Got the recent translated Hellstar Remina and I am excited to see what it’s like compared with the fan translation I read back in high school. It’s remained my favorite Ito story in memory. There’s like nothing so feverishly anxious as Remina that I can point to. Really seems like Ito was tapped into a completely irrational and terrifying side of himself when he made this one.
Edit: I also read the No Longer Human adaptation he did which was pretty good. Makes me interested to re-read the novel, see the recent film. Pretty bleak. Protagonist is a terrible person too. Great art and nightmarish moments.
DUDE!!! Berserk’s Birth Ceremony chapter in the Conviction arc is fucking w i l d
I love that furtive pigmy character so much.
Reading Junji Ito’s Yon & Mu cat diary book, and in response to a question about what he would like to do for his 25th year as a manga artist (in 2013) he said he would like to make a manga out of a novel which he wrote for a video game. Does anyone know what this video game and novel are?
I don’t know but while googling for it I did find this:
skrull king gamer
have been reading a couple of different jack kirby things starting with Fantastic Four which is much more fun than i remembered, specifically for the ways it diverges from the marvel template to come - you can still see the bits that are like monster comic, romance comic, science adventure etc but they still feel distinct in themselves rather than being totally dissolved into the all-purpose gestalt that was to come. the stories develop in a rangier fashion as a result - just kind of stumbling on these weird situations and enemies while in the middle of squabbling with each other or performing an experiment or wandering into a haunted castle or answering a mean letter. there’s almost no crime with the exception of the part where some generic mobsters try to induce an omnipotent alien baby to knocking over an armoured car, which is maybe the determining difference from all the later stuff to come.
there’s definitely crime in the later OMAC book but it’s kind of counterbalanced by a very weird feeling of buckminster fuller style pop utopianism. like, there’s a part where OMAC has two unknown elderly people show up at his apartment: his Peace Agent coworkers (who repeatedly emphasise that they “wear featureless masks to conceal their racial identities, as they represent all the nations of the world”) just tell him that these are his parents now, as it’s important to form human bonds. OMAC gravely tells them that he’ll do his best to be a good son and then it doesn’t come up again. there’s a sense of awe and dread at the weirder aspects of this future vision but it’s always in an attitude of “well, the world as it is is fucked enough so i’ll give it a shot.” interestingly OMAC is the enhanced form of a human named Buddy Blank but the two are totally unaware of each other, don’t share memories, and he only turns back to his past life due to a kind of regression ray - there’s a sense that the past should stay buried.
i read a little of his Black Panther comic but it felt even headier and more psychedelic. the plot of the first issue revolves around “King Solomon’s Frog” which is a tiny ancient time machine concealed in the form of a golden frog.
Of the stuff I bought last week:
Yay to Barbaric #1 and Red Room #2
Boo to Shield #1. I’m a huge Liefeld apologist but he phoned this one in. And with all the drama about that variant cover giving away “the twist,” said twist is in the first word balloon on the first page!
Has anyone read Inio Asano’s Oyasumi Punpun? Curious to hear opinions from anyone who has finished it, if there’s anyone here who has. Or even if you read a little?
I’m considering stopping on the 6th volume… sometimes I think it’s a repulsive and boring book… but that is definitely the effect it wants to create, I just don’t know if I always find it interesting. But at this point I’m kind of interested to see how it ends, yet there are like 9 volumes more to read.
Edit: just realized I am reading omnibus versions, so I actually only two more books to go after finishing this one. So I’ll just complete the damn thing, but it’s kind of an emotional experience that I don’t totally like.
Oyasumi Punpun is really good, ‘emotional experience I don’t totally like’ is exactly how you should be feeling at the point you’re at.
A lot of it is designed to get a rise out of the reader, but not without purpose.
good! I am reassured then. what made me check before actually just walking away from it for good is that sometimes it is startlingly, pathetically relatable and completely coherent when it wants to be. and there is no way moments like this are accidental to the confusing monotony of its other parts.
Nijigahara Holograph’s only one volume and gets to the point a lot quicker, along with being a better book.
I like nijigahara holograph, but I definitely think oyasumi punpun is a more mature work.
punpun honestly feels like the turning point for Inio Asano, where it feels like he matured as a storyteller. The pre Punpun works all feel like they’re trying too hard
I think it’s the other way round! You can really tell how Asano was trying to contain his work into his smaller, more pronounced titles such as Solanin and Nijigahara before the way punpun took off made him pivot hard into his own nihilism which is how you end up with books like Downfall.
I can’t stand Solanin, I think its his worst comic, by far.
Not as bad as the epilogue he wrote to it over a decade later!
punpun is probably still one of my favorite comics, if i think hard about it.
i read during the last two years of highschool so you can imagine the type of cauterizing effect it had on me. i cried so much at the end i had to take a walk at like, 10PM.
it’s full of repulsive stuff, yeah.
(i should probably go back to reading dead dead demon’s DeDeDeDe destruction. seemed, ironically enough, more mature and less keen on grovelling in negativity overall)
