Bara is awesome. It’s a type of Japanese erotic manga for gay men, but unlike the much more well-known genre Yaoi, no one has published Bara comics in English. Die hard fans of Bara in North America must order the books overseas or hunt down scans on the Internet.

When my friend Blake Besharian invited me to make a series of prints on his letterpress, I decided to pay Bara homage. I collaged my favorite panels from Seizo Yebisubashi’s manga “My Hometown Hospitality” into new visual narratives, emphasizing the transitions, exteriors, and moments of stillness that establish the subtle mood and tone in Yebusibashi’s artwork.

“Bara by Letterpress” is a limited edition series of six prints. If you’d like a set, here’s your chance! Post this video on your blog/Tumblr/Twitter and then leave a comment below with a link to your site. Next week, I’ll randomly select one commenter to receive a set of all six prints!

Here are some links to help you investigate Bara on your own:

Bara Resources:
Bara – Wikipedia page.
G-Men – G-Men is the foremost magazine that publishes Bara comics. Site mostly in Japanese.
Japanese Gay Art – An Australian fine art blog devoted to the genre.
G-Project – A Japanese store that allows international orders of Bara manga.
Seizo Yebisubashi – All-Japanese website for the Bara artist.
Gengoroh Tagame – Mixed Japanese and English site for the legendary Tagame.

In addition to his thriving career as a cartoonist, Matthew Thurber moonlights as a musician whose manic stage energy allows him to actually fly. Here he is at Family, performing a short set of bizarre and amazing vaudeville tunes about balloons, furniture and cats.

Look, I’m going to try and display some restraint here. If I’m not careful, I could easily scare you away with the ocean of magniloquent praise swelling inside me. So let me be delicate in my wording– calm, cool and collected to help you understand the unparalleled beauty of Matthew Thurber‘s 1-800-Mice.

It’s an epic mystery about the moment in our future-history when human-tree marriage is on the cusp of social acceptance. An intersex mouse named Peace Punk roams the world seeking the entrance to Valhala, evading a trio of angry assassins through an underworld of never-ending hardcore festivals and viral video production palaces. A tightly wound mouse detective goes undercover amongst a pack of nihlistic terrorists, confronting his own criminality in the process. And a cog in the machine at 1-800-Mice (the world’s fastest courier service) learns the grisly truth behind a mysterious drug made of dead trees.

If that sounds like a lot, it is! There’s a whole Universe behind this story, and it feels like something dreamed by Henry Darger and Alajandro Jodorowsky after a night of getting stoned, prank-calling Marilyn Manson, and watching Monty Python. But don’t worry about keeping up with all the details: readers of 1-800-Mice will learn to truly appreciate a sudden nosedive into the surreal. Each panel says a lot, even when the narrative speaks in tongues.

Thurber’s particular poetry is a web of jokey stand-up observations, noirish voice-over, drifting existential questions, imaginary buzzwords, playful puns and casual dick jokes. He constructs a foreign language with familiar associations and unexpectedly deep capacity for humanity (even in interspecies characters). You’ll be reading a goofy exchange between a death cultist dentist and his vampiric assistant, and suddenly you’ll tap into a quiet sense of melancholy embedded within the panel. It’s an interplay that grants Thurber’s gonzo fantasy a surprising scope of emotional depth. Plus, heads explode, reality collapses, and you have a new message on MindBook.

1-800-Mice is published by the awesome PictureBox press, and it looks beautiful. The hardcover feeels really special, and it has pretty colors on it. Plus, there’s an endorsement from Matt Groening on the cover! Check it out at one of Thurber’s upcoming readings!

San Francisco: September 30th at 7:00pm – Escapist Comics (with Leslie Stein)
San Francisco: October 1-2 – Alternative Press Expo
Los Angeles: October 4th at 7:00pm – Family
Brooklyn: October 7 at 7:00pm – Desert Island
Brooklyn: October 20th at 7:00pm – Triple Canopy (with C.F.)

What Tom Neely and his friends at Igloo Tornado started as a joke on a cocktail napkin years ago has blossomed into a mini-phenomenon. Henry & Glenn Forever is their hysterical mini-comic about the imagined tender love affair between intensely macho punk icons Glenn Danzig and Henry Rollins, with digressions into their domestic duties, lovemaking practices, and friendship with the satanic couple next door, Daryl Hall and John Oates. The resulting patchwork of approaches in aesthetic and humor somehow manages to fuse gay jokes with gay’s jokes, striking a chord with punks, comic book geeks and homos alike– though Danzig himself is less than amused.

Last Friday night saw the opening of “Henry & Glenn Gang Bang,” an art show full of new pieces inspired by the original comic from a variety of vantage points, including works by queer comic king (and creator of Wuvable Oaf) Ed Luce, rising art star Eric Yahnker, and Jar Jar Binks aficionado Levon Jihanian. Take a peek at pictures from the opening below, and go check out the show at La Luz De Jesus before it comes down this weekend!

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When you were eight, nine years old, did you love Dilbert or The Far Side or Cathy? Jump Start? For Better or For Worse (if you were a total dork)? Those were simpler, blissfully ignorant times, before the veil of childhood was lifted and the funnies quickly lost their luster. Grown-up comics gave way to the operatic brooding of superheroes, or alternately, the navel-gazing existential musings of indie comics. Neither genre is widely known for its guffaws and belly laughs. Lucky for us, we’ve still got weirdos like Robert Crumb, Matt Furie, and Johnny Ryan running about, producing deliriously funny cartoons.

