The K Chronicles: I Left My Arse in San Francisco

The newest K Chronicles compendium, as artist Keith Knight labels his strip collections, is now available. It’s completely self-published and only available through his website, but that means it comes signed and numbered. The first strip in the book gives an indication that this is a new, more mature Knight, as he announces that he’s turning 40 and suffering from pneumonia. There are a couple of guest strips (from Nina Paley and Steve Notley) before he’s off to visit his […]

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Flock of Angels Volume 3

The series by Shoko Hamada concludes in this volume. I haven’t read book two, so I’m not sure how Shea wound up living in the mountains with a mysterious black-winged girl. Her people can fully retract their wings, unlike him. So even where he might fit in, he doesn’t, although most are nice enough to him. Still, there are a bunch of weird things about their society, things Shea finds wrong and disturbing. However, they risk dying out, unless something […]

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Love for Dessert

Aurora’s Luv Luv line of explicit manga for women continues, and the quality is still disappointing. Like the other books, Love for Dessert contains a set of short stories by the same author, Hana Aoi. You can see the pasted-together nature of the stories — pick a quirk, bolt it onto a character, shove in requisite sex scene whether it fits or not — from the cover, where the tongue and the spoon seem like afterthoughts, edited into a generic […]

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Kodansha to Open U.S. Subsidiary; Manga Pricing to Change?

Currently, Del Rey Manga is mostly titles licensed from Japanese manga publisher Kodansha. Now, as Brigid reports, Kodansha plans to open their own American office. Many questions result. Del Rey isn’t concerned — their licenses are proceeding as planned. Chris Butcher reports that Tokyopop cancelled Beck, a Kodansha title, but that might also be due to lower sales or Tokyopop’s own problems. The most interesting aspect of this for me so far is the speculation on what this might mean […]

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Essential Books About Manga

I’m covering here reference works, not how-to books, of which there are more than enough. I’ve previously reviewed two how-to books: Manga Secrets is straight-forward and includes the basics, while Even a Monkey Can Draw Manga is satiric. You’ll learn from it, but you’ll learn more what NOT to do. And you’ll laugh while doing it. Anyway, on to the books about manga. Manga! Manga! Frederik L. Schodt provided the first and still one of the best English-language books covering […]

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Keith Knight on Complete K Chronicles

(This interview was originally published in PiQ #4, July 2008.) If he’s not the hardest working man in comics, Keith Knight’s definitely one of the top ten. He’s the creator of The K Chronicles, the Harvey and Glyph Award-winning weekly comic strip, as well as the weekly editorial cartoon (Th)ink. At the beginning of May, he launched a new syndicated daily called The Knight Life. That’s in addition to his regular work for MAD and ESPN magazines and, oh yeah, […]

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Walkin’ Butterfly Volume 3

As Walkin’ Butterfly volume 3 opens, Michiko’s mentor has been hospitalized. She fainted, and tests reveal liver damage from too much alcohol. She’s also about to give up on her agency, just as Michiko had given up on being a model. Seeing someone else quit gives Michiko new determination to pursue her dream, although she’s equally driven by escaping a nightmare, by getting a chance to redo a scene from her past in a better way. I’m getting bored of […]

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Honey and Clover (Movie DVD)

I’d been putting off watching the Honey and Clover DVD because I enjoyed the live-action TV series so much. I feared I risked becoming a little tired of the story, too, seeing it a third time. On the positive side, the experiences are very different, so I wasn’t bored with repetition. For one thing, the movie opens with a large group of people instead of just a few. This continues through the film, with there being lots more people around […]

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