Osamu Tezuka - Dr Thrill

Here's a classic Tezuka series from 1959. There's a boy solving mysteries and having adventures with his faithful dog, which saves him from lots of cliff hanging style dangers. It's got all the classic characters in it, like Inspector Mustache and lots of others I recognise but don't know their names. It's a good silly book.

Here's a bit of whats going on from the proper Tezuka book review site - "Along the way they encounter an evil group of assassins that plant a time bomb in the belly of a foreign dignitary in an attempt to kill his prince, and the leader of a gang of narcotic smugglers who dresses like a giant insect and hides their wares in honeycombs.  They duke it out the Black Tengu gang for possession of a treasure, come to the aid of a young boy with insomnia who witnesses a murder.  They even get kidnapped by an evil gang of international conspirators – and that’s just the beginning!". Cool.

Taiyo Matsumoto - Sunny Volumes 1 and 2

I really liked the first two volumes of Sunny by Taiyo Matsumoto. It's about a big group of kids living in a children's home. The slice of life stories follow different ones of the kids, or different groups of them as they get up to things.

The drawing is amazing as to be expected.

Sunny is the name of a yellow car that's parked behind the childrens home. The children often sit in the car and think about things or imagine they are driving along. Matsumoto draws the best cars, bicycles and animals, which are about the hardest things for me to draw.

I'd really recommend this series, it's out in English too.

Taiyo Matsumoto - Brothers of Japan and Zero

I got a few more Taiyo Matsumoto books in Japan too. Here's the first 'Brothers of Japan'. It's a book of his short stories. There's a wide range of different stories. Here's one about a gorilla riding in a motorbike race. The drawing is all great as usual with amazing lines, and great use of black and white.

Also I got 'Zero' which is about a boxer. Here's a double page from it.

This one is great too. I always like how he puts so many animals in his stories, just wandering about in the backgrounds. This one seems more like a standard comic, with more of a usual story, but it's still very idiosyncratic.

Another Japan Drawing

Here's a drawing I did of a fancy old house I saw in Kanazawa, Japan.

Usamaru Furuya - Bokura No Hikari Club

This is a pretty twisted manga about a gang of misfit boys who form an evil club. This is a prequel to the main story apparently, showing how they get together in the first place.  In the later volumes they build a robot to kidnap women for them as they are all losers. It's a very satirical story with lots of black humour, it's not trying to be serious.

It's all drawn in a very similar style to Suehiro Maruo, which is funny. The kids look like his drawings of evil boys.

Here's the leader of the gang trying to be evil by painting a big black star on the floor. I found this manga very amusing.

Japan Drawings

Here's some drawings of Japan I did when back home.

Osamu Tezuka - Microid S Volume 1

Here's another book by Osamu Tezuka. This one is about an army of insect people who are planning to exterminate all humans. Three of the tiny insect people escape from their base deep in the desert to try and warn the humans. They keep getting captured by humans and put in jam jars, nearly eaten etc. They are quite superhero looking with letters on their shirts and special powers.

They try and warn people at the United Nations but no-one will listen, except for one scientist. Meanwhile a kid is being bad at school and fighting gangs of kids and his evil teacher, but he will turn out to be the hero.

The insects attack in lots of places and kill loads of people leaving piles of bodies in the streets. Can they be stopped?

There's lots of adventure and excitement, it's a good story.

Osamu Tezuka - MW Volumes One and Two

I went to Book Off again when I was in Japan, under the bridge in Akihabara and bought a big pile of super cheap manga. Here's one of them, Osamu Tezuka's 'MW'. It's available in English as well which I didn't know.

It's a weird one as Tezuka is trying to write a much darker style of manga. The antihero is this banker character here. As a child he was saved from a poison gas attack on an island by the hero, a priest. The gas caused him to lose all his conscience so he is very evil and does whatever he wants, such as bank robberies, kidnappings and murders.

The antihero is gay and so is the priest character. The antihero is always disguising himself as a woman to carry out his evil schemes, as he is here. The priest is a very conflicted character who blames himself for the evil antihero, who he is in love with, and is trying to save him.

There's a lot of action, brutal murders and very dark stuff. By the end the antihero is trying to get hold of the MW poison gas that nearly killed him, and release it, to kill everyone else on earth. It's very 1970's which is fun. I had to look up the English synopsis to find out what was going on by the end, as it was getting very busy.

Japan Holiday 2020

I've just got back from Japan last night. We went for a holiday for my brothers fourtieth birthday. This time we went to Osaka, Kanazawa, Lake Kawaguchiko and Tokyo. It was great. It was very windy on the flight back to Manchester last night so that was scary. Now to recover and get back to cleaning the scans of my new comics...

