"Bobbie Sellers" wrote in message news:o88h2i$76o$
1@dont-email.me...
On 02/17/2017 05:18 PM, Kenneth M. Lin wrote:
Whoever is making the purchase decision at SFPL must be a huge fan of
Mizuki Shigeru as he is very well represented at Western Addition Branch
of San Francisco Public Library. This is peculiar because Mizuki is not
well known in America and his stuff probably wouldn't translate very well.
It as translatable as most manga and anime.
But Mizuki's stuff is very Japanese and might not have wide appeal to international audience.
I just read a two-volume series based on Mizuki's household budgeting
book before he finally made it. He started off drawing "kami-shibai" (translated to paper show), which is just a guy with a stack of
illustrations reading out the stories. When television was invented,
that went away and he started drawing for "kashihon" (rental manga). He seems to like working for these publishers because they paid cash but eventually they all went under when manga magazines were introduced. It
also depicted how he met his wife throught matchmaking and his father
forced him to marry the woman few days after they met in order to save a
trip to his hometown. At the beginning, he even owned an apartment
complex (where his pen name came from).
All that is covered in Showa. As it the struggle to regain his
artistic skill after he lost his arm in WW II or as the Japanese prefer
the "Pacific War".
For the longest time, I always assumed that he lost his right arm because
his style is very minimalistic but I was wrong.
Strangely, there is virtually no Gegege No Kitaro books even though this
is his most famous work. Ironically, I found one book of unrelated
horror shorts that were incorporated into Kitaro anime series when they
ran out of stories.
I am going through Televi-Kun (Television Boy), a collection of short
stories in oversized volume. It has nearly 600 pages and retails at
2,700 yen so it'd retail for perhaps $40 at Kinokuniya.
His first big serialization was an outright copy of Superman
from comics his father bought for his use as inspiration.
I also found a book on Kitaro that functions as a publication history
and character guide. He switched publishers quite often and in one arc Kitaro had an infant sister with ESP-like power that shows up out of
nowhere but accepted by him and his father. (His mother is later
revealed to be a human even though it's been wide held that she was from
a tribe of one-eye youkai. His father revived himself as an eyeball
after his own death.)
My lingering gripe about Mizuki is that his assistants are doing all the heavy-lifting and his own drawing is quite sloppy. His characters have
no necks and jaws to middle of their chests. One of the most famous assistants he had is Ikegai Ryoichi of Crying Freeman fame. However,
many of his assistants drew ten times better than Mizuki and in almost
every panel, the background looks far more detailed than the foreground characters. Often, the cover pages are drawn entirely by the assistants
with no trace of Mizuki.
Ah but he had to draw the "name" aka rough manuscript. His art
was adequate to his intent and he studied art and drawing from childhood
to the time the Japanese Imperial Army snapped him up.
Probably. But it's sad that so many went unrecognized like Bob Kane hogging all the credits for Batman.
There was a book about his grandmother who told him many yokai stories
growing up. Even his wife has written a book about living with him that was adapted into a TV series. Up until he passed away, Mizuki was doing few
pages about his life in one of the Big Comic magazines about his personal
life.
Even the famous Tezuka Osamu only has three series at SFPL: Hinotori, Blackjack, and Buddha.
Ken
I don't know where you are looking Kenneth but they have other Tezuka
book including "Adolf" aka "Message to Adoph" or "4 Adophs".
Now I suggest if you want a more honest inventory of Tezuka work
that you go to <
http://sflib1.sfpl.org/search> and search on
"Tezuka, Osamu" and you will find numerous pages. If you search a bit
you will find Astro Boy, Nyako, and a few others in multiple languages.
And if on the same URL you search on "Mizuki, Shigero" you will
find several interesting works including "GeGe No Kitaro" and "Onwards
to our noble Deaths" as well as other works including but not limited
to Showa:History of Japan all 4 volumes.
Take care to search online and if you find something you
like you can reserve it and then find the time to hurry to the
city to pick it up. Maybe you can use a more local library to
do the request for a volume so that you do not have to hurry to
the city to pick up the volume.
bliss
I meant Tezuka's work in original Japanese. I am aware that some translated works are available but I don't like them because they lose a lot of nuance
in English. This is not always bad as many dialogues in original Japanese
are quite choppy and the meaning is sometimes not very clear. (Like saying just "Fetch" instead of "Doggie fetch the ball." You have to know who the person is talking to.) This is often utilized as a plot device but it shows that many manga artists didn't study very hard in school. I believe
Shogagukan is the only publisher that requires correct punctuation marks and others utilizes only ? and ! and ... and nothing else! Shogakukan has many titles aimed at young children (such as Doraemon) so it's a good thing they enforces correct grammars.
Many manga dialogues are just like how Yoda talks, with the subject term
coming at the very end. (“PATIENCE YOU MUST HAVE my young padawan.”) Regular Japanese folks often speak that way in real life but it's a very
poor practice.
Other interesting manga I found at SFPL is Saint Oni-San (Saint Young Men) about Buddha and Jesus sharing a studio apartment in modern-day Japan.
There usually is a monthly used book sale every third Sunday in El Cerrito organized by the local Japanese group. Unfortunately it rained out today.
Ken
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