Satoshi Kon, Reincarnate Please!

By Mat K.

I know this is a day late, but it is by far not a dollar short. You may have heard the sad news last week, and if you have not, let me break this gently. A Couple weeks ago on August 24th, the notorious anime director Satoshi Kon passed away from cancer. He has been one of my favorite directors since I first saw “Perfect Blue” back when I was in high school, which god help me is almost 10 years now. And if you haven’t seen Perfect Blue, Tokyo Godfathers, Millennium Actress, Paranoia Agent, or Paprika, then you are definitely missing out on life. One of the saddest aspect of this is that he was in the middle of story boarding a new movie, and I know that one of his few regrets was that he may have kept the beginning stages of this movie too close to his chest, that he was worried the studio might not be able to continue making it with him gone. There is a posting of his last words which you can find here or you can probably find them via Google search. You can definitely see it was something he saw coming, and I think this monologue (for lack of a better term) is just brilliant to read. The reason I didn’t report on this last week is because I got so excited by a week full of books (after 2 weeks of nothing), that I utterly forgot and gushed about the new releases. For dropping the ball like that, I apologize.

Don’t worry, this isn’t going to be all morbid, there are too many great books to not get into them this week. There are  two books on my list of amazing stuff I have been waiting FOREVER for, the first of which being Air Gear which will finally be showing up in one of those Del Rey three-in-one collections of volumes 15, 16, and 17, with Sano the Aeon Clock on the cover, which is the standard cover for Volume 15. In this cluster of books the exciting battle between Kogarasumaru and Animal House comes to an explosive conclusion as secrets about Sleeping Forest surface and Ikki gets more involved with team Tool Toul To. Pressing questions are answered at last when Ikki and team Kogarasumaru descend deep into a Tower Trophaeum of mystery!

The second book on my list of “Things-I-Have-Incredible-Patience-For” is Ghost Talker’s Daydream Volume 4 written by Saki Okuse and illustrated by Sankichi Meguro. Now, it’s been so long since Volume 3 came out that I’ll give you a little refresher on this Dark Horse series. Saiki Misaki is an albino necromancer who works as a dominatrix by day, and does part time exorcisms for a special government agency that’s run by her father. This time around the case becomes more personal, as the power that gives Saiki the ability to see and talk to the dead is the very thing terrorizing her client.

Anyway, believe me when I say there is plenty more, and definitely a lot worth reading. So until next time!

Ja Ne!