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Doraemon The Movie: Paper Cup Edition

Doraemon The Movie: Paper Cup Edition

If you’d like to see an amazing piece of animation made with three paper cups, a scalpel, pens and pencils and a ton of love, check this out. I saw it this morning on Twitter and it absolutely blew me away. Next time someone tells you they want to be an animator but they don’t have the money, or the equipment, or the special fancy computer programmes, share this link with them. It just might…

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Super Information Hijinks: Reality Check!

Super Information Hijinks: Reality Check!

Get your Reality Check today! Rikki Simons and Tavisha Wolfgarth-Simons have a Kickstarter for their book Super Information Hijinks: Reaity Check! running until 30 December 2015. (Yes, Virginia, that IS an anime-inspired foreground/background title as featured on so many anime of the late 70s and 80s and discussed in The Anime Encyclopedia!) It’s a beautiful book – funny, engaging and warm.They…

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Shigeru Mizuki: War Haiku

Shigeru Mizuki: War Haiku

Shigeru Mizuki and his wife blow out the candles on his 90th birthday cake Shigeru Mizuki, the manga creator who died on 30 November, wasn’t always the genial bald elder of this 90th birthday snap. At 18, he was a typical high school student in what we would consider an untypical situation – in a nation at war, waiting to be drafted. Mizuki aged 18, 1940 At 21, he was part of a platoon sent to…

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Puppet-Making at Anime Attacks 5, Gateshead

Puppet-Making at Anime Attacks 5, Gateshead

More puppets from the workshop I did in Gateshead. I was amazed at the diversity and energy of the puppets created from basic stationery supplies and waste. Plastic cups make great Daleks, but there are lots of other possibilities. Here’s a very simple character using a foam ball for a head, and flanked by two stick puppets. Pikachu is on the right, and on the left is a weird creature with a…

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War veteran aged 22, sole survivor of his platoon, amputee, brother of a war criminal.

Cinema projectionist, kamishibai artist, manga creator.

Scholar, field anthropologist, folklore historian.

Man with the heart of a child and the ability to make others see the magical and terrible truths of the world.

May he rest in the peace he never ceased to fight for.

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Mizuki at work

Mizuki in his studio with his goblin child Kitaro, July 2015

From “Towards Our Noble Death”

Comics as fine art

From “Towards Our Noble Death”

Two Mizuki covers

Shigeru Mizuki 1922-2015 War veteran aged 22, sole survivor of his platoon, amputee, brother of a war criminal. Cinema projectionist, kamishibai artist, manga creator.

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Drawing Basics Made Easy: new book out now from Flame Tree!

Drawing Basics Made Easy: new book out now from Flame Tree!

I have a new book in the shops just in time for the holiday gift season. (That’s a hint. A massive one.) It’s published by Flame Tree and you can take a look inside on their website. I had so much fun making a second book with the fab Flame Tree team and many of the artists from my first Flame Tree outing, How To Draw Manga Made Easy – including Newton Ewell, Tony Luke, Inko, Chie Kutsuwada,…

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Anime Encyclopedia 3rd edn: Signed, Sealed, Delivered and Yours

Anime Encyclopedia 3rd edn: Signed, Sealed, Delivered and Yours

Just in time for the holidays, the epic hardback 3rd edition of The Anime Encyclopedia is available with a bookplate signed by both authors! That’s right, both Jonathan Clements and I have scrawled our names (and in my case, my dopey little katakana autograph face) on an exclusive bookplate to adorn our magnum opus. And here’s a preview – although please bear in mind that being signed, each one…

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Puppet-Making at Anime Attacks 5, Gateshead

Puppet-Making at Anime Attacks 5, Gateshead

After puppet yonkoma, here are some more of the the puppets we made at Gateshead Central Library during Anime Attacks 5. (Faces have been removed to protect everyone’s privacy.) In this post I’m focussing on stick puppets. The puppet yonkoma elements were mounted on plastic drinking straws; these puppets are mounted on wooden lolly sticks. Like all the materials we used, these are available…

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Social change in fandom: Armadacon 07, 1995

Social change in fandom: Armadacon 07, 1995

Digging in the fannish archives on YouTube, I unearthed this interview from Armadacon 07, which was held over the weekend of 17-19 November 1995. Steve and I were guests at this fabulously friendly Plymouth convention and I’ve been laughing over the sheer quantity of rubbish I managed to talk in 54 minutes. From the historical point…

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This time last week I was in Newscastle – well, actually, on the city fringes, over the River Tyne,  walking across the High Level Bridge into Gateshead. Although I got there too late for the opening ceremony of Anime Attacks 5, and the video Q&A with voice actor Greg Ayres, I spent a wonderful morning talking about cosplay and listening to amazing shamisen playing by Hibiki Ichikawa and Japanese folk songs beautifully sung by enka artist Akari Mochizuki courtesy of the Japan Foundation. There were also some fascinating presentations on Japanese life and culture by students and staff from Newcastle University’s School of Modern Languages.

