Grand Guignol Orchestra Ma Cherie

I read Grand Guignol Orchestra, Vol. 3

I posted a review at the Comic Book Bin (which has FREE smart phone apps).

Google eBookstore Has Digital Manga Publishing Titles

Digital Manga Publishing launches on to Google Books!

Gardena, CA (May 25, 2010) - Digital Manga, one of the manga industry's most unique and creative publishers, is proud to announce its digital distribution expansion on to Google Books! http://books.google.com/ebooks

Digital Manga has so far launched over 90 titles from their DMP, Juné, and 801 Media imprints into the Google ebookstore, with more to follow in the coming weeks and months, including popular manga titles like Vampire Hunter D and Maiden Rose. Kindle blocked titles like The Color of Love, Weekend Lovers and The Selfish Demon King, are also available in the Google ebookstore.

Digital Manga believes in the “More the better…” concept where digital distribution to every available online storefront, platform, device or digital distributor can provide easier accessibility and availability to readers who own alternative e-reading devices.

Average pricing for most DMP titles is between $5.95 to $7.95 downloaded to your device. You can find a direct listing of current available Digital Manga titles in the Google ebook store here: http://www.junemanga.com/digitaledition/

Google eBooks is compatible with just about any dedicated ebook reader as it stores your library in their digital cloud. Access, your ebooks using your favorite e-reading device like the Barnes & Noble Nook™ and Reader™ from Sony. Follow the link for an overview of Google’s wide array to read your favorite ebook on your favorite device or platform: http://books.google.com/help/ebooks/overview.html

Google Books also provides FREE online eReading applications to help you browse, purchase and download directly off their sites to your preferred device. Apps for PCs, Macs, iPads, iPhones, and Android smartphones and tablets are available now.

http://books.google.com/help/ebooks/devices.html

Sample some of the DMP’s titles below now or go to Google eBooks http://books.google.com/ebooks (best keyword search: digital manga, yaoi, manga)

Sample links:
Vampire Hunter D vol.1: http://books.google.com/books?printsec=frontcover&id=uLb7M1yvHNoC#v=onepage&q&f=false

Love Water: http://books.google.com/ebooks?id=Q2uwSRq_IxgC&dq=digital+manga&as_brr=5

Same Cell Organism: http://books.google.com/books?id=MlP8mzc9OWwC&printsec=frontcover&dq=same+cell+organism&hl=en&ei=GxXXTeXOHY-WsgO1zfCwBw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CC0Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false

Digital Manga currently also publishes manga through other storefronts like the Amazon Kindle, the Barnes & Noble Nook, Kobo books and their very own eManga.com. Check back for new manga title releases which will be up on sale over the next few weeks and months through our newsletter, blog, and our other social networking links below.


About Digital Manga Publishing
Located in Gardena, CA, Digital Manga Publishing is one of the industry's most unconventional and innovative companies, specializing in building corporate and cultural bridges from Japan to the Western Hemisphere - specifically through the licensing, importation and preparation of anime (Japanese animation), manga (Japanese comic books) and related merchandise for the North American mainstream and subculture markets. In this capacity, DMI serves as a catalyst for the expansion of Japanese pop culture institutions into global arenas. The company's imprint line includes DMP: its mainstream imprint, DMP PLATINUM: its classic manga imprint, JUNE´: its boys love imprint, 801 MEDIA: its adult boys love imprint, and DokiDoki: its exclusive co-publishing imprint with Shinshokan Publishing.

For more information about Digital Manga Publishing, visit http://www.digitalmanga.com/ as well as:

http://www.emanga.com/
http://twitter.com/digitalmanga
http://www.youtube.com/user/junemanga
http://www.youtube.com/user/801media
http://www.youtube.com/user/digitalmanga
http://www.facebook.com/DigitalMangaInc

The Signifiers on Kickstarter

Following my review of The Signifiers #1 by Michael Neno (published by M.R. Neno Productions), I want to let you know that The Signifiers #2 is listed on Kickstarter.com. The first issue didn't sell enough copies through Diamond Distributors for them to continue distributing it.

The Signifiers #2 will also feature an exclusive interview with cartoonist Tom Scioli (Godland, The Myth of 8-Opus) on the state of comic book distribution, including unpublished art from his wicked webcomic, American Barbarian. Issue #2 will be 52 pages, B&W, with color covers and a $5.95 cover price. Money pledged for this project will be used towards the printing bill and pledgers will receive new copies of The Signifiers #2 as soon as they are printed.

The Kickstarter.com project will only be funded if the goal amount is pledged by June 5th, 2011.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1317514173/the-signifiers-2?ref=live

Leroy Douresseaux on THE SIGNIFIERS #1

THE SIGNIFIERS #1
M.R. NENO PRODUCTIONS

CARTOONIST: Michael Neno
48pp, B&W, $4.95

The Signifiers is a new comic book series from self-publisher, cartoonist, letterer, and comic book creator, Michael Neno. The Signifiers #1 takes me back to the ancient days of my first encounters with comic books.

