“Daisuke Ichiba is not a manga artist, he is a drawer of beautiful women!” There are few Japanese underground creators that can hold sway over a select few and never pierce into the larger collective. Certainly, the likes of Suehiro Marou, Shintaro Kago, and (digging even deeper) Kazuichi Hanawa have become notable names with manga

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Sensor Junji Ito manga Cover Photo

Junji Itō is easily the most prolific horror mangaka in English translation. Viz Media has made a concerted effort to bring as much of his work to the west as possible, with Kodansha and Vertical Comics licensing the few titles Viz missed. There is certainly a valid argument to be made that the popularity of

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Taro Bonten and the Birth of Sukeban Cinema COVER PHOTO

The genre, now referred to as “Pinky Violence”, would absolutely dominate cinema in the early 70’s, which was largely helmed by Toei in their focused attempt to pump out many popular films to quickly and cheaply as possible to meet their quota of two new films every fortnight in order to obtain exclusivity contracts with

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Taking place after the bloody conflict in The Princess of the Never-Ending Castle, “Twelve Sisters” (shortened for sake of sanity) takes another trip to the mind-bending world of branching realities at war with one another. The abstract concept of a feudal castle growing into the sky and branching off into other realities may seem like

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misou misou

Before finding success with his nostalgic “High Score Girl”, Rensuke Oshikiri went full-Michael Haneke and brought us “Misu Misou”. Bleak, cruel, and extremely tragic, this manga explores to an extreme length how bullying can become a murderous affair for everyone involved. Granted, Haruka’s journey as her town’s new punching bag is subtle as a brick

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happiness

Theoretically, a vampire is one of the sexiest supernatural transformations you can have in fiction. You remain young, you become strong and agile, and nothing can kill you. However, Happiness makes us rethink the vampiric mythos by realizing that it would really suck to have those kinds of powers, at least in a world like

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gantz

­­­­­­­­ I remember the first time I watched Hiroya Oku’s Gantz anime. Let’s set the scene: it was the early 00s and I would hang out with my friends after school to watch whichever anime one of us could get their hands on. Unfortunately, there was this girl I hated that sometimes went to these

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Guengsi Comic Book Review

Singapore-born artist and author, Sean Lam, has been working commercially since 2009. Building off of his love of both comics and manga, Lam’s career has been varied, seeing him working on everything from bible themed series to illustrating for one of the biggest publishers in manga with Seven Seas Entertainment. Despite this, Lam has flown

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