By Joseph Luster

Without any background on its creator, Felipe Smith, being a tad confused by what exactly Peepo Choo is would be understandable. You see, Felipe had the proper mixture of fortune, hard work and guts to be able to produce manga in Japan, where it's considered, well, "proper manga." For more on this process, I highly recommend reading Deb Aoki's extensive interview with the man here . So there, ...

By Patrick Macias

Osamu Tezuka and Fred Patten once conspired to make you "watch cartoons in a language you can't understand". As even casual observers of paradox and head-scratching conundrums know all too well, the life of a time traveler can get complicated fast. Just a few days ago, I began the “2010 is 1980” project here at the Otaku USA website, and already the events of those three decades ago are loudly...

By Darius Washington

Originally created by Takao Saito, the world of Golgo 13 is a harsh one grounded in the very real arenas of government politics, brutal crime, sex and intrigue. Despite many helpings of action, most of the stories focus on people who may fear G13’s existence or presence in town. Known to the outside world as Duke Togo, he is the ultimate freelance hitman, used by various agencies, governments ...

By Joseph Luster

Writer and artist duo Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata have an especially tough act to follow, a trap set by their past selves to cast a shadow on all subsequent endeavors. Death Note 's presence still looms menacingly, but their latest series, Bakuman , takes things in an entirely different direction. It's not some high concept fantastical game of cat and mouse; rather, it's a more grounded tal...

By Joseph Luster

At this point we've had fairly ample room to explore some of the principle work from prolific mangaka Yoshihiro Tatsumi. His books published by Drawn & Quarterly manage to paint experienced visions through a lens that can be simultaneously distorted with hope and despair. We've even had the opportunity to soak in an overview of his career thanks to A Drifting Life, making the publication o...

By Caleb Dunaway

Part short story collection, part novel, Hiroshi Yamamoto's The Stories of Ibis is largely a story about stories. It lurks somewhere in the interstices between the framing story of an android telling stories a la Scheherazade to a storyteller and the stories she tells. It places itself between the real and the virtual, and ignores the arbitrary delineation between both.  The framing story...