One of my favorite Junji Ito stories, “Hellstar Remina,” is getting an official translation. I will have to read it again and see whether it’s as good as I remember.
This is the one in which a scientist discovers a new planet and names it after his daughter. When things take a bad turn, the population of Earth blames the girl.
Oh my god. I loved Hellstar Remina. It’s the most hellish apocalypse I’ve ever seen depicted. So much of it is seriously horrific, but then there’s also a ton of just ridiculous garbage thrown in there that makes it really entertaining too. Would love to read it again.
I just popped in here because I am nearly finished with My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, which I am enjoying a lot. In it, I encountered, once again, another Frankenstein archetype that has made me want to cry. I shed endless tears for Frankie and Marry Shelley. But this comic is very good! Beautiful art. There’s going to be a sequel in 2021 apparently?? I’m already looking forward to it.
Hellstar Remina is my favorite Ito manga to be sure. Just a nightmare.
I would be a little disappointed if they dropped “Hellstar” from the title because that is actually a pretty accurate description of what Remina is.
reading the old EC tales of the crypt series for the first time and, what’s with the hosts?? i knew about the crypt keeper but didn’t know that different stories in the same comic could ALSO be introduced by either “the vault keeper” or “the old witch”, who all constantly complain about each other in their respective rambling story introductions, and who are all also more or less just RGB palette swaps of the same weirdo? i greatly enjoy how needless all this is but have a hard time figuring out how it all came about, other than offering an early prefiguration of the console wars.
the stories themselves are good and a little faster moving than i’m used to from old horror comic reprints. it’s funny that when i think about it, the ones that dragged most for me were like post-'50s attempts to lean more into the gothic side of things (bats, cobwebs, elaborate lineart and detail) and the pacing this implies, while a big pleasure of the EC ones so far is that they mostly stick to a kind of streamlined noir template and situate most of their melting corpses in empty suburban iconography worlds.
for the record, my favourite horror host is: whoever is meant to be narrating this strangely equivocal ending segue from a comic whose name i forget
who was it? who knows! but those are the facts, i guess! well, see you later… goodbye!
wonder what Robert Rafalik is up to these days
It was so each could host their own anthology book and EC could put out three books bi-monthly instead of just one. The Crypt Keeper hosted Tales from the Crypt, the Vault Keeper had The Vault of Horror and the Old Witch did Haunt of Fear. They were all essentially the same book though with any distinctions being from whoever the creative teams were at a given time.
I have a few of the collections in print (I had almost everything that had been scanned on a harddrive once that is no longer alive) and I have another anthology book of non-EC horror comics called Four Color Fear: Forgotten Horror Comics of the 1950s. They’re good but distinctly different from the kinds of stories EC put out. The EC books were really big on showing some awful person get what was coming to them but the stories in this book are a bit more just here’s a normal person encountering a zombie or a ghost or something. There’s not as many “twists” to them like the EC stories have.
I wish more material from that era had survived because EC kind of dominates since their work was more widely published.
did comic horror hosts or tv horror hosts come first?
the ideas were pretty contemporary but stuff like tales from the crypt/this magazine is haunted seem to be a couple years older than most recorded horror hosts unless there was just some cool local guy doing it in 1950
I imagine radio horror hosts were the originators
These are a few comics that I read recently.
A Gift for a Ghost by Borja Gonzales
I’d been waiting for the English translation of this one for a long time. (The original version is in Spanish.) I like the artwork a lot but the story didn’t do much for me. Maybe I’ve just read too many comics lately about young people in bands. Worth a look for the drawings, though.
Parallel Lives by O. Schrauwen
I don’t remember how I learned of this one. I like strange stories, and this one was certainly strange. I’m not sure how much I liked it, overall, but I did like the final segment.
West Coast Blues by Tardi and Manchette
This is probably my favorite of the three books I’ve mentioned here. It’s about a middle class man who gets pulled into a crime drama and how he adapts. Maybe something @parker would like.
i want to read an Important comicbook from say the last 2/3 years, what is it
Ohhh I love Schrauwen. He’s one of the few guys I’ve gotten into over the last few years.
I loved the UFO abduction story in Parallel Lives. I thought it was hilarious. It has one of my favorite cartoonist depictions ever
(This is how every white autobio cartoonist depicts themselves, of course. It made me laugh.)
Arsene Schrauwen is excellent but all the screenshots I took of it are feature boners so I will not be posting them here. After every chapter there’s a two page spread asking you to wait a week before resuming and I actually did to that but I wish I hadn’t cuz I sure forget things when it comes to fiction
But I think it says a lot about how much I enjoyed it that I actually, like, tried to do something that silly. #1 author respecter over here.
I’ll buy his next book once I can afford it.
still dipping into EC stuff. did people know that harvey kurtzman is extremely good?? well, i guess everybody knew that… i guess that everybody knew that, apart from me!! all these comics have good hit rates for genre anthology books but it’s a real pleasure to turn the page occasionally and find stuff so much more lively in layout and style than anything else i’d expect to see in this context.
like, adjacent to slick commercial design graphics but almost using that approach as a way to smuggle a cartooning sensibility back into these things. i feel like i could just look at the shoulders in that last image all day. it’s also weird to feel like i’m looking at the source material for like a dozen 80s alt cartoonists, including people like eddie campbell or dan clowes who wouldn’t otherwise seem to have anything in common.
in truth i’m mainly reading for these but Weird Science is turning out to have a lot of small pleasures so far. i liked the one that details the origins of house cats.
this is the possibility journalists are considering when they write shit like ‘man killed by bullet once located in gun registered to police officer’
Series wise Monstress, if you haven’t started it yet?
does anyone got an opinion or recommendation for what is the best and coolest era of George Herriman’s work? I saw some cool Krazy Kat/Krazy & Ignatz panels and my eyes did that 1930s cartoon coyote thing and popped out my skull they looked so cool.