Long Story Short, Short Story Long

So, like... one of these is gonna be our 100th chapter and to celebrate we're just gonna breeze right past it with a beeeg release day. And a beeeg blog post to accompany. As usual, scroll past the wall of text if you're not interested, download links are hard to miss.

First up, here's Saruchinesu. 

So... what? Yeah... This damn manga is .. it's quite something. What a way to end the volume on... This reminds me of that first volume of Wanitokagegisu, I was practically laughing my butt off every page. Minoru Furuya did not have mercy on my sides.

Like, the smallest things make me laugh... for example on chapter 9 when numbnuts said that he would remain unfazed if a five meter beetle came flying at him and piggy's response was "pff, there's no such thing as a five meter beetle", like, really? that's your reaction? or when they caught the little one stealing underwear and pig-man is saying how his parents are probably rich and they'll get a lot of money out of him and then the nutjob's all like "how are we gonna get money from him if his parents are the ones that are rich?" Just these banal conversation, Minoru is amazing at how he can make almost every single line of dialogue funny. I do also think that the themes he's going for in it are fascinating, with the idea of leading a meaningless life and how your right to suicide can be "taken away from you" simply because you don't want to hurt the ones you leave behind, and how you can become a burden to society despite trying your best to live outside it.

Anyway, the characters are really interesting and they bounce off each other so well. They all have had problems adjusting to modern life and properly integrating into society, and they each have their own issues like not having a spine and being a pushover or being too dependent on others.

But enough about that, here's the goodies

Saruchinesu ch. 11

And of course

Saruchinesu vol. 1

Over in Tokyo Kaido, page 15 is amazing. Fuck, I love it so much... it really hit.

Tokyo Kaido ch. 23

Wet Moon was quite brilliant this week, such a good good chapter.

Wet Moon ch. 23

And now for the bonus stuff but before that, if I may, I would like to talk about short stories.

I think short stories are a bit of a lost art, yeah I get that everyone grows more attached to something the longer they're exposed to it. You get more of that world, more of the characters, more of everything... In a long series, it's harder to miss what the creator(s) are going for, even if they don't beat you over the head with it, missing a metaphor in a long piece of work will not be "fatal" as you will get others that refer to the same thing or theme or character or whatever. And people in general would rather rewatch or reread a long piece over a short one. I love structure and I love when in a visual medium like a movie or a manga/comic, the creator(s) are aware of it and try to bend it and twist it and play with it. At the end of the day, in a limited number of pages, it's hard to give your characters enough depth without resorting to cheap tricks like info dumping shit. In a series, you can gradually insert elements at your own pace, in a one and done... it's a bit harder.

One of my absolute favorite mangaka is Taiyo Matsumoto, but Brothers of Japan is not as great as his usual stuff, even a short series like Flower that was only 4 chapters is great but I feel like a one shot is never enough for him. In Brothers of Japan, I would have loved to see any of those picked up for serialization, the worlds presented were enthralling. On the other hand, one of my other absolute favorites is Usamaru Furuya and this man has completely and utterly conquered the one shot format. Putting it in a more sophisticated way, Usamaru Furuya has made the one shot format his bitch. He's so versatile that you could easily go from his least gory/violent/dark stuff in Chronicle of the Clueless Age (in collaboration with Otsuichi) to Happiness and then finally Garden, his darkest, more experimental collection of shorts. I mean, the guy does fantastic 1-2 pagers too, a lot of people love Palepoli for his experimentation with layouts and stuff but I think Short Cuts is underrated for just how crazy his ideas can be at times. Hox is currently doing another collection of 1 pagers from him that he did based on letters people sent to the magazine in which it was published, Donki Kourin. Fun stuff.

Inio Asano is another person I adore and his short stories are genuinely great... yet I still prefer his longer stuff. As good as his stories in What a Wonderful World or City of Light were... my heart still belong to solanin, to Punpun and I guess still my favorite from him, Nijigahara Holograph. Fun fact, I remember stumbling on the raws of City of Light back in the day and bothering some scanlation groups asking them if they'd like to do it, as if I found something secret 😂

If you're a fan of gekiga, you're a bit more familiar with the one shot format because most gekiga are one and done stories. The wonderful Yoshiharu Tsuge is being fully collected into english and although Garo went under, from its ashes AX was born and I am happy we live in the world in which one of my favorite acts, the Nishioka kyoudai, can freely publish their stories.

The one thing that I wanted to point out about oneshots is that, a lot of people never even realize just how many of them were pilots that were never picked up for serialization. Like, most people know Tsutomu Nihei's Dead Heads was a pilot for a series that was never picked up for serialization(and although I don't like zombie fiction, this one I would burn my neighbor for), but how many know that Blame NSE was also meant to be serialized? Or (and in this case I'm assuming) Digimortal was also probably supposed to be a series considering the world he created there, lots of potential.