The afternoon was even better. I was in a puppet making workshop with a gang of the most creative individuals I’ve ever worked with. I gave a presentation on creativity, puppets and techniques of puppet-making, then using very basic techniques and tools we dived straight in to create a diverse and fabulous bunch of puppets.

My two workshop rules are that everybody plays nicely – sharing, supporting, helping and respecting everyone’s work – and everybody takes part. The group had, I would guess, a six-decade age spread and the usual diversities, but everyone was united by the passion for making stuff. And what stuff! I suggested to some of the Gateshead Library regulars that they might want to talk to the amazing staff there about possibly getting a group going to wirte and rehearse a manga-based puppet play for the next Anime Attacks, and I hope they do that – the talent is certainly available.

I’ve got photos of every puppet to post and I’ll do that soon. All will be posted anonymously and if the maker wants to claim ownership in a comment they’re welcome to do so. But first I want to showcase something that emerged from the workshop – puppet yonkoma. (You could make one as a conventional photocomic, a slideshow or a perfrmance piece.)

Five plastic straws, one piece of paper and a black felt tip pen, plus a devotion to the word balloon and a truly twisted imagination, created a new artform. (Warning: may be distressing to sensitive Bronies, and the last panel will mystify almost everyone who doesn’t know the artist.)

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  Puppet Yonkoma – a manga first from Anime Attacks Gateshead This time last week I was in Newscastle - well, actually, on the city fringes, over the River Tyne,  walking across the High Level Bridge into Gateshead.

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Anime Attacks Gateshead - 24 October 2015

Anime Attacks Gateshead – 24 October 2015

Library conventions are always special, because libraries are special. A library is a place where many roads begin and end, where ages and races real and imagined meet, where everything is possible. A good librarian is a master navigator, researcher, archaeologist and magician, who can start you on your journey to anywhere – distant galaxies, GCSE German, physics superstardom or curtain-making:…

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Feast your eyes, Ultrafans – though not your tummies, unless you’re in Tokyo before this pop-up cafe closed on 12 October 2015.

Patisserie Swallowtail has hooked up with Tsuburaya to enable fans to defend mankind from all manner of Ultramonsters by eating them. What a great way to neautralise the alien invasion threat! And you can collect souvenir coasters as mementos of your battle.

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Ultraman x Swallowtail: cake is the new enemy!

Ultraman x Patisserie Swallowtail: new Tokyo pop-up cafe Feast your eyes, Ultrafans - though not your tummies, unless you're in Tokyo before this pop-up cafe closed on 12 October 2015.

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Monsters from the Id - Kakurenbo: Hide and Seek and Negadon

Monsters from the Id – Kakurenbo: Hide and Seek and Negadon

On 21 August I introduced two short films for the Japan Foundation at Deptford Cinema. This is the text of that introduction. We’re going to see two very interesting short anime tonight, both pieces from directors who are developing into auteurs with strikingly individual and rather unsettling visions. Both are working in CGI, computer generated imagery, but using it in very different ways. Both…

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1994: Manga! documentary on the BBC

1994: Manga! documentary on the BBC

Straight from BBC Post Production… Another video blast from the past via YouTube, posted by my old friend Tony Luke, who features in this BBC TV documentary alongside Hayao Miyazaki, Katsuhiro Otomo, Buichi Terasawa, his then manager Junco Ito, Steve Kyte, a whole crowdfund of UK and Japanese fans, and me. Manga! was presented by…

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Gatchaman: heroism, memory and the bond of friendship

Gatchaman: heroism, memory and the bond of friendship

The Japan Foundation’s Junko Takekawa introduces the session Flashing my Doraemon t-shirt (Miki House, for all you label fiends) Photos courtesy of Anna Kindness – thanks Anna! It’s the last day of August 2015, a public holiday in Britain; and therefore, as is the tradition for British summer holidays, the rain is falling heavy and cool. Fifty-seven years ago today I was sitting under a shelter…

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No Strings Attached! Supermarionation cosplay 1983 style

No Strings Attached! Supermarionation cosplay 1983 style

Well, we WOULD have called it cosplay … but it was 1983 and the word was still, in process of being dreamed up for a magazine article by Nov Takahashi and his friends in Japan. So we just called it fancy dress, or dressing up. My friends* and I did it quite a bit in public – on city streets, at ancient monuments, around the parks…

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How To Draw Manga Made Easy at A-Kon 26

Kinnerton Dalek egg The charity auction at A-Kon 26 was absolutely amazing. It’s one of my favourite jobs every year: two hours of combined shameless begging, bullying and pleading stand-up with an audience to raise money for charity. This year, the charity was Texas Scottish Rite Hospital for Children and the response of the A-Kon crowd was as generous as ever. Still waiting for the numbers but…