Andrez Bergen's Blog, page 4

Who is Killing the Great Capes of Heropa? is now published

Over the past year I've been working on this new book, novel #3, Who is Killing the Great Capes of Heropa? — which brings together such disparate elements as 1940s and '60s comic books, a sci-fi/dystopia, pulp influences, and hardboiled noir trying desperately to skulk somewhere beneath the coattails of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett.

Anyway, it was supposed to be published via Perfect Edge Books in the UK on September 27th this year, but has sneaked out of the blocks early and is now available from Amazon UK and Amazon USA — in paperback form at least (the eBook will probably come out late in September). 

I still can't believe it's out there, and of course I can't resist hawking it here!

There are Japanese elements to the book, after all. Key character Midori, a.k.a. Prima Ballerina, is of Japanese descent. Lead character Pretty Amazonia (pictured here, conjured up by artist Juan Saavedra), is a hybrid of super-powered girls' anime characters from things like Sailor Moon and PreCure . She spends free time kicking round a manga volume of Candy Candy .


And she gets around in a ship named the Magnetic Rose (check out Katsuhiro Otomo's 1995 anime Memories).

There's also a cameo by another character that plays on the Fuchikoma 1-man tanks used by members of Section 9 in Ghost in the Shell.

So, Japanese refs and hawking aside, I'm pretty buzzed about this one and hope you get the time at least to check it out.

While the price (for the paperback) may seem a little steep, just remember it's 473 pages, with 35 illustrations. And it makes a great door-stopper.

BREAKING CAMP: Running School Camps in Japan is Weird

Last week, after twelve years in this country, I did something for the first time that's apparently quite the lure for English teachers in Japan, mostly because of the bonus-extra cash — going on a school camp during summer vacation.

In this case it was a three-day affair, attempting to teach a bunch of junior high school girls I'd never before met, without any idea of their English language level and no access to a PC, whiteboards, textbooks or a photocopier.

The lessons were conducted on the tatami-matted floors of their shared rooms at an inn near Yamanaka Lake, and my particular group of nine included the rowdiest and more stubborn members of the entire camp. I had one kid constantly questioning everything we did—sadly in Japanese rather than the language we were supposed to be practicing—along with a grumpy scowler, a girl who thought she was a bird, rivalries, and mood swings galore.

There were tears almost as often as there was laughter.

To top things off, one of the Canadian teachers had a meltdown, locked herself in her room, and refused to teach—meaning the other four instructors inherited that class as well.

Joy.

Being stuck teaching 13-year-olds from 6:00 am to 8:00 pm every day had me climbing the walls—and fired up to do something creative. Like drink a lot of beer from the convenience store located a kilometre away down a road in the middle of a tiny village with no streetlights.

READ MORE @ FORCES OF GEEK

12 Years in Tokyo

Yep, I'm still a bit stunned—today is my twelfth anniversary of living in this country, so I've been away from Melbourne (my old stomping ground-cum-home town) for well over a decade now.

The plan was originally six months.

When I arrived on July 26th, 2001 the world was, cliché as it might sound, a different place.

It was the year Stanley Kubrick's and Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) was supposed to take place, but didn't.

That July the World Trade Center attack in New York was still over six weeks away, Junichiro Koizumi had just become prime minister of this country while George W. Bush had been kicking back in office in the U.S. for seven months. John Howard (shudder) had run Australia into the ground for six years already.

Wikipedia had been online for just six months, the first Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings films were released and Jean-Pierre Jeunet directed Amélie. In 2001 Japanese cinema was also on a roll: the great Mamoru Oshii (Ghost in the Shell) delivered up live-action deep-thinker Avalon , while anime-wise we were blessed with two brilliant films by Hayao Miyazaki ( Spirited Away ) and Satoshi Kon ( Millennium Actress ).

Personally? I was still running my record label IF? and doing odd tracks as Little Nobody, but became more focused on local food, saké, travel and journalism. I found myself living in Shin-Koiwa here in Tokyo, in a place called "Hikari Mansion"—named, perhaps with perverted jocularity, in line with
the Japanese concept of a ‘mansion’: myriad apartments thrown together in the single building, with each separate flat containing one or two tiny rooms and a more compact bathroom. 

I worked for the rather evil Nova franchise teaching English to pay the bigger bills, and did articles on the side for The Daily Yomiuri, an English language off-shoot of right-leaning Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun.

Twelve years later I'm married and I have a gorgeous daughter in Grade 2 at elementary school—who recently did the bloody brilliant cover art for my latest book.

