Skullkickers Volume 1: Coming in March to better comic book stores everywhere.
Unfortunately I ran out of time last month to talk about some of the very good books in the Previews catalogue, available for pre-order, and coming our way in March.
One of those was the very first volume of my good friend Jim Zubkavich’s SKULLKICKERS trade paperback, entitled 1,000 Opas and a Dead Body, being published by the fine folks at Image Comics. It collects the first 5 issues and some short stories that ran in Image’s Popgun Anthology, and it’s quite a bit of fun.
Just today I’d noticed that Jim had posted up the cover of the printed book to his Facebook page, complete with little spot-varnish skulls, and I thought that was a very cool deal.
It reminded me of how excited I’d gotten, seeing my first work in print, and then finally (eventually) holding the first trade paperback to feature my work in hand. For me it was seeing that first issue of Jimmie Robinson’s Evil & Malice, which I coloured from start to stop– that was the book that really made me well-up with pride (although kudos to J. Torres for getting me my first job on Siren). My first piece of published comics writing was Put The Book Back On The Shelf, an anthology of comics adapting the music of Belle & Sebastian, a band I adore. That was a book-book, a graphic novel, and it was my writing and not my colouring seeing print and that was a different kind of pride. Funnily enough, all of those works were from Image Comics too.
I mostly work in other disciplines now, organizational creativity rather than strictly creative, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss it a little. Colouring, design, writing. I do use all of those skills in service to The Beguiling and TCAF and even occasionally the blog here. But yeah, seeing Jim talk about how happy he was to know there was a printed trade paperback of his work, a work he put a lot of effort into writing, designing, promoting, developing, even colouring and drawing a tiny a little of it, it reminded me of the thrill of seeing a new comic that I’d work on show up in the store. Kudos Jim, hope you’re enjoying it.
Skullkickers Volume 1: 1000 Opas and a Dead Body by Jim Zubkavich, Edwin Huang, and Misty Coats is 144 pages of over the top fantasy adventure retailing for the bargain-basement price of just $9.99. It will be on sale March 9th in better comic book stores everywhere.
Hi there! My name is Christopher Butcher and in addition to running this fine blog, I’m also the Director of the 2011 Toronto Comic Arts Festival, or TCAF as we call it. TCAF is an annual comics event held in Toronto, Canada, inside the massive Toronto Reference Library. It attracts about 12,000 people over two days, and features readings, panel discussions, interviews, gallery exhibitions, and a massive exhibition of talented cartoonists from around the world, selling and displaying their wares. The next Festival is May 7th and 8th, 2011, and you can find out more about it at http://www.torontocomics.com.
Earlier this week, it was my great pleasure to announce that TCAF will be welcoming acclaimed Japanese manga creator Usamaru Furuya to the 2011 Festival. Furuya-san will be on hand to support his brand new English-language manga Lychee Light Club, published by Vertical Inc. and which will be debuting at TCAF. Furuya-san’s series for VIZ Media‘s Shonen Jump Advanced line, Genkaku Picasso, will also be finishing its three-volume serialization in May with the third volume possibly making an early appearance at the show. We appreciate the support of Vertical Inc., VIZ Media, and Japanese publisher Ohta Books in making this appearance happen–it’s a rare and unique thing to have one manga creator at a North American event–last week we announced the fabulous Natsume Ono as a Featured Guest–but to have two such talented and Japanese cartoonists is frankly unprecedented.
I want to talk a little bit about Furuya-san’s work. First and foremost, he’s one of my personal favourite cartoonists. He’s a unique, compelling, and incredibly talented creator with a vivid back-catalogue of work. His manga is incredibly varied, first appearing in North America in the cutting edge manga magazine Pulp with the series Short Cuts, published by VIZ Media. This humourous exploration of Japanese youth culture, and where it intersects with the ‘adult’ world, moved rapidly between strips, and sometimes in the same strip, from outré to shocking to laugh-out-loud funny to bizarrely touching, and is fondly remembered amongst alt-manga fans… myself included. Quite honestly much of the deeper appreciation for Japanese culture that I’ve developed came out of Short Cuts and its serialization in Pulp, a fact which is doubtlessly horrifying several of the people who read this. It shouldn’t be so surprising though–Short Cuts engaged an emerging Japanese youth culture and also explained it to a larger Japanese audience, and to have something like that translated for a North American audience was about as ‘inside’ and ‘authentic’ as you could get. Floppy-socked Japanese school girls, taking paid dates and listening to the hottest visual rock bands, all of this is taken for granted as a staple of Japanese culture from a North American vantage point here in 2011; in 2000 it was revelatory for me. The serialization in Pulp and the two-volume collection published by VIZ Media were enormously affecting; I’ve read and lent the series out many times.
