MadInkBeard | Derik A Badman

“Strange Beings” is another short Phoenix story that takes place in the past (1468 AD). This one features a young woman, Sakon No Suke, who has been raised as a man by her warrior father. When her father gets a cancerous growth on his nose (like the oft-appearing Saruta), a female monk from a nearby temple is called for and claims that she will heal the man. Sakon goes with her manservant to the temple to kill the nun before she can go back and heal her father because Sakon wants her father to die so she can live as a woman.

Besides my ongoing reading/blogging on Tezuka’s Phoenix, I’ve also been making my way through two other “classic” manga series: Koike and Kojima’s Lone Wolf and Cub and Otomo’s Akira. These three works are very different creatures on many levels, but primarily for me in my changing and opposite reactions to re/reading them.

The story “Civil War” takes up most of two volumes in the Phoenix series. Again, the story goes back in time to the end of the 12th century, following a number of characters during a tumultuous time of civil war in Japan. From some recent reading, I know Tezuka used historical events as a backdrop for his stories, so I’m assuming a lot of the major events and leaders in this book have some historical basis. At times the various clans and factions and places do get hard to keep track of, some seem to appear out of nowhere with little context. I’m not sure chaos doesn’t help the story by making the civil war a little more hard to grasp.

Urushibara, Yuki. Mushishi. 10 volumes in Japanese. 6 volumes in English to date. Del Rey, 2007-. I looked around for reviews of this manga series. Six volumes have come out from Del Rey, yet I can only find reviews of the first (with some minor exceptions where the reviewer just summarizes plot). People seem to [...]

[This was originally written in the summer of 2007 for a print publication. Since it has yet to appear, I'm posting it here. I'm going to post each of the three parts as a separate post during the course of the week. While they are part of one piece, they are also independent.] My enthusiasm [...]

My previous post about using words instead of images (borrowing an example from Ben Towle) was a bit of a throwaway post, a brief thought that I did not elaborate. Thanks to some of my insightful commenters, I am forced to give more thought to my post. The point of my original post (almost completely [...]

Trains Are… Mint by Oliver East. Blank Slate Books, 2008. Hardcover, color, 122p, $24.99. (You can order from here.) Trains Are… Mint #5 by Oliver East. Rolling Stock Press, 2008. 52p. color mini, 5 pounds. Oliver East walks around England (Manchester and its environs), from train station to train station, trying to follow the tracks [...]

On Walt and Skeezix 1925-1926 (Drawn & Quarterly, 2007) and Sundays with Walt and Skeezix (Sunday Press Books, 2007). I haven’t written about Gasoline Alley yet, though I’ve been buying and reading the reprints that are coming out– the three volumes of dailies from Drawn & Quarterly and the Sundays collection from Sunday Press. I [...]

Trains Are Mint… by Oliver East. Rolling Stock Press. If the reader takes Oliver East’s comics at their face value (and I do), they are autobiographical accounts of walking. In issues 2, 3, and the forthcoming 5 (of which I have a 12 page preview) he walks around parts of northwestern England following the train [...]

Aqua v.1 (of 2) by Kozue Amano (2003). Tokyopop, 2007. ~180p, $9.99. Over two years ago (times flies!) I reviewed three volumes of Kozue Amano’s Aria as translated and published by ADV. Those three were the only volumes released before ADV temporarily stopped publishing. Now Tokyopop has picked up the license for Aria as well [...]

All Over Coffee by Paul Madonna. City Lights, 2007. 178 p, color, hardcover. $24.95. View the online archive. I like to think I keep up on what’s new in comics, so I wonder how it is that I found this book by happenstance on the shelf of Million Year Picnic in Cambridge while vacationing in [...]