Fisher and Tezuka

I have so much love for stores like She Said Boom, Zoinks! and, to a lesser extent, BMV. They all seem to be run in a very similar fashion and totally rock the used book/CD/vinyl realm. Why pay regular price for needle in the haystack books at Indigo (or whatevers) when these places are all needles and employ a serious re-figuring of prices. Check out this book Tokyo Days, Bangkok Nights, for example. I was drawn to it by the awesome cover art, and sure enough the inside is just as beautiful. Unfortunately I found out that the artist, Seth Fisher, whom I'd never heard of before, is no longer alive, despite having been born in 1972. I found that out about him, and little else, from his website, www.floweringnose.com. Check out, in particular, this page of his site, which has some amazing pattern-type drawings such as...


'Tokyo Days' quickly got me much more interested in both Tokyo and Japanese comics (manga). So I picked up a copy of Dororo at She Said Boom yesterday, a 1969 serial by manga-master Osamu Tezuka. He's the guy behind Astroboy and a bunch of other respected Japanese works. While I was perusing the store's graphic novel section I noticed that they had a copy of 'Tokyo Days' for two bucks less than I nabbed it for at Zoinks! Go pick it up. You lucky dude, you.