Here’s some excellent publishing news for fans of the indie manga scene: Ryan at Same Hat announced that Top Shelf will be publishing a 400-page anthology culling work from the seminal bimonthly underground magazine AX:
This gigantic book was co-edited by author Sean Michael Wilson and AX co-founder Mitsuhiro Asakawa. Sean is a comic book writer from Scotland, now an ex-pat living in working in Japan. He’s published a number of books, nine graphic novels, and his first English-language manga was published this past summer. Asakawa-san is an author and current editor of AX, and worked in the 90s on the staff of GARO, along with writing a number of books on alternative manga and gekiga.
AX was formed when the seminal underground geikga magazine Garo closed its doors several years ago, and has published work by such influential manga-ka as Suehiro Maruo, Shinichi Abe and Usamaru Furuya. Yusaku Hanakuma’s Tokyo Zombie, recently published in the U.S. by Last Gasp, was intially serialized in AX.
According to Ryan, Wilson will be at APE, hosting a panel on the magazine and its history and giving away a 16-page sampler. And here’s where I curse myself for living on the East Coast.
November 6th, 2008 at 9:16 pm
Hi Chris,
Hopefully your pal will get that copy of the AX collection sampler to you. Please do add your voice to the efforts we are making to get this alternative manga out more in Eigo!
Myself and Asakawa in Tokyo are both very pleased by the wonderful
reception news of the book has had so far.
Cheers,
Sean Michael Wilson
January 17th, 2011 at 4:42 pm
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