His debut manga Palepoli ran in the seminal underground manga magazine Garo, and has been lightly excerpted in North America in the sadly out of print works Secret Comics Japan (an amazing anthology of alternative Japanese comcis featuring the likes of Junko Mizuno and others) and Tokyo Edge (a mostly-text guide to Japanese underground culture written by the Editors of Pulp). Furuya’s mix of surrealism, superior craft, and an unwillingness to be bound by social mores in Palepoli was instantly appealing to me, and repeated rereadings of those precious few pages have revealed even greater depth, meaning, and humour. I wish, one day, that the series would be translated into English.
And that was it for a while.
Pulp sadly folded, taking with it the majority of alt- and underground manga releases for a little while, and seriously stalled manga-for-grownups for a little while, and the industry became very focused on boys adventure comics and girls romance comics for a little while. Not a bad thing, but not generally where my interests lie. Luckily Furuya’s career continued unabated in Japan, and surprisingly, in France. Owing to our bilingual heritage we stock French comics (including manga) at The Beguiling where I work, and new works from Furuya would appear from time to time. His manga are championed by Nouvelle Manga movement originator Frederic Boilet (whose own comics have been published in English by Fanfare/Ponent-Mon), and consequently where anglophones had a 9 year gap between Furuya projects, popular series like La Musique de Marie, Le Cercle du Suicide, and the recent Tokyo Magnitude 8 have continued to impress French audiences. His work is also very popular amongst scanlators and the grey market, it must be said, though I feel like popularizing that fact will hinder future releases of his work.
On that note, it was on my trips to Japan starting in 2007 that I started picking up Japanese editions of Furuya’s manga. By Japanese language skill is still almost non-existent, but anyone who’s looked at one of Furuya’s manga will agree that you can get a lot out of the drawings. I own 10 or 11 of his works in Japanese, and I’d love for them all to be replaced one day with English editions.His 51 Ways To Save Her was one of the announced but unreleased works from the doomed CMX manga line. Will we see it one day?
Recently, surprisingly… almost bizarrely, Furuya showed up again at VIZ with Genkaku Picasso, a gloriously demented short manga series about the inner lives of teenagers, and a boy tasked by God with helping the lives of those around him using his profound artistic talent. One element of Furuya’s work I haven’t touched on is his incredible draftsmanship. His work has a clarity and skill that is above average even in Japan, and he’s an expert at the human figure (especially cute girls…). He’s also incredibly creative, drawing objects and situations that most people couldn’t conceive of… and when you’re drawing the dreamish, nightmarish inner worlds of teenagers, that is a skill that will serve you very well. The series looks great, and is hilarious and disturbing and entertaining… of much more interest to an older audience than the “Shonen Jump Advanced” tag might imply.
Which brings us to Lychee Light Club, debuting at TCAF from Vertical Inc. I’ve got the Japanese version, and while gorgeous it’s certainly bizarre–learning that the series is actually a comedy (a dark comedy), set against the beautifully rendered violence and gore of the original? Well that’s going to add a lot I feel. But really, let me say again, the book is gorgeous. I’m really looking forward to reading it in English.
It was also just announced that Vertical has picked up another 3 volume series from Furuya, debuting this September and being released every two months, so I have that to look forward to too! And quite honestly, so do you. I feel incredibly lucky to share the work of one of my favourite manga-ka with all of you, and for those of us who’ll be in Toronto this May getting to meet him will be an additional thrill. Even if you can’t come, make sure to check out Genkaku Picasso, track down the two trade paperbacks of Short Cuts, and pick up Lychee Light Club when it appears in stores this spring.