Some things have stayed the same, like the sticky late-July humidity that assails Tokyo every year, like now, but I'm today not going to whine. It is, after all, part of the charm of the place.

Big (Screened) in Japan

While here in Japan we're often forced to wait an absolute eternity for blockbuster movies from abroad to hit the screens — just as an example Star Trek Into Darkness doesn't arrive until 23 August, making this the last country listed on imdb.com to screen the sequel, three months after even Iceland — there are some home-baked goodies to keep us entertained.

It helps, of course, if you're into anime and manga, which I most certainly am, and 2013 is bubbling with big-screen versions of some titles you may've heard of before.
 
For starters there's something out later this month (July) courtesy of the great Katsuhiro Otomo, the genius behind both the Akira (1989) movie and manga, and one of my favourite Japanese comic book short-story books in English: Memories.

If you've never picked up this weighty tome, you should, since it's a 250-page compendium of shortstories veer wildly from surprising twists verging on Twilight Zone to silly slapstick, but it’s the title-tale ‘Memories’ that always grabs me.

A space salvage vessel with a cranky crew finds a drifting Marie Céleste with plush carpets, chandeliers, empty books and homicidal robot watchdogs — not to mention a mummified cadaver reaching out from beyond the grave.



With his new film Short Peace , Otomo has negotiated with Shuhei Morita, Hiroaki Ando, Hajime Katoki and Kōji Morimoto to produce a four-part short story omnibus, apparently based at least partially on Otomo's 1979 manga of the same name.


READ MORE @ FORCES OF GEEK

Two New Books Now Available

Quick update, since I’m over-excited as always when these things happen—my next two books are available (early) to order through Amazon.

Yep, I'm being greedy/self-indulgent (tick applicable) and publishing two of 'em.

The Condimental Op collection, officially out in July, is already in the hands of some of my mates if not yet my own, and Who is Killing the Great Capes of Heropa? —due out in September—is now available for pre-order.

Just click on either novel’s moniker to go to the associated Amazon page. Both even have heavy discounts for any aspiring early birds.

And I’ll love you to death as a bonus.

What have either got to do with Japan? Well, Who is Killing the Great Capes of Heropa? has very little—aside from lead character Pretty Amazonia (pictured here, conjured up by artist Juan Saavedra), who's a hybrid of super-powered girls' anime characters from things like Sailor Moon and PreCure . She even spends time reading a manga volume of Candy Candy .

And she gets around in a ship named the Magnetic Rose (check out Katsuhiro Otomo's 1995 anime Memories).


And there's a cameo by another character that plays on the Fuchikoma 1-man tanks used by members of Section 9 in Ghost in the Shell.

Otherwise, this is a novel paying equal homage to 1930s/40s noir by the likes of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett as it does to sci-fi/pulp and the silver age 1960s Marvel comic books by Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, Jim Steranko, Roy Thomas, Barry (Windsor) Smith, John Buscema, and their ilk.
 
Set in Melbourne.

The Condimental Op is a collection of noir, surreal stories, comicbook asides, hardboiled moments, fantasy, dystopia, sci-fi, snapshots of Japanese culture, and the existentialism of contemporary experimental electronic music—bringing together recent short stories, older material, new comic book art, and a range of pop-culture articles written about music and Japan from 1999 to 2013. 

Included are articles on bon odori, saké and fugu, along with reviews of Japanese flicks by Satoshi Kon and 'Beat' Takeshi Kitano.


Plus there's a minor spotlight on the joys of working on English subtitles for a feature by Mamoru Oshii.

The cover art is actually by my 7-year-old daughter Cocoa, and I love what she did here.

BTW, hats off to my awesomely indulgent publishers, Perfect Edge Books, and to all and everybody who’s read (or bothers to read) either tome mentioned here.

Aussie-Made Madmen Dishing Out Japan

Just did an interview with the very cool people @ Madman Entertainment in my hometown Melbourne—with their opinions on all things Japanese including anime and Akira Kurosawa. It's up at Forces Of Geek. 

Here's a sample or two:

"Australia has had a long history with Japanese cinema, TV and anime even if we didn’t always realise it at the time.

"For many years TV has been a window on Japanese culture through shows like Monkey Magic, Shintaro, Star Blazers, G-Force and Astroboy; and also culturally adjacent shows like Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers. I think this has made Australia more receptive to seeing media from Japan.

"Also, for cinema, the growth of the Japanese Film Festival over the years demonstrates the popularity of the cinema here."


