From: kenmlin@aol.com   
      
   Whoever is making the purchase decision at SFPL must be a huge fan of Mizuki   
   Shigeru as he is very well represented at Western Addition Branch of San   
   Francisco Public Library.  This is peculiar because Mizuki is not well known   
   in America and his stuff probably wouldn't translate very well.   
      
   I just read a two-volume series based on Mizuki's household budgeting book   
   before he finally made it.  He started off drawing "kami-shibai" (translated   
   to paper show), which is just a guy with a stack of illustrations reading   
   out the stories.  When television was invented, that went away and he   
   started drawing for "kashihon" (rental manga).  He seems to like working for   
   these publishers because they paid cash but eventually they all went under   
   when manga magazines were introduced.  It also depicted how he met his wife   
   throught matchmaking and his father forced him to marry the woman few days   
   after they met in order to save a trip to his hometown.  At the beginning,   
   he even owned an apartment complex (where his pen name came from).   
      
   Strangely, there is virtually no Gegege No Kitaro books even though this is   
   his most famous work.  Ironically, I found one book of unrelated horror   
   shorts that were incorporated into Kitaro anime series when they ran out of   
   stories.   
      
   I am going through Televi-Kun (Television Boy), a collection of short   
   stories in oversized volume.  It has nearly 600 pages and retails at 2,700   
   yen so it'd retail for perhaps $40 at Kinokuniya.   
      
   I also found a book on Kitaro that functions as a publication history and   
   character guide.  He switched publishers quite often and in one arc Kitaro   
   had an infant sister with ESP-like power that shows up out of nowhere but   
   accepted by him and his father.  (His mother is later revealed to be a human   
   even though it's been wide held that she was from a tribe of one-eye youkai.   
   His father revived himself as an eyeball after his own death.)   
      
   My lingering gripe about Mizuki is that his assistants are doing all the   
   heavy-lifting and his own drawing is quite sloppy.  His characters have no   
   necks and jaws to middle of their chests.  One of the most famous assistants   
   he had is Ikegai Ryoichi of Crying Freeman fame.  However, many of his   
   assistants drew ten times better than Mizuki and in almost every panel, the   
   background looks far more detailed than the foreground characters.  Often,   
   the cover pages are drawn entirely by the assistants with no trace of   
   Mizuki.   
      
   Even the famous Tezuka Osamu only has three series at SFPL:  Hinotori,   
   Blackjack, and Buddha.   
      
   Ken   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)