DRUGS AND SEX HAVE NEVER BEEN SO CUTE: JUNKO MIZUNO // LITTLE FLUFFY GIOLO PELU VOL. 1
breathing fire made of hearts?
San Francisco based artist, Junko Mizuno resides in a magical world populated by curvy women, odd circular men, cute fluffy creatures and lots of sex and drugs. Coupling the cute with the obscene is nothing new, but Mizuno has a way of combining charming and grotesque imagery that is all her own.
My first exposure to Mizuno’s unique brand of story telling happened when I found Pure Trance at a comic book story in North Carolina while I was on tour. I picked it up for my girlfriend at the time, but ended up reading it and had to snag my own copy. The story she told was so dark and so full superficial and evil characters that I found it impossible not to love. And of course, Mizuno’s art is nothing short of perfect.
1 commentGOGO Monster // Taiyo Matsumoto
Let’s talk about rad comics!! You may know about Taiyo Matsumoto…I think he’s most famous for being the author of Tekkonkinkreet. It was made into a pretty rad anime movie, too. But what I wanna talk about today is his newest manga, GOGO Monster, which came out in December of 2009.
GOGO Monster by Taiyo Matsumoto
I can’t speak for Matsumoto’s entire body of work, but of the manga I have read, he tells stories in the vein of magical realism. I’ve always liked this genre of story, and GOGO Monster is the pinnacle of the genre. It tells the story of Yuki Tachibana, a first grader who believes that there is a battle going on in his school between good and evil spirits. He also believes that the good spirits that he used to see are abandoning him, and that soon his insides will rot because of it. Of course, all this is is a thinly veiled coming of age story where Yuki’s fight to stay in his magical world parallels his desire to stay a child forever and also serves as an excuse to keep himself apart from the classmates he despises. And though I’ve just explained the story in a nutshell, to say that that’s all there is to it would be an incredible disservice to a simple but beautifully subtle and dream-like tale about the end of youth.
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