ALL PULP NEWSSTAND BULLDOG EDITION 1/24/11 For immediate release — January 24, 2011 THE GHOST WIND – COMBINING PULP and MANGA INSPIRATIONS from GRANTON CITY PRESS The Ghost Wind is the first spin-off title for Granton City Press. Following on the heels of The Ghost Wind, The Ghost Wind operates in the same fictional…
Color Bleach+: The Bleach Official Bootleg Viz Media; $14.99 Tite Kubo’s [[[Bleach]]] franchise is vast and never-ending, at once very playful and utterly serious. The latest addition to it to be translated into English by Viz Media is [[[Color Bleach: Bleach Official Bootleg]]] (U.S., July ’10, Japan ’07). The conceit of this jam-packed volume, presented…
In case you’re coming late to the party, it seems the American manga market is drying up faster than our mother’s brisket on Sunday nights. Our first hint came when Publishers Weekly recently reported that Viz Media, one of the largest publishers of manga in the U.S., laid off 40% of their staff. This included…
Radical Comics removed it’s comic, Incarnate, from this week’s pull lists, after a Tetsuo-sized avalanche of displeasure emanated from the internet and it’s legion of Otaku. It seems penciler/writer/creator Nick Simmons (you might know his dad, Gene, from the Dr. Pepper commercials…) has paid a little bit to much homage to various Manga series. Covered…
One of the great symbols of Japan to a Western audience – equal to pagodas, kimonos, and that exaggerated white makeup – is the katana. (Well, any vaguely Japanese sword, to be honest – it doesn’t have to be precisely a katana as long as the profile is right and it’s declared to be incredibly…
Most of us, it’s safe to say, will never be told that our sin is our very being. (Unless we were brought up in the Deep South, in which case we’ve heard it twice a day and five times on Sunday.) We’re also not going to learn that the odd new girl in our high…
Manga-format comics have a tropism for high school even stronger than that of sunflowers for the sun – it is possible to find manga without a hint of high-schoolery in them, but serious digging is required. But you couldn’t loose an arrow in a manga warehouse without hitting at least one book about girls in…
Red SnowBy Susumu KatsumataDrawn & Quarterly, October 2009, $24.95 From a Western perspective, it would be understandable to assume “gekiga” meant “short, depressing Japanese comics stories,” even if that’s not the most accurate definition. (Gekiga can also be long depressing Japanese comics stories, of course.) And, since the current exemplar of gekiga for those of…
Where would comics be without the stories of young people with amazing powers? Oh, sure, you could cobble together a world canon of stories with no supernatural stuff at all, but it would have to be a masterpiece of the gerrymanderer’s art. And why would you want to – when you can have all of…
All young comics protagonists are special, even if they don’t know it yet. In manga in particular, they’re likely to protest loudly that they’re just “a normal kid” and to squirm at the thought of being separable from the vast thundering herd of undifferentiated humanity in the slightest way. But it doesn’t matter what they…
Finding myself in an art creating deadline crunch this weekend, so I’m going to pass on some art tips for you. I just came across this tutorial on creating speed lines in Photoshop, and creating a brush to do the process. It looks to be one of the more useful techniques, and will be interesting…
The room was packed for Viz Media’s Shonen Jump panel, which took place at 10:30 am in Room 10. The company announced two new series: Mitsutoshi Shimabukuro’s Toriko, about a “gourmet hunter” of the same name who apparently tracks down the most dangerous and tasty beasts, which he sells to exclusive restaurants; meanwhile, the metafictional…
