazines were fifty years ago in a country on the other side of the world, in a language where we can’t even tell where words end?

That’s where A Drifting Life comes in. It’s another one of those bricks: isolated, yes. Specific rather than comprehensive, absolutely. Biased, certainly. But it’s the story of those years, of the early days of manga from 1945 through 1960, from a creator who was there, and telling a semi-fictionalized story of a culture, an industry and a time we knew nothing about before.

Drawn & Quarterly has published three books of Tatsumi’s work before this, three collections of his short stories from the 1969-1972 period: The Push Man and Other Stories, Abandon the Old in Tokyo, and Good-Bye. A Drifting Life comes from somewhat later in his career, though how much later isn’t clear. It’s been said that Tatsumi worked on this for more than a decade, and the epilogue – set in 1995 – has the feeling of bringing the story up to the “present day.” So, from that evidence, I surmise that Tatsumi worked on A Drifting Life from the mid-80s to the mid-90s, with serious uncertainty about both ends of that assumption. But it does look like he came to write this memoir long after the events he’s writing about, and probably at least a decade after he created the other stories we’ve seen from him. (more…)

If you’ve read ORIGIN: The Story of Wolverine, Weapon X and various issues of his own title and the X-Men books, then you know the basic background of the mysterious mutant called Logan and the secrets behind who he was in the past. It took many years to piece together, but we finally learned the truth.

Basically, Wolverine was born James Howlett, later taking on the name Logan after discovering he was a mutant with heightened senses, advanced healing, a connection to animals, and bone claws that could extend from his hand.

Logan traveled the world, becoming a samurai at heart, later becoming involved in the Weapon X project, working alongside his old enemy Victor Creed AKA Sabretooth, a mutant who had similar abilities but none of Logan’s compassion. Weapon X eventually attempted to turn him into a bio-weapon, burying most of his memoies, implanting false ones, and lacing his skeleton and bone claws with the unbreakable metal adamantium. After escaping Weapon X, he worked for the government for a few years before finally joining the X-Men. Since then, he has become a true hero, discovering his whole past in recent years.

But this story was not intended from the beginning. There were a few other proposed ideas for Wolverine that were discarded. There were ideas hinted at but later disproved or simply never followed up on.

Want to hear more? Read on. (more…)

Anime and manga distributor Central Park Media filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy last Friday, which means that the company does not plan to restructure and its assets will be liquidated. CPM put out such classic anime as “Revolutionary Girl Utena,” “Project A-Ko,” “Demon City Shinjuku” and “Grave of the Fireflies.” They also published yaoi manga under the Be Beautiful imprint as well as assorted shojo and shonen titles. However, they hadn’t issued any new releases in a year.

This news comes less than two years after the collapse of Geneon USA. Apparently, CPM won’t comment on how they got to this unfortunate pass, although they’ve obviously been struggling for some time. Of course, times are tough in publishing, and the bottom’s dropping out of the manga market in Japan. Geneon also cited illegal downloading as a factor in their troubles, and I’m wondering what role that played in CPM’s demise.

It’s sort of ironic, really. Fan subs and scanlations helped build the manga and anime industry in the U.S., and now they’re probably helping to tear it down.

Amy Goldschlager is an editor at findingDulcinea, the Librarian of the Internet, and SweetSearch, the smarter search engine.