Interview with Sion Sono
Time Out Tokyo interviews Sion Sono about his film, Himizu, and shooting in Ishinomaki after March 11. (via Earl Jackson)
Terror of Monkeys vs. Robots
Manipulated by mad scientists, humiliated for humanity’s pleasure, will robots and apes tire of making our cars, vacuuming our floors, fighting our wars, washing our cats and smoking our cigarettes? Who will break first as humankind continually fails to distinguish androids from robots, apes from monkeys? We return […]
The Secret History of the Skeleton Suit (in Japan)
I appreciate Lord Death Man’s flair, his élan, panache, the way he daringly wears brown leather gloves, belt and boots with his high-contrast black and white skeleton suit—and makes it work. Of the many skeleton suits in the criminal underworld, I would wear Lord Death Man’s.
The Problem with Fanservice
Shattersnipe has some smart things to say about the problem with fanservice. “This isn’t just an argument about unrealistic portrayals of women (though that’s certainly a parallel concern), but of what happens when you draw beautiful girls for the sole purpose of sexually objectifying them – and worse, […]
Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s “Black Rainbow”
Ryan Holmberg reads Tatsumi Yoshihiro’s Black Blizzard closely with Tatsumi’s memoir, A Drifting Life, and discovers Black Blizzard is an adaptation of pulp mystery writer Shimada Kazuo’s story, “Black Rainbow,” then puts Tatsumi’s work in the context of other mass entertainment of its time. The piece itself is […]
The Disturbing Nature of Ultraman
A meditation on Ultraman and Ultraman in manga form, drawn by “horror comics auteur” Kazuo Umezu: “The boys who read this would grow up to read even more outlandish and violent mens’ comics; the girls would have a whole sub-genre of girls’ horror comics, jam-packed with beheadings, defenestrations, […]
The Cultural Gutter 