From Bloody Ukiyo-e, or The New Atrocities in Blood by Suehiro Maruo, 1988

You've mentioned the history of guro before, but I was wondering if you had any resources?

So, guro is a super niche thing outside of Japan so it's hard to research its history in any one particular place. If you want to learn more about ero guro as a genre in English you pretty much just have to go down separate rabbit holes piecing together what you can and looking at the art and literature of creatives of the genre like Shintaro Kago, Suehiro Maruo, Waita Uziga and Edogawa Ranpo. Most resources are going to be in Japanese. A lot of early ero guro was also destroyed so there are holes in its history.

I can offer a general summary of ero guro, but also mind you that I might not have everything exactly correct for the reasons stated above. Most of what I gather is just from being a fan of the genre and talking to other fans. Also apologies if this is kind of all over the place, I'm not going through and editing this, I'm just going to be a little autistic about this.

Ero guro has its roots in another art genre from the 19th century, muzan-e, which were woodblock prints that depicted violent acts in Japanese history. You also had the appearance of I-novels, semi-autobiographical works that described usually dark events in the author's life. Later ero guro gained popularity in the 1920s with the ero guro nansensu subculture. Ero guro nansensu focused on exploring violent and sexual themes that would have been considered shameful. There's the misconception in the west that guro means "gore," but it's instead a wasei-ego (borrowed English compound or abbreviated words) term for "grotesque." Ero guro and ero guro nansensu were not just blood and guts, and being bloody or violent doesn't make something guro. The art style focused on pushing the boundaries of what was acceptable, and featured horror-like themes, body horror, and body fluids. It's meant to explore what is deviant, taboo, or just outlandish or ridiculous. The contrast of eroticism and grotesque is the appeal.

Especially jut before and during WWII, the Japanese government heavily censored published media, and people were rebelling against that. A lot of ero guro works of this time were also tied to leftist publications. Kaizo magazine featured works from communists, anarchists, and other leftists, and as such, faced heavy censorship and was eventually completely banned. A lot of leftist literature at the time was anti-militarism, anti-authoritarianism, and anti-war while also embraced naturalism, humanism, and radical social and political views. Kaizo inspired other magazines and underground sale of media, which included ero guro. There was even more scrutiny for ero guro after a real event where a couple was practicing erotic asphyxiation and the woman ended up killing the man and castrating him. The Japanese blamed ero-guro books for the incident and decided to ban them. Unfortunately that means a lot of books and magazines were destroyed, and those that weren't were often printed on poor quality pulp paper, so little of it survives today. After the war and during American occupation, Kasutori became another magazine that inspired ero guro by publishing controversial sexual art and writing that also integrated horror themes. This was also a very traumatizing time in people's lives, so they were expressing this through horror. Both during and after the war, Japanese people were pushing for sexual liberation and freedom of expression, which is why I find ero guro so interesting. This was a time when even kissing was seen as a disgusting immoral act outside the bedrooms of married couples, and people were telling the government they couldn't be controlled. If anything they did was going to be judged they were going to hold no bars with what they could create. There are no confines to human expression. I was a fan of ero guro even before I became a leftist but it as an expression of progressive ideals and being intrinsically anti-fascist makes me love it even more. Taboo art has inseparable ties to leftism.

Another later influence of ero guro was Garo magazine, which was also started to promote Marxist artists and the gekiga art style, which differed from early manga art styles like Osamu Tezuka's that were more cartoony and whimsical. Gekiga focused on being more detailed and having more mature themes. Garo published several different bizarre themes during its publication. Ero guro also ended up influencing the rise of pink films (Japanese erotic movies) and exploitation films (movies that exploit the shocking or transgressive). Tentacle hentai also stems from ero guro media.

Hope this makes some sense to you and inspires you to look more into ero guro. The genre is so interesting and the random little paths you can find it taking you are very cool.

Animation Night 129 - Thrice the brinded cat hath mewed...

thrice and once the hedge-pig whined, harpier cries; ‘tis time! ‘tis time!

It is once again halloween! Or as close as we can get to it on a Thursday this year. Which means it’s time to once again celebrate horror, in the field of animation...

In previous years, we’ve enjoyed the prog rock album cover spectacle of Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust, the devastating ruined-world masterpiece Birdboy: The Forgotten Children, the hilarious creepypasta jankiness of Yamishibai in one year...

...and the next, the exquisite Katsuya Terada design and impossibly slick animation of Blood: The Last Vampire, the tense Korean zombie film Seoul Station, the sublime ero-guro festival of Suehiro Maruo paraphilias in Shōjo Tsubaki, the viscerally upsetting abstract dive into a Chilean Nazi cult in The Wolf House... and of course plenty more Yamishibai.

Halloween animation nights are some of my absolute favourites, you guys.

This year, we’ve got our hands on the long-awaited Mad God, the thirty year(!) project of stop motion animator Phil Tippett to take all the techniques he learned doing movie special effects and put it towards a fully stop motion film...