...and...

"The most ubiquitous name is certainly that of [Akira] Kurosawa. His breakthrough film Rashomon [1950] was so well-regarded that the first Foreign Film Oscar was created just for it. He gave us samurai films and helped inspired countless spaghetti westerns.  

"The Hidden Fortress and Sanshiro Sugata even helped shape Star Wars."

Read the entire piece here .

International Artists Yack About Japanese Anime

In last month's Flash In Japan we set the stage by asking a few upcoming international artists to tell us their thoughts on Japan—from manga through to the country's culture—and you can read Part 1 here.

These people are all young, pushing the perimetres of comic book and sequential art along with visual stills, and they're ones I worked with closely in the development of an upcoming noir/comicbook novel, Who is Killing the Great Capes of Heropa? , out later this year through Perfect Edge Books.

So, for the merry month of May we're continuing our insightful yack, this time focusing on that bastion of global fascination: anime.

"Japanese animation is always years before any other country, and of course I absolutely love it," says Spanish artist Carlos Gomez.   "Overall? I think the best animation is seen in movies—like Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira."

"I don’t think an '80s child in the West didn’t get exposed to anime in one form or another," agrees Gomez's Australian peer Paul Mason.

"I recall Astro Boy and Voltron being my favorites as a kid—though I can’t say anime really influences my work directly in themes, I enjoy the Japanese flair in terms of the animation frame rates: The fast action speeds create such a high impact, plus I’ve always admired the camera selection choices and framing methods utilised in some of the better anime action films. The Warner Bros West/East animation co-production Batman: Gotham Knight had some fantastic example of this, and the storytelling approaches that the Japanese directors used, and the illustration/compositional choices within the segments, really hooked me. I think the marriage of Batman’s mythology and persona, with the Japanese flavour, really suits the ronin/samurai tradition, thinking and visuals of the character."

Spaniard Javier 'JG' Miranda (see Bullet Gal picture at right, from Who is Killing the Great Capes of Heropa?) isn't quite so enamoured—not really. "I don't usually watch anime, mainly because I think the animation in the widespread series—such as Naruto, Bleach, even Dragon Ball—is a bit lacking due to the huge amount of work that a single episode needs, and the scarce time they have to prepare it. However, when talking about Studio Ghibli or some OVAs, you see the amazing quality these studios can achieve. That said, I have been a real fanatic of Dragon Ball, Dominion Tank Police, Slayers, Rurouni Kenshin..."


READ MORE @ FORCES OF GEEK.

Southern Cross: Character Design Competition

My next novel, Who is Killing the Great Capes of Heropa? , is a crossover homage to things comic book, pulp, sci-fi and noir—pretty much all the genres I dig—and the central character here is Jacob Curtiss... who moonlights as superhero Southern Cross.

Given the comic book nature of the romp, which will be published later this year by Perfect Edge Books, and the fact it's partially illustrated, I decided to continue the exploration of the comic artist angle by setting up a competition. 

This comp is open to anybody with a pencil, and the 5 winners will get copies of the novel once it's published. 

The key point is free-range interpretation, something that's important to me. I like the idea of disparate visions of the same person — it's the way American comic books, after all, work in the real world. Bryan Hitch's perception of Captain America in 2009 was far different from Jim Steranko's in 1969.

We're getting some great entries only days after beginning (the comp closes on 30 June), including the hilarious caricature of a man-and-his-dog (above) by Claudia Everest and the more Iron Man-inflected style by Craig Bruyn (below, at bottom). 

One of the artists, Tomomi Sarafov (she did this gal-version of Southern Cross, along with another piece), wrote about the process here at her blog.



Anyway, if anyone else is at all inspired, you can hit this link and find out what the competition is all about.

By the way, for those of you (a) with long memories, and (b) Australian, this isn't the first Southern Cross superhero character. I've recently been chatting with esteemed veteran comic creator Tad Pietrzykowski who nicely filled in the gaps.

"Yes, there are at least three other Southern Crosses out there. Mine [the Golden Age Southern Cross by Tad, with Glenn Lumsden], Dave de Vries' Southern Squadron , and one at Cult Fiction Australia that I don't know the status of. Under the copyright law, no one can own the name "Southern Cross" exclusively. We can all retain copyright on our own individual Southern Crosses—artwork, logo, et cetera—as long as none of us try to impinge upon anyone else's version... which none of us are interested in doing, so it's all good." 

I guess Australia doesn't have too many iconographic logos to stick on the chest of union suits. Hey, wait... maybe I should've gone with Captain Vegemite.?

