• Tokyo Scum Brigade vs. Kazuo Umezz Parts 1 & 2 The big news! My friends at TSB have begun serializing their in-depth interview with Kazuo Umezu! They were lucky enough to visit the Makoto-chan house in person, have lunch with Umezz & Demerin, and interview him on camera a few weeks ago. By everyone's reckoning, this is Umezu's first English language interview. In the first two parts, the TSB boys talk to Uncle Kaz about his childhood, and early encounters with Tezuka's manga and drawing Shojo weeklies. These are a MUST-READ for Same Hat horror junkies!
  [PART 1] & [PART 2]



(Kazuo Umezu in high school showing off a drawing!)


• Jog dissects the '80s MANGA anthology (and in doing so, drops major science on the definition of "manga" among Western audiences). This was a fascinating read from pretty much the best comics/manga reviewer on the internet. Jog uses this odd collection of manga (featuring Keizo Miyanishi , Noriyoshi Olai, Otomo and others) as a jumping off point for a long discussion of publishing trends since the early 80s.
  [PART 1] and [PART 2]





• I DRAW YOUR SHIT series on the Electric Ant Zine Blog! It's a series of posts where we take turns doing tributes/covers to each other's characters. It's admittedly self-referential, but has become a great excuse for the extended EAZB readership to get off out butts each week and draw. So far, we've done TING & TERNG, the conjoined twin bullies from Hellen Jo's Jin & Jam #1, and MAX GUY from Lamar Abrams' Remake. It's open to anyone that wants to join, so check 'em out and take part in the next round (starting on Monday)
  [LINK]





• The Drifting Classroom: The Game: The Soundtrack OTAKU USA games/anime editor and Same Hat buddy Joseph Luster created a chiptune tribue to an imagined 8-bit game adaptation of Kazuo Umezu's child/anarchism nightmarescape manga Drifting Classroom.
  [LINK]





• Daul Kim, RIP Not necessarily relevant to everyone here, but I wrote up a short memorial post for the passing of supermodel / blogger Daul Kim, who died by suicide last month. Among other things, Kim was a cool girl and into the same stuff as us: blogging, zines, Shinya Tsukamoto, Wong Kar-Wai, Klaus Kinski, etc.
  [LINK]





• Who is Makoto Takahashi? Same Hat BFF zytroop has been on a role lately at KURUTTA (despite a tragic hard drive crash), but this post was a stunning gem for me- a collection of art from a "1957 shōjo manga called The Rows of Cherry Trees (さくら並木) by a man named Macoto, or Makoto, Takahashi (高橋真琴)."
  [LINK]

THE PREEMMINENT GEKIGA-KA'S FIRST GRAPHIC NOVEL FROM FIFTY YEARS AGO
Created in the late 1950s, Black Blizzard is Yoshihiro Tatsumi's remarkable first full-length graphic novel and one of the first published examples of Gekiga. Tatsumi documented how his love for Mickey Spillane and hard-boiled crime novels led him to create this landmark genre of manga in his epic, critically acclaimed 2009 autobiography, A Drifting Life. With Black Blizzard, Tatsumi explores the dark underbelly of his working-class heroes that five decades later has made him one of the best-known Japanese cartoonists in North America.



Susumu Yamaji, a twenty-four-year-old pianist, is arrested formurder and ends up handcuffed to a career criminal on the train that will take them to prison. An avalanche derails the train and the criminal takes the opportunity to escape, dragging a reluctant Susumu with him into the blizzard raging outside. They flee into the mountains to an abandoned ranger station, where they take shelter from the storm. As they sit around the fire they built, Susumu relates how love drove him to become a murderer. A cinematic adventure story, Black Blizzard uncovers an unlikely love story and an even unlikelier friendship.