One of the first things that captured my imagination about comic books was that the pictures they held within their flimsy covers were strange and were full of weird looking things. What has kept me reading comic books for pretty much every year of my life since I was seven (except for about three or four years) is that they are fun to read – even when I don’t completely understand what they are trying to tell me or sell me.

The Signifiers #1 embodies that. Even after two readings, I don’t quite understand it all, but I want more. This old-school, black and white comic book is set in a whacked out universe. The focus is a character named Splash, a Summer of Love-type black youth who must either obey or fight a mysterious force called The Voyst. In another story, Establishment gadfly/advocate, Landlark, the Heat-Seeking Dwarf, must escape his captors, the Polution Pioneers. What awaits him if he gains his freedom is even stranger.

If Jack Kirby and Paul Pope had gotten drunk together and produced a comic book, The Signifiers would be it. Of course, what would also be needed was Stan Lee trippin’ on something so that he could add his obtuse, sometimes fumbling dialogue. In another way, The Signifiers also seem like something that David Lynch and J.J. Abrams would have cooked up with Jack Kirby in mind.

Beyond Kirby, I can’t say for sure who or what influenced The Signifiers, but it has a free spirit and a willingness to go on a journey into the imagination without the weight of other comic books’ expectations and rules. Reading The Signifiers #1 reminded me of the first time I read Love & Rockets (either #8 or #9 of the first volume) in that, like early L&R, The Signifiers has a look that is old, but also new in a strange and exotic way.

This first issue also offers two backups. One of them features Landlark, the Heat-Seeking Dwarf. It is a lovely mixture of Jack Kirby’s New Gods with a funky take on counterculture. The story is strange, but Neno builds that story with thoughtfully drawn graphics and compositions. It is beautiful art. I could see every page of it in a gallery show.


Copies of The Signifiers can be ordered by sending a check or money order for $7.20 ppd. ($7.53 for Ohio residents), $4.95 for each additional copy, to M.R. Neno Productions, P.O. Box 151303, Columbus, Ohio 43215.

Copies can also be ordered via PayPal: http://www.nenoworld.com/The_Signifiers_No.1.html

http://www.nenoworld.com/
http://twitter.com/#!/Nenofsky
http://eventized.blogspot.com/

Natsume's Pal of a Water God

I read Natsume's Book of Friends , Vol. 6

I posted a review at the Comic Book Bin (which has FREE smart phone apps).

Fantagraphics Books to Publish Two Guy Peellaert Graphic Novels

FANTAGRAPHICS ACQUIRES RIGHTS TO TWO LEGENDARY BELGIAN CLASSICS: PEELLAERT’S THE ADVENTURES OF JODELLE AND PRAVDA

Fantagraphics Books has signed a deal to release two groundbreaking graphic novels from cult Belgian artist Guy Peellaert (1934-2008): The Adventures of Jodelle (1966) and Pravda (1967). The remastered editions will be produced in collaboration with the late artist’s estate, which will contribute previously unseen material for extensive archival supplements.

Both albums were originally released in France by Eric Losfeld, the controversial publisher who passionately defied censorship in the lead-up to the cultural revolution of 1968; along with Jean-Claude Forest’s Barbarella, Peellaert’s Jodelle and Pravda were among the earliest of European adult-oriented graphic novels.

The Adventures of Jodelle, whose voluptuous title heroine was modeled after French teen idol Sylvie Vartan, is a satirical spy story set in a Space Age Roman-Empire fantasy world. Its then-revolutionary clashing of high and low culture references, borrowing as much from Renaissance painting as from a fetishized American consumer culture, marked the advent of the Pop movement within the nascent “9th art” of comic books, not yet dignified as “graphic novels” but already a source of great influence in avant-garde artistic circles. Visually, Jodelle was a major aesthetic shock. According to New York magazine, its “lusciously designed, flat color patterns and dizzy forced perspective reminiscent of Matisse and Japanese prints set a new record in comic-strip sophistication.”

Released a year later and first serialized in the French counter-culture bible Hara-Kiri, Pravda follows the surreal travels of an all-female motorcycle gang across a mythical American landscape, led by a mesmerizing cold-blooded heroine whose hyper-sexualized elastic anatomy was this time inspired by quintessential Gallic chanteuse Françoise Hardy. Pravda’s eye-popping graphics pushed the psychedelic edge of Jodelle to dazzling new heights, further liberating the story from narrative conventions to focus the reader’s attention on the stunning composition and glaring acid colors of the strips, with each frame functioning as a stand-alone cinematic picture.

Pravda, with its themes of female empowerment and beauty emerging from chaos, became an instant sensation on the European underground scene, inspiring various tributes and appropriations from the worlds of film, literature, fashion, music, live arts, advertising or graphic design. Over the years, it has acquired a rarefied status as a unique and timeless piece of Pop Art defying categorization or trends, and has found itself exhibited in such unlikely “high culture” institutions as the Musée d’Orsay or the Centre Pompidou. An early admirer of Peellaert’s radical vision—along with luminaries as diverse as Jean-Luc Godard (who optioned the film rights to Pravda) and Mick Jagger—Frederico Fellini praised Jodelle and Pravda as “the literature of intelligence, imagination and romanticism.”