Here's a few photos.

 Dotombori in Osaka

 We went to Koga San to see all the temples on top of the mountains, as you can see it was very foggy.

 We went to the very nice garden Kenrokuen in Kanazawa.

 Geishas throwing lucky beans to the crowd in Kanazawa for Setsubon. We also got free sake at this festival from a great big barrel.

 Mount Fuji from the lake.

 Shinjuku at night

Shinjuku with the giant Godzilla head.

Japan Sketchbook Pages

As it's Japanese season on BBC4 at the moment here's a few different pages from my Japan Sketchbook that I drew in January and February this year. It's still on sale at my website if you would like a copy.

Nekojiro - Nekojiro Udon 1

This is the last of the manga books I bought on holiday. I remembered Nekojiro from 'Secret Comics Japan' or 'Sake Jock', one of those early books of underground Japanese comics. Do you remember when that was the only way to see any weird manga? This collection has the story from there, the one where they hold a court to judge insects in their backyard. The other stories are all different types, a lot are dark, weird or philosophical. The stories usually star the brother and sister cats. They can be cruel, but they are cats after all.

Here's a double page from a story about priests trying to convert the cats, but they are not keen.

Matsumoto Taiyou - No. 5 Volume 1

 This is a very fancy manga from Matsumoto Taiyou. It has lots of colour dustjackets and fold out paintings. It's about a group of global security masters who are protecting the world. One of them goes rogue so the others decide whether to kill them or what else to do. It's a lovely looking book so well worth buying for the artwork, as always with Matsumoto. This was the hardest of my manga purchases to follow so I didn't understand the story properly, the first two came out in English but they never finished the series which is a shame.

 It is full of drawings of animals, nearly every page has at least a few.

 There's a lot of violent fights in some sections as the masters try to kill each other with assassins or by battling in the thick dark forests.

There is a very fancy colour fold out painting at the back of the book, with a lot more animals.

Atsushi Kaneko - Bambi and Her Pink Gun Vol 2 - 1

 This is a fun manga I picked up. I'd heard of Bambi somewhere so it caught my eye. Bambi is driving her tiny car (with eyes painted on) through the post apocalyptic landscape. She has kidnapped a child who is always starving to eat as much junk food as possible. There's a massive reward on the child's return so all the gangs of bikers, bandits, crazed truckers, Mexican wrestlers and psychopaths are out to kill her. It's very Mad Max. She kills a lot of people with her gun.

It's got a very nice print job with lots of different colours of printing for different chapters, tinted pages and ends up all red in a massive explosion.

Nananan Kiriko - Blue

This is a really great comic. The drawing is very minimal but it gets everything over really well. Here's the first lines of the comic- “The sky that stretches out above the dark sea. The school uniforms and our desperate awkwardness. If those adornments of our youth had any color it would have been deep blue.”
A lot of the comic is about being awkward.  The schoolgirl protagonist makes friends with a new girl, they become romantic, then break up awkwardly.

I really like the minimalist artwork. Nearly all the drawings are of the schoolgirls. Lots of feet, hands, close ups of them turned away from each other. The story takes place at the school, at each others houses and a lonely looking beach front.

This book was brought out in English by Fanfare / Potent Moon so I would recommend that, its a really good manga. Here's a review of the English version from Derik Badman.

Japan Sketchbook

I've just brought out my Japan Sketchbook. It is 28 pages, plus covers, black and white and A5 sized. I'm only doing a limited number of copies. It's full of sketches, drawings and photographs from my recent two week holiday in Japan. I went to Kyoto, Nara, Yudanaka and Tokyo. If you would like one I'll have copies at the Sheffield Zine Fest on Saturday or you can buy them from my Comicsy page for £3.70 with free postage in the UK. Thanks!

Taiga Sassa - Isabella Bird in Wonderland - Vol 1

This is a cool little manga. It's the manga version of a book from 1878 written by Scottish adventurer Isabella Bird, who travelled from Edo to the far North of Japan. I'd heard about the book from my guide book to Japan, so when I saw the manga I bought it. I wish they'd have had more volumes as she meets the Ainu in Hokkaido later in her adventures and I would have liked to see that.

In this first volume she hires a guide and tries to get used to Japanese food as she starts to travel North.

She is attacked by hundreds of fleas while sleeping. She gets over this and starts to enjoy some of her adventures. She makes friends with a young Japanese girl. I liked the drawing and the story was easy enough to follow in Japanese.