Hey folks, just a reminder that HEY OSCAR WILDE, IT’S CLOBBERIN’ TIME! and I are doing a super-awesome contest right now. The winner will receive the final cover rough of Evan Dorkin’s art for I Love You Beth Cooper (image below) and signed copies of DORK VOLUME 1 and DORK VOLUME 2! To enter, all you have to do is post the name of your favourite Evan Dorkin creation to Twitter with the hashtag #dorkin, between right now and August 31st at midnight. Steven Gettis from HEY OSCAR WILDE! IT’S CLOBBERIN’ TIME! will randomly choose one entry to win!
RULES:
All the tweets with the #dorkin tag are being registered at http://twapperkeeper.com/dorkin/ and that will be list where the winner is chosen from (once the non-entries/re-tweets are pulled). If you don’t see your entry on that list, please re-post with the appropriate tag. We will then add up how many specific replies there are to this, plug that number into the random number generator at http://www.random.org/ and the winner will be the person whose ’twit’ on that list corresponds with that number working from the bottom up/earliest made. So the first entry that rolls into this today will be number one and working the way up to the final number, whatever number that may be.
One of the things that really took me back in Japan? The alcohol culture in general is a hell of a lot more enlightened than it is in North America. We’ve all heard the stories about drunken salarymen making a mess of the streets of Tokyo, but I’ll take that over the wierd puritan love/hate relationship we have with alcohol here any day…
To that end, if you happen to wanna drop in to the local KFC for dinner, why not pick yourself up a nice big not-quite-a-pint of Kirin Beer? Beer: It really does go great with Fried Chicken.
(I couldn’t find any hint of this at the KFC site, which leads me to believe this is a more ground-level production… Or they want to keep it under the radar for some reason!)
– Christopher Not everything I wanna say about Japan will be in 30-photo chunks… enjoy!
The July 2009 Manga Release List. Yeah, just July.
Who likes pictures of Bookstores!?
I just went through my 2007 Japan Photo set, and would you believe that in all of my pictures of Kinokuniya’s awesome 7+floor flagship store in Shinjuku, I never once took a picture of their sprawling, massive Japanese-language manga section? I think that’s because I hit Kinokuniya towards the end of my trip, and by then I’d taken hundreds of photos of manga stores like Animate and Tora No Anna, but I don’t think I ever gave Kinokuniya it’s due as being a great, centrally located and excellently stocked bookstore–whether you’re a manga fan or not…!
Kinokuniya’s flagship store is located in Tokyo’s capital, Shinjuku, about 5 minutes walk from the south exit of Shinjuku Station. Shijunku station has like 20 exits, so it’s actually closer to the “New South Exit” but walking everywhere or anywhere in Tokyo is a joy, if you happen to be in love with cities and people-watching. Kinokuniya (the bottom red box) is actually on the otherside of the massive Takeshimaya Times Square Department Store, which is giant and beautiful, and has a whole Tokyu Hands inside too! It’s worth the walk.
Unfortunately on both days that I visited the store it was raining outsie, and so an exterior photo of Kinokuniya didn’t really work out. Once again, the photo above is from Wikimedia commons, taken by the user “Ons”.
Instead we took the awesome 7th-floor glass bridge between Takeshimaya Times Square and Kinokuniya. You get a pretty fun view of the city from here too.
I’m kind of surprised by how many folks I’ve talked to that don’t know about this particular Kinokuniya, despite the fact it’s prominently mentioned in most of the travel guides. I know it’s not a 4000 year old shrine or anything, but a giant well-stocked bookstore is my kind of temple.
The glass bridge lets you off on Kinokuniya’s foreign-books floor, which incidentally carries a huge selection of manga in English. Representatives from all of the major publishers could be found, although much like Kinokuniya New York, this store seemed solely interested in Manga By Japanese Creators, with no OEL or manga-influenced North American work to be found. That said, their selection of English-language manga was amazing, balancing popular long-running series with prestige graphic novels and series traditionally popular in Japan. The English-language editions of Pluto, 20th Century Boys, and Black Jack even merited attractive + well-made signage just to draw attention to great work.