Anyway, I initially created my version of S.C. in high school in 1981/82, when I still had great aspiration to be a comic book artist/writer and mostly frustrated that Marvel Comics didn't have an Australian superhero. After procrastinating, I finally sent a concept design (and pitch) to Stan Lee in the mid '80s—after which Stan got his secretary to write back that he loved the idea and was hand-passing this on to then-Marvel editor-in-chief Tom DeFalco... who sadly was not so inspired in the follow-up letter, knocking back the character in no uncertain terms (if politely).



At which time I stuck him in a drawer and sat on the character... until last year, when I started dreaming up a novel that pays homage to 1960s silver age Marvel stuff (Heropa) and decided to resurrect him the bugger.

But until the book comes out (around September?), it's definitely worthwhile exploring the other incarnations of an essential cultural icon—cast in tights—and seeing how different people explore the superhero medium from an Aussie and/or foreign perspective.

BIG ON JAPAN: A Fistful of International Artists Croon The Country's Cultural Praises

Recently, I've been doing my best to mimic a literary ostrich since I've had my head buried deep inside assembly of the next novel.

Trouble is I have trouble picturing a big bird with a hardback and a pair of spectacles, wrapped in Harris tweed.

And I say assembly, because this brute not only deconstructs 1930s detective noir/pulp and 1960s Marvel comic book lore, but renovates them together as a conjoined tome over 100,000 words in length — stitched together by 35 images from 28 artists. 

It's the way comic books, after all, work in the real world.


But now I'm geeky nitpicking. If I haven't lost you already, I swear I'll try harder, there are some pretty pictures still to come, and a bunch of other people take the verbal reins.

For now, suffice to say, this train of thought (the wayward one about comic book art) inspired me to ask artists from Australia (Paul Mason), the UK (Harvey Finch and Andrew Chiu — see picture at right), Italy (Giovanni Ballati), Russia (Saint Yak), Spain (Javier 'JG' Miranda and Carlos Gomez), Canada (Fred Rambaud), Mexico (Rodolfo Reyes), Chile (Juan Andres Saavedra — see picture above), the Philippines (Hannah Buena) and Argentina (Maan House), amongst others in Japan and America, to get involved drawing characters and events from the book — and then let their hair down for a rambunctious tête-à-tête together here.

All in all?

Putting together the novel has been like taking Lego and Meccano and making the pieces function together as a futuristic-retro superhero romp that mixes and matches 1930s Art Deco architectural lines with the gung-ho Soviet formalist propaganda style, twisted into '60s pop art sentiment and the huge influence of Jack Kirby. 

Anyway, Who is Killing the Great Capes of Heropa? will be published via Perfect Edge Books some time around September, but what I'd like to share with you over the next couple of months of this column are the insights and opinions of some of the fascinating, talented and truly cool visual artists I've had the opportunity to touch base with — while attempting to keep the bulk of these within Flash in Japan's obvious perimeters: focused on, well, the Japanese archipelago.


If interested, you can read Part 1 of this interview @ FORCES OF GEEK.

STAR TREK: Darkness in Japan

With the new Star Trek movie Star Trek Into Darkness scheduled for release in the ’States in May (but not till August here in Japan), I thought it timely to flick back to a spot of “research” I did prior to the screening of J. J. Abrams’ first reboot of the franchise in 2009.

Research telling me, at least by May four years ago, that only one in seven citizens of Japan had heard of Star Trek.

I knew this then because I finished personally quizzing 60-odd people.

The margin of error was (and still is) completely open to contention, since I interviewed people only in Tokyo, my test subjects were limited to anime production staff, students of English, techno DJs and musicians, and the ages stretched from 15 to 72. 

I’ve since had arguments with a bunch of people, all foreigners, who contest the findings (well, they've argued and I've thrown up my arms in surrender), but they have yet to do similar research and I guess mine still stands up okay.


Apparently there was a Star Trek boom in Japan in the ’70s — the evidence is there in online artwork and blogs — but either most people forgot by 2009, or I picked the wrong target audience.

The one-in-seven figure was itself a stretch, since two inclusions in the ‘yes’ category confused Star Trek for Star Wars. One time, when I asked the ongoing main question (“Have you heard of Star Trek?”) my tipping-the-scales 72-year-old English student Hashimito-san declared “Of course!” — and thence proceeded to enact a spritely air-lightsaber cut-and-thrust routine.

Read more of this article @ Forces Of Geek.