The Eastern Edge

Not much time to blog lately, and a couple rants I'm writing aren't quite ready yet (even ranting needs planning when it's going on-line!), but I thought I should at least follow up on one thing, with apologies to Dylan fans for this entry's title ...

In case it isn't obvious already, I managed to find the elusive Urasawa Dylan comic, which wasn’t so elusive once I started looking at record stores instead of bookstores.

Here's why:

Most of the pages look like that.
It isn't really a comic, folks.

The "manga" portion of this book is basically hand written narrative of Bob Dylan's early career highlights by Urasawa, and illustrated with sketches.
While the illustrations are cool, this isn't really a comic and rest of the book is a ton of Dylan related dialogue between Urasawa and Koji Wakui. This is definitely for hardcore Dylan fans (and Japanese readers) only.

Here's are a couple more examples;
(The shitty quality is on purpose. Sorry! I only put these images up to show a sample of what you'd be getting if you were thinking of buying it on spec.)

Anyway, no matter how much you may like Urasawa's art, it’s only about 30 out of 307 pages, which are jam-packed with text and transcripts of conversations.
So, again, if you don't read Japanese and don't like Dylan (a lot!), then don't bother.

However, take heart, Urawasa fans, because Billy Bat is back in Weekly Morning this Thursday.

Until then...