Yes, I might ultimately not be able to resist this. I’ve never paid even half that much for a book before, though.
And for slightly cheaper, I could pick up Codex Seraphinianus. I don’t know how many times over the years I’ve talked myself out of ordering that one.
same
Ironically, I’ll do it as a gift; I’ve bought Codex Seraphinius and other tomes for my brother when I could never justify it for myself. I knew they’d be good gifts because I wanted them so dearly
Reminds me of when I was looking around last month at rare editions of Myth of Sisyphus to try to find one with the original French of the American introduction and came across this 1953 limited edition with a cover by modernist painter Mario Prassinos
Realistically I’m one of the world’s most committed fans of this book and this cover is 100x better than all the ones with a clipart of a guy pushing a rock… but it’s $500 tho
not to push you, Broco, but they got Jim Woodring to illustrate Arcturus
Oh I bought that already
Oh Heck Yes
Holy shit I just… couldn’t resist
Tried to read some other League of Extraordinary Gentlemen books released after those first two, but I have decided I kind of hate that series or at least have no reason to torture myself with the feeling I get every time I start one of those books that is like I’ve missed thirty issues of a series or walked into a conversation with everyone on the same page, and oh yeah DICKS and BOOBS and yes rape too. Moore’s usual stuff but at its absolute worst and in the least interesting way possible.
Which is pretty much what all of you warned me about when I started this. so yeah I SAW what y’all meant.
viz are re-releasing fist of the north star~!
I actually liked the first vol of League, but everything after Vol 2 is def irredeemably crap.
Between the gollywog and alan moore butchering the lyrics to mack the knife, I knew I was done with that shit
The fundamental premise was great, it just needed to focus more on the particularly savage legacies of Victorian imperialism and colonialism instead of just generic Image grimdarkness. If it’d all been written 10 years later (or at least with the sensibilities of 10 years later) it would’ve been really something
Yo. I wanted to suggest to every manga fan, the following:
The Drifting Classroom, by Kazuo Umezu
It’s something special, a sort of sci-fi horror novel. I think people who like Junji Ito might especially appreciate it.
I wanted to throw out this advice, especially becuase I extracted lots of useful information from this thread.
I will have more things to suggest, especially related to manga 
I saw someone once describe it the peak of ALL CAPS, ALL THE TIME comics and I think that’s beautiful. One of my favorite comics.
This was my desktop for years.
Super nice, I didn’t know this one. I will look for it
As I saw Tezuka mentioned above in the thread.
I read lots of his stuff and I think his best works are:
Message to Adolf
Kirihito
MW
Dororo
Ayako
All those are wonderful. I really liked also Apollo’s song. Others are quite nice too (such as Human Insects). I started to read Hi no Tori (Phoenix), but I found it a bit boring. I will have to try again in future. Budda and Black Jack are very famous and among his longest works, but I haven’t read much of those, and my partial impressions are that they aren’t as special as the ones I mentioned above.
I loved Buddha but I’m also really into Tezuka’s wild tonal shifts, where he’ll totally spoil a heartbreaking page by doing a self-insert WAKKA WAKKA bit.
I’m not sure many other people share my fondness for this technique.
Karma is probably the best Phoenix story. I’d give that a shot if you haven’t already. From what I recall the volume order doesn’t make any sense and they all work fine as standalone stories.
There’s a lot of Black Jack. I haven’t read all of it. But the old Viz volumes are excellent. I can’t remember if they were Best-Ofs or sequential reprints though. There’s one story where he performs surgery on himself while wild hyenas standby waiting to eat him which is really wild. I had my nephew read it when he was a kid. He told me it’s what inspired him to get into medicine.
Obayashi’s film adaptation starring Jo Shishido is also amazing, think it was the first movie I watched post-pandemic that was so entertaining I actually, like, smiled, and laughed, and forgot about how much shit sucked. Really fun movie.
I read through this last year and really enjoyed the constant escalation of the terrible situation the kids were in, like it just didn’t stop getting going from worst case scenario to even worse case scenario. I like that practically ever other panel is children with their mouths wide open in either shock, terror, or just yelling whatever they’re saying.
It’s definitely a product of it’s time, eg. Sho’s mother going to the pharmacy to beg them to give her some specific drug and the pharmacist just calls her hysterical and punches her so hard she flies out the door
Will second this, the live action Black Jack is absolutely incredible
I didn’t know there was a Black Jack movie. I will definitely track that one down. I still haven’t got around to seeing Hanagatami. Every time I consider it I remember that it’s almost three hours long and put it off again.
Of all the Tezuka books I’ve read, Ode to Kirihito is the one I think about the most.
