Industry talk is getting depressing so I'm going to get back to pimping creators by working on translations of interviews and other comics and animation related articles.
As always, I won't be scanning any pages from the books or magazines I translate, only posting a few pics of certain pages (not all pages, and generally not the entire page) taken with my shitty iPhone camera. I also won't translate entire books or magazines, only excerpts. If you want the whole book or magazine I've taken bits from, sorry but you are on your own (although I don't mind pointing you in the right direction if you can't find it on Amazon or whatever. I cannot, however, personally provide anyone with anything. Sorry).
My only intention is to pass on info about the creators and their work that is inaccessible to people outside Japan and who can't read Japanese. Maybe someday the industry will truly go global and we'll see interviews with Naoki Urasawa, for example, in Rolling Stone or something in the same way that Japanese magazines get interviews with American and other global artists and entertainers. But I think that's a long way from happening.
Comics like Pluto may be get good reviews from comic book people and be readily available, but what does anyone know about the creator?
Takehiko Inoue may have painted a mural on the wall of Kinokuniya in New York a while back, but does anyone really know anything about him except that he created Slam Dunk? Did you know, for example, that "Inoue" is a pen name? Not the most earth shattering bit of info, but that's just one example of the type of thing that only really comes out in interviews and feature articles, the like of which we rarely see outside Japan.
That's the bridge I'd like to gap until we all truly do come closer together and don't need hobbyist like me to do things like this.
I will get back to work beginning with a discussion between Takehiko Inoue and Eiichiro Oda that came out last year when Inoue's Vagabond exhibition was in Kumamoto in this magazine:
I meant to get around to this a lot sooner. But all excuses aside, I'm finally doing it and will post part one sometime next week.
Until then…
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