Vertical [Ode to Kirihito]

[cmoon]

[Metropolisforever]

I was talking about the "thickness".

Are they really that big, or are you just exaggerating?

We have some children's books that are also bigger than an actual child.

They're perfect to crawl on.

[cmoon]

Again, in the department of thickness, Ode is pretty impressive, but has absolutely nothing on surface area.

I am in no way exaggerating about the size of at least one of the nemo publications. No, it isn't thick at hall, but height and width are stupendously huge. Yes, I think my earlier description was pretty accurate.

Shipping must be absolutely stupid. The retail price was over $100 as I recall.

What is the point of a book that huge?

Personally I'm really happy with the size of Kirihito. I hope vertical keeps up with that kind of thing.

[Huscheli]

Well I think it has about 120 pages, which isn't much compared to a manga My German Version is much smaller in size (I think maybe the same as cmoons?), but the pages have such a quality (And it has 450 of them) it really is very hard to hold since it's quite heavy. I think it's annoying. But the size of th english one is just funny everytime I see it. Where would you put it`? lol

Well I don't think Kirihito is really huge...just fat. (Really fat...) lol

But yeah...this nor Nemo are something compared to my Biology Book...

[snake search]

according to amazon.com, the Nemo book is 21 x 16.2 inches. that about the size of my drawing pad, which is 18 x 24. you should also remember that the nemo strip tuck up a newspaper page.

if you want to talk about thickness, have any of you guys seen the new complete Bone collections?

[deadbeatpete]

I have that bone book. It is indeed chunky on a grand scale.

Great series too.

[cmoon]

Ah yes, the bone book...amazingly, it is sitting on my shelf not far from Kirihito, but I'd forgotten about it. In hand, Bone is definitely a bigger book than Kirihito, but not by much. Its also just outright heavier (are there bricks in it???)

As far as the dimensions of Nemo, again I have to stress there are multiple editions out there. My 'small' edition is easily over a foot tall, so I think that 21" height seems rather scrawny to the proposterously huge version of Nemo I saw at the comic shop.

It was almost like someone was going for a practical joke--let's make a book so absolutely huge that people can't stop looking at it. Of course, my memory could be exaggerating the size, but seeing it there on the shelf, it definitely made everything else look really small.

[putrocca]

[Huscheli]

[Metropolisforever]

[putrocca]

The third one is in Barbara. The dog there is also female, I believe. Once again it fit very naturally into the story, which is why I didn't think much about it until I found two more instances, but three is quite conspicuous.

[UnluckyLukeGR]

That's interesting...so that came up three times in his later works. I'm not quite sure what it could represent, as I haven't read MW or Barbara. The only thing that comes to mind for me, apart from that whole "beast inside" idea, is that it might represent man being brought down to the level of dogs in terms of losing humanity and respect. Interestingly, there's something similar in one of Yoshihiro Tatsumi's short stories (in Abandon the Old in Tokyo) that involves a man who's lost everything finally losing all self-respect and having, ah, relations with a female dog.

[cmoon]

This is a sort of non-response, but there are a lot of prolific artists I've followed into maturity/career end, and the truth is, it always gets weird. The author-artist becomes liberated to deal with topics that younger author/artists wouldn't. A fave author of mine, Russell Hoban, for instance, was always a bit strange, but through the years developed his own language. I can't imagine picking up one of his later books without the introduction of his earlier books. Tove Jansson (of Moomin fame) gets quite weird while still working within the children's lit medium.

Of Tezuka and bestiality (if it is really an issue), I can only assume that he was becoming more honest and open about everything, ready to go where other authors probably wouldn't even have considered. I also return again to 2772 where the phoenix apparently makes love to the main character. This is apparently a god-man relationship that must be considered in a different way than younger people might. I think we must consider how love can move beyond species, beyond ideantity, and the clear need of one living thing for another. I do not think that Tezuka was moving into fur-vert territory (although I haven't seen these other examples mentioned), but rather exploring perhaps what love really means, trancending form, physical dissimilarity, etc.

I could easily be wrong. Tezuka seemed to explore virtually every idea conceivable (and thank goodness). As far as I know, there's comics of his with big furpiles and what not. Good grief!

[putrocca]

I think it's interesting to note that the beginning of Tezuka's interest in "beast transformation" (effectively datable to 1966 when he starts Vampires) comes a couple years before the beginnings of his starting to write darker, more adult and more sensual works. The two themes often line up so I think it's clear that he was using both to explore the darker passions of the human psyche, and after so many iterations of these themes it's only natural that this particular combination would come up several times.

One thing I found notable, though, was that it was never as simple as a man approaching a dog, as it is in its very straight-forward use in that Yoshihiro Tatsumi you sited. We've all seen the one in Kirihito which is as much a man-as-victim as a man-as-fallen scene. In MW it's the dog which initiates it and man whose degree of monstriousness is indicated by his accepting it contentedly - a direct contrest to Kirihito. In Barbara the man is manifestly insane and doesn't know what he's doing, so it's up to the reader to decide how much he was conscious of the dog being a dog was. All very complicated uses of the theme which make it more an exploration of different ways the psyche can fall or access its darker elements than a simple "fallen man" case as it is often used in literature. Not that one would expect any less of Tezuka...