Let’s make it clear right away — to the four volumes of the French edition by Delcourt, I prefered the superb American brick published by Vertical. Less expensive, with an impeccable print quality in a larger format, and wrapped in Chip Kidd’s elegant cover … what can we ask for more ? And it is with […]

Ten years before the Best Album award for NonNonBâ at the Angoulême Festival, in the pages of Le Monde Diplo, Pascal Lardellier painted a frightening portrait of the yellow peril, exhorting to take arms to defend our endangered homeland, and concluded : “There is no minor cultural fight that deserves indifference or resignation. Manga should make […]

Immediately recognizable with her sexy dolls straight out of a Powerpuff Girls episode with a Russ Meyer-makeover, Mizuno Junko has steadily build, if not a career, at least a reputation — so much that when she attended the 2005 edition of the Angouleme Festival, animation magazine Animeland introduced her as the “morbid pin-up of underground […]

With six volumes of the no-holds-barred Bambi, Kaneko Atsushi indeniably established himself as one of the foremost punk artists. Obviously unwilling to get back in the fray, he followed up with SOIL, a story built on atmosphere and mystery. Encounter with a manga-ka on the fringe. Xavier Guilbert : Obviously, your drawing style is always what […]

So far, Frédéric Poincelet had remained a minutious chronicler of the intimate, somehow distant from the other authors published by Ego comme X, most likely because of a scarce production — after all, his official bibliography counts no more than seven books and a handful of pages scattered between 1998 and 2002. And since — […]

Tôkyô, paradisiacal ? One might be led to believe so, walking down the streets with Arima Rikuto — young, lazy, wealthy and handsome, and sporting an impressive gallery of female successes. From the Rainbow Bridge overseeing the bay to the “Blue Note” in Aoyama, the whole city seems to be made for nonchalant walks, romantic afternoons […]

Having coined the “horror manga” term, Umezu Kazuo experienced his first success with Hebi Shôjo (“The snake-girl”) in 1966, the first book from a bibliography specialized in the nightmarish. Incidentally, Hyôryû Kyôshitsu (The drifting classroom) won the annual award from Shôgakkan in 1975, and was even adapted as a television series in 2001, under the […]

To appropriately celebrate Umezu Kazuo fifty years of career, Shôgakkan undertook in 2005 the great project of a complete collection of his works, gathered under the title “Umezz Perfection !”. Hailed as the “ultimate version of horror as viewed by Umezu, the creator of Japanese Horror”, the collection is currently composed of thirteen volumes : Hebi-Onna, Negai, […]