Oh, and, they can get English-language manga we can’t even get here, like the bilingual editions of Kodansha’s Division Chief Kosaku Shima, or the bilingual Doraemon volumes. It’s jealousy-inducing.
HEY OSCAR WILDE, IT’S CLOBBERIN’ TIME! is the site where comics creators draw portraits of their favourite authors and literary creations, and COMICS212 is running Evan Dorkin’s DORK strips every day for a year…! So we’ve teamed up to present an awesome Evan Dorkin prize pack! We’re going to select one winner to receive the final cover rough of Evan Dorkin’s art for I Love You Beth Cooper (image below) and signed copies of DORK VOLUME 1 and DORK VOLUME 2! To enter, all you have to do is post the name of your favourite Evan Dorkin creation to Twitter with the hashtag #dorkin, between right now and August 31st at midnight. Steven Gettis from HEY OSCAR WILDE! IT’S CLOBBERIN’ TIME! will randomly choose one entry to win!
RULES:
All the tweets with the #dorkin tag are being registered at http://twapperkeeper.com/dorkin/ and that will be list where the winner is chosen from (once the non-entries/re-tweets are pulled). If you don’t see your entry on that list, please re-post with the appropriate tag. We will then add up how many specific replies there are to this, plug that number into the random number generator at http://www.random.org/ and the winner will be the person whose ’twit’ on that list corresponds with that number working from the bottom up/earliest made. So the first entry that rolls into this today will be number one and working the way up to the final number, whatever number that may be.
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It couldn’t be easier! So tell your friends, tell the world, and get some great artwork and great comics too!
As Evan Dorkin pointed out in the comments last week, the very first two FUN strips actually ran on the inside front-cover of Dork #1, which I totally missed on my read-through of the magazine. Sorry about that folks. Now, thrill to the first-ever appearances of MYRON: THE LIVING VOODOO DOLL and PHIL: THE DISCO SKINHEAD.
As we approach the end of summer (sigh) it’s important to remember the fall deadlines that every indy comics creator and self-publisher should have tattooed on their hands:
From the site: What Can The Grant Be Used For? Xeric grants can be used for the physical production and distribution of your new or previously unpublished work: printing, color separation, photocopying, solicitation, shipping, advertising, and securing an ISBN number or domain name. Xeric grant funds cannot be used for website design, T-shirts, stickers, posters, postcards, art supplies, phone bills, convention costs, living expenses, or computer equipment.
The Xeric Foundation awards up to $5000 for the production of your (print) comics or graphic novel project! They award between 6 and 8 projects this money every six months. Their tastes are broad, they think pretty-much every format of comics is ‘valid’, it’s a nearly-free-pass into the Diamond catalogue, and at least here at The Beguiling we order a minimum of 5 copies of anything that wins the Xeric because we like supporting indys and the small press. Oh, and it’s funded by Kevin Eastman’sPeter Laird’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles money, which is amazing. [Edit: As Peter Laird points out in the comments, he’s the kind-hearted fellow behind the Xeric foundation. Mea Culpa.]
From the site:
Every year, Prism awards a significant Queer Press Grant to assist in the publication and promotion of LGBT comics. The grant is funded by donors who are either creators who want to help others just starting out, or fans who want to see more LGBT creators get published.
The Prism folks have funded a couple of comics I really loved, Shirtlifter by Steve MacIsaac, and Glamazonia by Justin Hall, as well as a handful of other worthy recipients. It’s pretty clear that the majority of comics publishers simply aren’t interested in pursuing queer stories, which is unfortunate, but it’s why what Prism is doing is so important. That said, PRISM donates money based on their fundraising throughout the year, so if you want to see more queer comics on the stands please consider donating at http://prismcomics.org/donate.php.
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Free money for doing good comics, it’s one of the things I find most inspiring about the comics industry… so participate!
The Xeric Foundation – Deadline September 30th, 2009
Prism’s Queer Press Grant – Deadline October 1, 2009