Peach Momoko is an artist that has been steadily gaining acclaim for her covers and illustrations that have been used by DC, IDW, Marvel Comics and Magnetic Press. These covers have become highly coveted by collectors and have sent the artist from Japan to tour the United States convention circuit (until Covid put a stop to all that). Her soft pastels, and use of heavy inks give her covers a cute and dreamlike feel, and her convention commissions are often chibi versions of popular American comic characters. Though these illustrations of Harley Quinn, Batgirl, and Spider Woman belie a more sinister world she is constructing within her comics.
Jean Giraud (1938 - 2012), also known as Moebius, took the comics and science fiction medium to new heights. Arzach, The World of Edena, and The Incal reverberated beyond just the medium of comics and affected film, animation, and art. Combining simplistic characters with other worldly details, Moebius’ work traveled from France to the US thanks to the comics anthology Heavy Metal, while his work had already spread across Europe, but what about Japan? In this article we'll be looking at how Moebius' work made it's way to Japan and influenced some of the biggest names in anime and manga there.
There’s no shortage of the fantastical on TV and streaming services these days. Star Trek: Picard has fleets of massive starships doing battle, while the Marvel movies dominate the pop cultural landscape. But spectacle without joy is a hollow affair, just a bloated tech demo. Ultraman Zis the perfect union of spectacle, joy, and vision. Ultraman Z is the latest in the long lineage of giant protectors from space, born from Tsuburaya Productions, since the 1960s. Ultraman has delighted audiences for decades, and with so many TV shows, movies, cartoons, and Scatman parody singles, it can be challenging to imagine the show still feeling fresh in 2020. The story, at a glance, is indeed boilerplate. Ultraman Z, a hot blooded rookie of the Galactic Defense Force, lends assistance to Haruki (Koshu Hirano), a hot blooded rookie to the Earth organization STORAGE, which protects Japan from giant monsters
YasushiNirasawa (1963 - 2016) was one of the greats of the garage kit and tokusatsu world. In this video we're taking a look at his earliest published collections of art and sculptures: Fantastic Creature World and Creature Core.
The ninja represents a sort of ideal in video gaming. From the first moments Ryu Hayabusa nimbly leapt off the walls in Ninja Gaiden, games have been trying to encapsulate the speed, agility, and lethality of ninja. Ghostrunner, from developer One More Level, aims to capture that speed and fluidity while dropping the player into a grungy cyberpunk world.
In 2016, Shinji Higuchi and Hideaki Anno created a terrifying new vision of a classic movie monster withShin Godzilla. It was belched forth from the ocean and slithered across the usually sleepy neighborhood of Kamata, knocking cars aside effortlessly, and grew to spew lasers across Ginza.
A creature with five faces belches flame from the top of a skyscraper. A young girl finds out she’s descended from an Egyptian goddess that fought demons. A superhero does battle against someone making counterfeit merchandise of them! The spectacular world of Toei’s tokusatsu TV shows have only existed on the periphery of mainstream US access for decades.
Where do you go if you want classic horror manga, toys going as far back as the 1950s, 1970s idol photo albums, and some doujinshi that was just published the other day? Mandarake!