Add to that list another comedian undercover as an artist: Lisa Hanawalt. Hanawalt’s formal artistic skill is unparalleled, suave and refined– so graceful and gorgeous, it’s doubly fun to watch her gleefully defecate upon it with an array of dizzyingly crude subject matter. Hanawalt’s work is the perfect mixture of adorable animals, gentle bon moths, and beyond the pale dead baby jokes, poop jokes and/or dick jokes. I can almost picture her as a happy little kid, obsessed with drawing majestic stallions, before something deliciously insidious crept into her mind and persuaded her to draw deeply unsettling, even nauseating images of anthorpomorphized creeps and unstable human bodies from beyond the uncanny valley.

Check out pictures from the second issue of her excellent comic book I Want You, below. The Fan Mail page is especially awesome, and paints a picture of Hanawalt as the type of person who’d be more than just a little bit fun to hang out with. Don’t miss her fantastic new series for The Hairpin, “Rumors I’ve Heard About Anna Wintour.”

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It’s an important question to ask an artist: “Why do you make stuff?” At its core, the answer I’d always love to hear an artist say is, “I make stuff for myself.” It seems to me that those are the artists that show genuine talent. So, what happens when you ask two people– partners in life and art– to try and describe the force that drives them, and the things in life that got them to that point?

Victor Cayro and Becca Kacanda are a couple, and they’re both incredibly prolific and inspiring artists. I first began my working relationship with Victor and Becca when they participated in a show that took place at Synchronicity Space, under the moniker Big Apple Graphicxz. Since then, I’ve received epic, epic emails and occasionally a phone call that leaves me in awe of their superhuman character.

Here, Victor Cayro and Becca Kacanda on the question of: Why do you make stuff?

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It turns out heaven is a place on Earth, bathed in a cloud of dust on the tracks between Black Butte, Oregon and Mt. Shasta, California. That’s where train hoppers have created the Black Butte Center for Railroad Culture, a museum celebrating the splendor of transience, complete with a zine library and punk venue in two refurbished antique boxcars. When I visited the Center during a summer gathering, I couldn’t help but marvel at the togetherness of such a collective, and the very existence of a place where a phrase like “queer feminist train hopper” is nothing to gawk at.

Amidst such a vibrant sub-subculture, sometimes resident and full time punk virtuoso Robnoxious is well known for providing a good bit of community glue through his zines, illustrations, and screenprint designs. Heavyweight zine distro Microcosm now carries a wide selection of Rob’s prolific output, exposing a much broader audience to gems like You Fucked Up– a dreamy post-apocalyptic anarchist fantasy series whose fourth and final installation arrives in early 2011.

Shut Up and Love the Rain, released in September, is an earnest and hilarious comic diary of young Robert’s discovery of human sexuality and his own latent queerness. He doesn’t stigmatize or shy from the details, and the result is a narrative that empowers us all to utter our tales of awkward adolescence. As much as I enjoy Rob’s bare, yet whimsical illustration style, my favorite sections of Love the Rain are his text memoirs. These may be the most frank accounts of youthful experimentation I’ve ever read, and his triumphant tales of masturbation will have you fetishizing the banana in ways you never imagined. The latter half of the zine takes on a more sentimental tone– featuring an intimate interview with Rob’s parents about his father’s transgender coming out story (you can also read this section on his blog). It’s a sex-positive feel-good family dramedy for the rest of us.

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Dirty Dishes, a book of illustrations and paintings by outstanding Canadian animator Amy Lockhart. We share her love of angry ladies and the sheer terror of human bodies. Published earlier this year by Drawn & Quarterly.

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Continuing our Matt Furie Monday marathon, join me at the coffee table to take a look at Furie’s latest hilarious issue of Boys Club. Lovable weirdos Andy, Brett, Landwolf and Pepe are back, accompanied this time by a beanie-wearing pizza delivery creature named Bird-Dog and Whitey, the sinister pimple. Bird-Dog lays out the history of marijuana while Landwolf twirls his boner in front of a strobe light. Plus a great recipe for Slim Jims and Easy Cheese!

Pictures of Boys Club 4 below, along with a few pictures of the rad print I picked up from Furie at APE last month, created by Desert Island– the amazing NYC comic shop behind Smoke Signal.

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Matt Furie: everything he does is awesome. I’ve yet to be disappointed once by the incredible things Mr. Furie creates, and his contributions to the new issue of Giant Robot are no exception. The cover story features a seven-page interview, awesome illustrations of broccoli basketball players and Beelzebub bassists, and best of all: a CD-ROM of Return of the Quack, a video game with artwork by Furie. If you’re unable to get your hands on a copy of Giant Robot 67 right away, I’d suggest playing the free bonus level from Return of the Quack online, to hold you over.

Giant Robot 67 also includes a great interview with Jillian Tamaki, an investigation into Japan’s obsession with tricked-out big rig trucks, and Michelle Borok‘s gorgeous travelogue from her journey through Mongolia. It’s chock full of radness!

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