And then there's Jiro Matsumoto, a person incapable of making bad manga. He has done so many incredible one shots and so many incredible mini series or even long serializations such as Freesia. I think Tourin was a pilot for a series that was never picked up, he tells a complete story, but I think the world that he creates there could've been fleshed out more if given the chance. In A City of Honest and Heretics, you can find the pilot chapter of his manga Joshi Kouhei, the mecha manga with the mechs being giant school girls. Yeah, you probably think "that sounds retarded" or "lol that sounds bonkers" but if you read the pilot chapter it actually deals with themes of identity and sanity, it's really good. I have not read Joshi Kouhei because scanlation has been stalled for years and at this point even if I was reading it, I'd need to reread the entire thing again to catch up. In general, Jiro likes to deal with insanity and mental illness, he's got a fondness for old fairytales and there's usually a war happening in the backdrop of his stories. Sadly, we only ever got one of his things licensed in english, Velveteen & Mandala, and even in France they only got Freesia, an incredible manga with one of the best portrayals of a schizophrenic in fiction. Why am I talking so much about this wonderful creator? Because our newest addition to the slave pens is Gyoshi, our first japanese translator and the thing he worked on was Jiro Matsumoto's The Complete Stealth Camouflage-type Little Match Girl and I'd prefer it if this wasn't your first Jiro Matsumoto manga. Anyway, this thing was sitting out in the open, free to be read by anyone anywhere on the globe(bit ironic, huh?) and so... we just had to do it. The bad news is that we had to rip it from there and... well, it's pretty low quality, like, low res. and shit, pip3 did the best he could so it wouldn't come off as pixelated if you read it on a big screen or something and all things considered, it's more than readable but... it's lower quality than our other releases. Also heads up, his current series Ichigeki is going to end in 1 or 2 chapters so you can catch up on that. I started reading it a few weeks ago myself and I'm on ch. 7. Good samurai manga.

Full Stealth Camouflage Little Matchstick Girl 

We're gonna have Gyoshi on something that maaaaybe we can release the first chapter of next week, it's something a bit short to keep him busy until we get the volumes of what's gonna be his third project with us, a longer series that Ashnee will have to scan because the digital edition doesn't look good enough for pip3. This second project he'll do with us is gonna have some actual high quality scans though. The elusive monster called "life" is kicking everyone's butts now or else we could've probably released it with the rest. Oh well.

Atsushi Kaneko is also really good at short stories, there was this, quite frankly, expensive collection put out by Humanoids called The Tipping Point and I though his story there was the best but I don't feel like anyone was really firing on all cylinders, Taiyo Matsumoto does a good story but the most interesting thing about it is the fact that he painted the entire thing and it's beautiful, but it's not as good as Kanai-kun, another short story that he fully painted, also fun fact, before Viz published Cats of Louvre in english, France got a full color edition of it. Paul Pope is always great but this isn't one of his best, Naoki Urasawa did a fun little thing but ultimately, look for scans of this because imo, it's a bit too expensive considering the length of it and the quality of the stories. Fantastic lineup though, they even got Keiichi Koike out of retirement to do a short there. [Another fun fact, new mangaka working for the big publishers get assigned a rival and when Paul Pope was in Japan working for Kodansha, they appointed Minetaro Mochizuki as his rival😄]

Anyway, there was this collection of shorts stories called Comic? Kaneko Atsushi Extra works that M3OW did but never finished before disbanding, they were a really cool group that like a flame ignited the world and then quickly burned out. So... we decided to finish the remaining chapters because it's been bugging me for quite some time.

Here's the stuff we did

Atsushi Kaneko extra works ch15-19

Or the entire thing if you never read the stuff M3OW did

Atsushi Kaneko extra works (complete)

And what can I say, we got something planned for when we finish Wet Moon, we got something planned for when we finish with Tokyo Kaido, I already have a few things lined up for when we finish with Saltiness and Gyoshi, well... apart from Secret project #1 and Secret project #2 there are at least 2 others that are already waiting in line. Typical, we just got a japanese translator and I'm al- I mean we're already thinking of relentlessly unloading on him with title after title after title... we need to learn self-control, he's only a person...

We'd love some help with cleaning, redrawing and typesetting so we can get through it all, another editor would probably complete the team. Or at least a colab for some projects... Oh well, Ashnee said she'll be able to help more on cleaning and redrawing in the coming months once things settle down irl but she's also on scan duty so... idk, we'll see.

I wanted this post to have more substance but alas, I'll just dump a few recs of short story collections instead

News of Transformations (bizarre surreal stories)

Mukashi no Hanashi (I really like Kaoru Fujiwara; dark ambiance; she's got this really cool fleeting style in her usually dark stories)

A Single Match (sadly, this is the only Oji Suzuki you can read but he's fantastic; great gekiga)

OBRIGADO (this is by the guy that did National Quiz, I actually like Obrigado better)

And if you can, get Moto Hagio's A Drunken Dream and Other Stories. It's also a good intro into her stuff, but I think it's sadly out of print and it was never scanned. She's incredible though.