The Adventures of Jodelle was published in the United States in 1967 by Grove Press, whose legendary editor-in-chief Richard Seaver (the man credited with introducing Samuel Beckett, William Burroughs and Henry Miller to America) also provided the translation; Pravda has never been released in English, despite its lead character transcending the long out-of-print book where she originated to become a peculiar iconic figure, the maverick muse of a few “au courant” art and design aficionados from Paris to Tokyo.

Refusing to cash in on the phenomenal success of Jodelle and Pravda (he viewed the former as a one-time graphic “experiment” of which the latter marked the accomplishment) the reclusive Peellaert abruptly left cartoons behind after only two albums at the dawn of the 1970s to pursue an obsessive kind of image-making which painstakingly combined photography, airbrush painting and collage in the pre-computer age. His best-known achievement in America remains the seminal 1973 book Rock Dreams, a collection of portraits which resulted from this distinctive technique and was hailed as “the Sistine Chapel of the Seventies” by Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine, eventually selling over a million copies worldwide, influencing a generation of photographers and earning its place in the pantheon of rock culture. Other well-known creations include the iconic artwork for David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs album cover (1974) as well as The Rolling Stones’ It’s Only Rock ‘N’ Roll the same year. Peellaert also created the indelible original poster for Martin Scorcese’s Taxi Driver (1978), the first of many commissions from renowned auteurs including Wim Wenders, Robert Altman, Stephen Frears, Alain Resnais and Robert Bresson.

As the original negatives and color separations for Jodelle and Pravda are long lost (interestingly, Peellaert never reclaimed the original ink-on-paper pages from Losfeld) Fantagraphics will be re-coloring both books digitally. “The original Books were colored via hand-cut separations from Peellaert’s detailed color indications,” said Fantagraphics co-publisher Kim Thompson, who will be editing and translating the new editions. “Since the Losfeld editions were printed quite well and Peellaert’s linework is thick and simple, we’re going to be able to generate crisp black-and-white versions of the line art to start from which should duplicate the original ‘look’ exactly. Although actually our edition of Pravda should be better than the original, which had some pretty erratic color registration.”

The Adventures of Jodelle is scheduled for release in May 2012, and Pravda in November 2012, both in deluxe oversized hardcover editions. Each will feature an extensive original essay discussing the works and their historical context, accompanied by numerous archival illustrations and photographs.

“I am terrifically excited to bring these two landmark books to American audiences especially Pravda, which has never been published in English,” said Thompson. “They are some of the most graphically jaw-dropping comics ever put to paper. They remain both quintessentially 1960s in attitude and look, and utterly timeless.”

I Reads You Review: NEGIMA, VOL. 28

Creator: Ken Akamatsu; Alethea Nibley and Athena Nibley (translation and adaptation)

Publishing Information: Del Rey Manga, paperback, 186 pages, $10.99 (US), $11.99 CAN

Ordering Numbers: ISBN: 978-0-345-52160-6 (ISBN-13)

Rating “OT for Ages 16+”

Negi Springfield is a ten-year-old wizard who dreams of becoming a Magister Magi (a “Master of Magic” or “Master Mage”), a special wizard who uses his powers to help normal people. Negi’s primary reason for becoming a Magister Magi is to find his father, Nagi Springfield, the legendary mage also known as the “Thousand Master,” who is believed to be dead. After graduating from the Merdiana Magic Academy in Wales, Negi becomes an English teacher at Mahora Academy in Japan, where he deals with 31 older girls, each very special in her own way.

Negima!, Vol. 28 opens post-Ostia Festival. Negi has managed to free his enslaved friends. As Negi and company prepare to leave Magical World for their homeworld (Earth), they discover that they have been branded as outlaws. That is when Negi encounters Kurt Goedel, the Governor-General of Ostia, who plans to arrest all of them.

This sinister man also claims to be well-acquainted with Negi’s parents, especially Negi’s mother, Arika Anarchia Entheufushiaa, the Queen of Calamity. Goedel offers to pardon Negi and company if they attend his party, the Governor’s Ball. Also, Negi and his friends make a shocking discovery about Magical World and its location.

I always find Negima a difficult read whenever I receive a copy for review, as I have with Vol. 28. There are so many characters, and the story seems (at least to me) to be too busy. Still, I’m a sucker for team books, and this is essentially a team book or the shonen manga equivalent of one. Such a large cast is always bound to yield many interesting and engaging characters, and out of all those sub-plots, surely some of them will capture the imagination.

This time around, Negima offers something to keep readers interested and me coming back – at least for a while. Negi’s parents, their connection to Ostia, Goedel’s part in these mysteries, and the truth about Magical World are the kind of storylines that grab you. I must also admit to enjoying the dynamic of Negi and all those girls – some with romantic feelings for him. It’s like a gift that keeps on giving.