Stuff to look at: Imiri Sakabashira.

It’s been an age since I’ve done any posts focussed on art or design here, but given that I’ve not really had any time to write about movies during the past few weeks (believe it or not), here for your viewing pleasure are scans of a set of postcards which until recently were pinned up in my kitchen. (I’ve temporarily taken them down to facilitate some much-needed lockdown re-painting.)

These are the work of underground cartoonist and manga creator Imiri Sakabashira, a somewhat mysterious figure (to us English speakers at least) whose work first saw publication in 1989. About the only other biographical info I can find is that he was born in Shizuoka Prefecture in 1964. His gekiga manga The Box Man was published in translation by Drawn & Quarterly in 2010.

I bought these postcards from the Taco Ché underground culture/zine shop in Nakano, Tokyo a couple of years ago, and, as can be plainly observed, their combination of naturalistic urban street scenes, pseudo-Lovecraftian kaiju / yokai monstrosities and retro/pop art iconography is guaranteed to blow your (or at least, my) mind, anytime.

More of Sakabashira’s art can be seen via this 2009 post from the much missed Tokyo Scum Brigade blog, which also informs us that the artist is “..a prominent ero-guro artist from the avante-garde manga magazine Garo” [sic] and “..a big name in the underground manga scene”.

I also nabbed the following doozy of a jpg from a Pinterest page.

In conclusion: rock on Imiri. This stuff is amazing.

SAS: Al-Qaida Attaque! # 1 by Gerard De Villiers(Editions Gerard De Villiers, 2008)

Walking to Brockley one morning last month, I found a whole stack of these things, piled outside somebody’s front gate next to the bins.

I would have snagged the lot, only I was with some new friends from Denmark who were staying with me at the time, and thought I’d best spare them that awkward feeling you get when you’ve arrived in a foreign country for a week and your host suddenly starts scooping armfuls of sleazy abandoned paperbacks off the pavement. I grabbed the top one off the pile and made a mental note to head back later and investigate, but alas, by that evening they’d all vanished.

Most of the books had far more salacious cover designs than this one, all featuring variations on the theme of sexy Muslim ladies with machine guns.

Not being a French speaker, I have no further clue what the hell this is all about (beyond the obvious), but it sure is nice to find the spirit of lurid girls n’ guns pulp cover design alive and well outside the English speaking world.

Astonishingly, the inside cover reveals that when this volume was published in 2008, there were no less than 170 books in this “SAS” series, all bearing the Gerard De Villiers name. So if I felt a vague twinge of unease just now using the phrase “sexy Muslim ladies with machine guns” on my blog, imagine the balls it must take for these guys to churn out books on the subject at the speed of something like ten a month, helpfully leaving the address of their Paris office on the opening page.

Actually though, googling up some more of these covers, I note that relatively few of them seem to go in for obvious Muslim/terrorist imagery; perhaps the cover photo on the one I’ve posted above is unusually restrained for precisely that reason..?

Thankfully, such issues of cultural sensitivity don’t seem to have stopped ‘Editions Gerard De Villiers’ from scouring the world in search of other instances of violent conflict that can be explored via the medium of sexy ladies with machine guns;







Man, I *love* that “Furie a Belfast” cover. Is she supposed to be a swinging, catsuit-clad Catholic nun-assassin or something? What wonderful, ridiculous stuff.