It basically just took a hundred years for comics to become good

Thanks Droid! That's great

What about Jim Woodring? There must be some fan's of Frank's adventures on Dissensus...

http://www.jimwoodring.com/

Deleriously psychedelic.

droid said:

And id also like to add my voice to the chorus of praise for Charles Burns' 'Black hole'. Great stuff. Almost Japanese in its textual conciseness. Reminded me a bit of 'Uzumaki' or the 'Hino Horrors' mentioned above.

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I read one issue of Black Hole that someone had, but not enough to understand what was going on. I should give it a proper try.

Are there other japanese horror artists that have been translated into english? I really like Hino and Ito's comics but I haven't come across any others aside from this freakshow one by Suehiro Maruo which was also really awesome, just a bit more surreal. There's a very strange feeling that they have that seems unique to me from all other types of horror and certainly from other comics.

And thanks for the link, droid.

my two favourite comics of all time are love and rockets (more gilbert than jaime) and krazy kat. and art school confidential by dan clowes has a special place in my heart being that i'm an art student and that strip reflects my experience of art school almost entirely.

recommended japanese comics:

akira - Katsuhiro Otomo (the comic totally blows the film out of the water)
black and white - Taiyo Matsumoto
ranma - rumiko takahashi
secret comics japan - various (this is a totally amazing collection of japanese underground comics)
lone wolf and cub - kazuo koike
uzumaki - junji ito

i totally disagree about japanese comics being better than western stuff, the best western stuff i've read Ware, Clowes, Love & Rockets etc, is easily on a par with the best japanese stuff i've read. apparently though, according to a japanese friend of mine, barely any good manga gets translated into english, the vast majority of stuff that does come out over here is fairly shallow teenage stuff.
but as far as jap horror goes i'd definetly recommend checking out Secret Comics Japan, and also Junko Mizuno's stuff -more for the art, her writing isn't so great, and another amazing artist called Toshio Saeki, he doesn't do comics though, he just an artist

junko mizuno:






toshio saeki:

big satan said:

i totally disagree about japanese comics being better than western stuff, the best western stuff i've read Ware, Clowes, Love & Rockets etc, is easily on a par with the best japanese stuff i've read. apparently though, according to a japanese friend of mine, barely any good manga gets translated into english, the vast majority of stuff that does come out over here is fairly shallow teenage stuff.

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Its the genius VS scenius thing again though innit. The majority of westen comics that I rate highly - from Nemesis to the to Alan Moore, Moebius, Miller and Clowes, are produced by people (at one time at least) who were outside the mainstream of comics, and is either overtly manga influenced ala Dark Night, or completely individual and idiosyncratic in either writing or artwork.

I think that the acceptance comics have in Japan, plus the seemingly unwritten consensus on formula, genre and visual rules, allow for much greater freedom for artists to produce whatever they want within that framework without being as bound by thematic dogma as the average Western comics creator... so in Manga's case, innovation often comes from within the mainstream, and as its a self propelling and popular 'scene', the rate of classics to duds is much higher - its just a pity that most of them arent translated....

BTW, There were (I think) a bunch of toshio saeki pics in the Shojo special issue of Comics journal from last Autumn... Might still be available.

i disagree with discounting stuff outside the comics mainstream as anamolous bearing in mind the warped state of the so-called mainstream for comics, i.e. superhero only, seeing as superhero comics are scorned by actual the mainstream (although the films are often huge, and i don't really see why one and not the other...) whereas jimmy corrigan won the guardian prize for literature. and i'm sure anyone in to indie comics can give give examples of breaking down their friends predjudices against comics by showing them ghostworld or whatever.
i agree that there seems to be more tolerance for what is acceptable within the japanese mainstream though.

by the way, if you're in london starting on friday or saturday there's a week of films adapted from manga showing at the ICA, none of them i'd read or heard of before but i've been told they're all good mangas. Cromartie High School, My House, Blue, Fancy Dance & Nowhere Man

big satan said:

by the way, if you're in london starting on friday or saturday there's a week of films adapted from manga showing at the ICA, none of them i'd read or heard of before but i've been told they're all good mangas. Cromartie High School, My House, Blue, Fancy Dance & Nowhere Man

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Cromartie High School! One of the funniest comics /cartoons Ive ever read/seen. The live action version is supposed to be great.

'Blue' is a slow and stark 'last-day-of-school-nostalgic-lesbian romance' The mangas OK - cant see the film standing out much...

'Fancy Dance' is about a rock star kid who has to prtend to be a buddhist monk for a year for some reason... Ive ignored it up till now cos of its very 'Yaoh' looking... havent heard of the other one.

Whatever you do - go to Cromartie!!! - Im in Dublin so ill have to wait a while... (or I might just download the thing)

i went to see blue and it was very good, i only really went because my friend suggested seeing it and i hadn't seen her in a while so i went along, so it came as a welcome surprise to thoroughly enjoy the film. sadly, i didn't get to see any of the others due to work and prior commitments. she saw cromartie high school and said it was very good, but not on a par with the manga.

Freakaholic said:

Favorite comic, hands down:

Milk & Cheese

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I'll drink to that you @#&*!!

I also totally second big satan's mizuno junko recommendation. You should try and track down one of her pure trance strip collections...


and more mainstream manga-wise... I highly recommend "GANTZ"... you can find scans of this on the web if you do some searching but sometimes the internet fanboy translations are totally devoid of the original meaning. One of my favourite post-akira sf mangas.

and a japanese classic (also a great anime tv series) if you can find it... "ge ge ge no kitaro" It's a story about a monster boy and his other yokai (japanese goblin / ghosty monster) friends. Most of the characters are based on traditional ghost stories from all over japan... very cute and strange. My favourite character is medama oyaji - kitaro's eyeball-with arms-&-legs father who lives in kitaro's empty left eye socket.