And learn French. Musique de Marie and Suicide Circle are highly unlikely to be released in English.
Apparently the folks at online importer j-list have started selling cans of the pancake drink, or as they call it “Dydo Hot Cake Mix Drink ~ Pancake Essence Beverage”. If you’ll recall, this is the beverage that I heard about and became obsessed with finding on my trip to Japan this past fall. I found it, drank it, and it’s delicious. It’s like tea-with-milk that tastes exactly like buttery pancakes and syrup.
It’s also worth noting that I found it served piping hot (in the can!) at a different vending machine, and it might’ve actually tasted even better warm. Anyway, you can now get a can of your very own! Or two or three. I actually brought back 5 or 6 with me, and they’re in the fridge waiting for a perfect moment to relax and enjoy one…
The World Of Gloria Badcock, coming this summer from Koyama Press.
Fabulous news! The incredibly talented cartoonist and illustrator Maurice Vellekoop has announced that he’s working on a brand new comic book, his first in many years! Fans of his work may remember the adventures of Ms. Gloria Badcock from the anthology collection of Maurice’s work, Vellevision, published many, many years ago by the good folks at Drawn & Quarterly. Perhaps if you’re of a certain age you might even remember her appearance from the Fabulous Babes comic book before that?
Well Maurice announced on his blog this weekend that he’d be bringing back Gloria Badcock in three sexy new adventures in a new 24 page comic book from Koyama Press this spring. For the bargain price of $5, you get a healthy dose of funny new comics, filled to the brim with the outrageous and erotic, all beautifully illustrated to boot.
I’d really been hoping that the book would be ready to debut at TCAF, but alas, it will not. I’m still incredibly excited about it though, and while Maurice will still be exhibiting at TCAF, we’re just going to need to throw another big party for this book when it arrives this summer. Clear your social calendars now…
Oh, and I was talking to Maurice the other day and he’d mentioned that he hadn’t gotten a lot of feedback on his blog since he launched it. With the advent of RSS feeds and Twitter taking up most of the conversation now, I said it was likely that lots of people were reading and enjoying and just silent in his comments section… But if you’ve been lurking and would like to offer a kind word or two I’m sure he’d appreciate it. He even has a great new illustration of “The 8 Circles Of Gay Hell!” for you to enjoy! http://www.mauricevellekoop.com/blog/
“We have a difficult time talking about things in comics. This is weird in that any reasonably large Twitter feed will tell you that people in comics talk all the damn time. So it’s not lack of practice, obviously.
“A lot of what was specifically distressing about the reaction to the video was how many old, corny, early Internet argument constructions still hold sway, ways of arguing that that should have been dragged into the light and staked a long time ago.
“That people shouldn’t be allowed to complain unless they solve the problem they’re complaining about is a ludicrous notion given two seconds thought.
“That a huge subset of superhero comics fans chose to regard this video as they’ve processed every argument since 1974 with a critical component — as some sort of full-bore assault on themselves and their tastes — is just sort of pathetic at this point.
“That comics people tend to cede to corporations some “right” to do whatever the hell they want as long as they don’t get put in jail, without criticism, because that’s the obligation these companies have to their stockholders remains stunning to me. It’s alarming partly because it’s a repugnant view, or at least I feel that way, but also because the history of comics is full of examples of companies and businesses acting humanely rather than inhumanely, making a choice of one thing over another on the basis of something other than ruthless self-interest.
“After 15 years working in comics and 14 and a half months on the comics Internet, I never need to see the word “hypocrite” again.
“Ditto the idea that anyone that criticizes anything does so from a cross-armed position of moral superiority and it’s that assumed smug state, rather than the argument or issue itself, that needs to be brought down.
“We have a lot of hang-ups, the comics community, and it will be much easier to move forward if we’re honest about when those come into play. We might at least try to find new ways of saying these things, so that we know something is being said instead of clichés being brandished. This wasn’t our finest discussion.”
