When approaching Vampires, many readers are confused by the fact that it seems to be about werewolves. The story begins in a village of vampires who are destroying their homes setting out into the world because humans are moving into their valley, but these “vampires” do not drink blood, nor are they immortal. Instead they all transform into animals, ranging from wolves and bats to snakes and crocodiles, the transformations being triggered by different stimuli for each vampire. For example, the main vampire, Toppei, turns into a wolf when he sees the moon or when he is scared. His little brother Chippei transforms whenever he sees anything round. Others transform at the smell of onions, the sight of a telephone pole, or a variety of other stimuli.

picked these up recently (in japanese). peak tezuka, late 60s, gorgeous art.

(info)

EDIT: I forgot about some stuff, like the Invisibles and Grant Morrison (his X-Men run and “The Filth” in the early aughts also had a huge impact), so I stuck them in the timeline in boldface

I bought LIVING GAME, Vol 3 at a used manga shop in North York, 3 or 4 years ago. The woman at the store actually threw it in for free with the rest of my random crap, now that I think of it. Anyway, I think it changed my world a little.

Mochiru Hoshisato does, I guess, “seinen” comics. They’re about young people out in the world, doing boring, mundane, stressful things. This particular 10-volume saga is about — and forgive me if I fudge the details, it’s been a while since I read it — a young guy whose job loses its office lease, and through a screwball series of events, the whole company has to move into his apartment. It’s like “The Office” set in a tiny Tokyo apartment, and it’s all about renting and real estate and boring, mundane, stressful, life, thus LIVING GAME.

The “hook” is that a young girl comes to work at the office, I think she’s 17, and she ends up living with him too. He doesn’t want to get involved with her because she’s underaged, and there’s tension and romantic hijinks. But the star of the story, in this volume especially, is feeling like you’re losing your mind because your living situation is untenable.

The thing Hoshisato does is tell these stories deftly, lightly, humourously, with a deceptively simple style. He’s one of my favourite manga artists. He’s got some superficial similarities to Rumiko Takahashi (I think this is from the same years as early Ranma 1/2), but everything’s very clean and cute and perfectly-balanced.

Above: a sequence where the young girl has just answered the phone. It was a woman. The young girl is already kind of infatuated with our hero. The other woman has never met our hero, but another woman is trying to set them up. There’s a misunderstanding. The young girl gets upset, THROWS open the closet, GRABS all her shit, STUFFS it in her backpack! She’s gonna move out SO HARD! I love it.

Here’s a 3-page dream sequence from later in the third volume (read right-to-left):

This is actually the second big dream sequence in this volume. In the first, he dreamed that he was living in a huge house with the young girl, and everything was great, and then the whole office staff showed up for work at his huge house, and life was still shitty.

This dream is the opposite: he lives in an apartment a quarter the size of his real-life apartment. But she’s still there, keeping him grounded. It’s domestic and nice, until he realizes that the company is STILL using his apartment for an office, even though it’s physically impossible! Oh my god, the stress!

Anyway, I love it. The panel sizes, the various scales (from closeup to full-body to full-room on the first page), the cuteness, the subtle screentones, the level of detail when it’s called for — the oppressive detail of the tiny apartment on the second page, followed by the claustrophobic exterior shot, the building completely surrounded by faceless skyscrapers. The sound effects on the third page, as the dream starts crashing down — I don’t even know what they mean, but they’re stressing me out, man!

This book has been a huge help with my comics. It lives by my drawing desk. I flip through it when I feel like I don’t know what I’m doing. I just have it in Japanese — I didn’t know what was going on at all, until I found this scanlation a few years later — but it’s a great comfort to me.

BONUS:
I had the urge to flip this page and diagram it in English, whatever it’s worth.

Here’s some button designs. New t-shirts and buttons debuting at San Diego. Buttons will be convention-exclusive; shirts will probably be available online after the con. I’ll show you the shirts when they’re finished!

And here are some pages from Kimagure Orange Road, which I’ve been reading. It’s manga from the 80s, beloved by many now-aging nerds (it was a little before my nerd-time, and I’ve only just discovered it). I’m not posting these to share the story or dialogue, just for the sheer love of comics. The panel layouts, the figure sizes, the hair-to-face ratios, mmmmmmm.

(Note: These pages read right-to-left, since they’re manga. And this is a quasi-legal scanlated version, which you can find by googling; this series has never been officially released in English as far as I know. Correct me if I’m wrong)

The guy is taking pictures of the girl. I love the big panels of their legs, like this weird vulnerable moment. The overall flow and energy of the page is great. That little panel where she gets mad and makes him stop stands out, just like it oughta. Note how he’s going “towards” her (right-to-left) while shooting the photos, and she’s storming “away” from him (left-to-right) after she gets mad.

Amazing “fashion shot” page. The over-the-shoulder full-length costume shot and all the establishing of the airport kill me. I love this page so much. That airplane drawing is amazing. Love the establisher of her shoes.

I’m posting these to be more like Brandon Graham, whose blogging is always a treat. I’m not constantly digging up new stuff like him, but I have been reading this manga and saving a ton of pages for future reference, and thought I’d share. I’ll try to post more like this. Let me know if it’s interesting at all.

You should go read 60+ pages of CHILDREN OF THE SEA, a lovely and intriguing new manga. Viz is posting chapters of it online, weekly, for free, at their new site IKKI. (EDIT: Apparently they only hold the North American rights, so if you live outside Canada/USA you presumably won’t be able to read the comic. Sorry about that.)

We’re not going to see some new hollywood blockbuster tonight – we’re having a SPEED RACER party and eating tacos! TACOOOOOOSSSSSSSSSS! Cheap thrills for our frigid economy!

I re-read all 21 volumes-so-far of GANTZ yesterday in scanlations. Brain: fried. (It’s a story about kids who “die” but then are brought to a special room, given weapons, presented with “aliens” and left to their own devices. It has lots of gore, boobs, psychological trauma, and a massive body count of innocent bystanders. And it’s all presented in a fairly realistic visual style. It’s in what I call the Psychic War genre, with superhero overtones.)

I hope to god that someday people start writing about this series with an eye to subtext, etc, because all I see is kids talking about how awesome it is and speculating about what happens next. It is a deeply messed-up story, and to see the fans approaching it surface-only is troubling. For example: the “coolest” character in the second half of the story-to-date starts out by perpetrating a massacre of hundreds of innocent people in a crowded downtown area, after which… what? He fights “bad guys” after that, alongside our “heroes”, but I’m not exactly rooting for him. This uneasy balance goes on for something like 9 volumes.

Dark Horse is supposed to start putting out translated volumes this summer, and best of luck to them.

Discussion questions:

1. Does GANTZ‘s author, Hiroyu Oka, know that he’s putting in all this subtext? Or is he just a soulless, dispassionate sociopath like the majority of his characters?

2. What defines the Psychic War genre? (Some other examples: Bleach, X/1999, X-Men)