Who’s that? Tippett started his career at the animation studio Cascade Pictures, inspired by the legendary stop motion of Ray Harryhausen. His break into in special effects cane in 1976, when he and Jon Berg were hired to create the miniature holographic chess sequence in the original Star Wars.

Working at Industrial Light and Magic, Tippett was on almost all the big 70s-80s special effects movies - e.g. Star Wars, Jurassic Park, Robocop - earning industry renown. One of his major achievements was a set of techniques termed “go motion” to simulate motion blur when photographing stop motion animations, by moving the camera or smearing a glass plate with petroleum jelly. He was also heavily involved in creating the creature props, so he and his team are behind all those inescapably replicated Star Wars aliens. It’s wild to think of how an idea created at a studio one time is now replicated so widely: how many people have spent time creating 3D models or illustrations of a ‘Rancor monster’?

Yet despite all that success in stop motion, Tippett also oversaw the transition to CG special effects, starting on Jurassic Park (where he’s credited as ‘dinosaur supervisor’) and then Starship Troopers (1977) - Verhoeven deemed him effectively a co-director of the elaborate battle scenes.

And that brings us to Mad God...

The way Tippett described it, Mad God is a form of ‘therapy’ in contrast to his increasingly constrained day job. It’s widely described as an exceptionally bleak film, depicting a figure known as the ‘Assassin’ descending into an increasingly grotesque body horror world. Tippett started it while working on Robocop in 1987, but shelved it for decades on the feeling that nobody was interested in stop motion anymore; he came back to it in the early 2010s, running a kickstarter which raised $124k, three times its goal; with this money Tippett brought on other people to assist him in finishing the film.

In an interview with Variety, he describes what went into it:

I had to archive it because it was just too big for me, the scope was too big, I didn’t have enough people, so I kind of canned it, but never forgot about it. Over the next 20 years, I studied a number of things like art history and literature, there’s a lot of Dante and Milton in the film, and then I really got into Freud and particularly “The Red Book” by Carl Jung. He wrote it over a period of 16 years, and it drove him insane. A similar thing happened to me. I went down this psychological path that took me into this bizarre world that ended up in the psych ward. It was that kind of experience where I guess I became a method filmmaker, I got lost in this unconscious vision.

As he alludes, in the last year Tippett suffered a mental breakdown - I can only imagine what it must feel like to reach the end of a thirty year project and just kick that 80 minute film out the door. I can’t wait to see what monsters emerge from Tippett’s subconscious from his almost improvisational process of animation.

Next on the docket is... do you remember ‘Ujicha’, the ingenious ‘gekimation’ animator whose The Burning Buddha Man we watched back on Animation Night 108?

Ujicha’s technique is termed ‘gekimation’, a portmanteau of animation with 劇画 gekiga, the darker, more adult comics movement which once contrasted itself to 漫画 manga. Gekiga, published in magazines like GARO, was eventually reabsorbed back into mainstream manga - its influence is a big part of the reason why manga doesn’t look like an early Osamu Tezuka or Go Nagai drawing anymore. However, Ujicha’s method draws even more on kamishibai street theatre; it’s a process of limited animation with complex painted cels, moved like puppets. To this he brings a fantastic eye for body horror imagery and some really fascinatingly strange stories.

So! Five years after The Burning Buddha Man (2013), which saw a girl investigating her parents’ deaths only to stumble into a bizarre conspiracy involving merging bodies with carved buddhas to gain superpowers, Ujicha came back with a film titled Violence Voyager. This one follows two young boys who stumble into a weird theme park where they participate in a ‘macabre game’. I can only imagine where it’s gonna go from that vague description.

Ujicha is something of a mystery to me - last time I could only find a scant couple of paragraphs, and searching today I only find similar information echoed on other sites. The Guardian article there mentions that he has the backing of production house Yoshimoto Kogyo, although I’m not sure when that began. Ujicha’s own words about his work are pretty brief, saying that they draw on his childhood:

It’s a mashup of all the things he enjoyed in his childhood, says the director, from trips to Universal Studios Japan to horror movies by Lucio Fulci, John Carpenter and Tobe Hooper, to the gory zombie violence of the Resident Evil video game. The amusement-park-gone-awry scenario is a perfect fit for the strange world of gekimation. “It’s like I’m making an attraction myself,” Ujicha says. “Using my own supplies, and my childhood experiences.”

To me it’s just extremely cool to have someone pulling off something so distinctly different from just about all contemporary animation as well as plain fun, almost entirely alone, and getting rewarded for it! I am really hype for this one, and whatever Ujicha does next.

Now, it wouldn’t be an Animation Night Halloween if we didn’t have an anime about vampires. We’ve done (one take on) Vampire Hunter D, and we’ve done Blood The Last Vampire... so this time let’s take a look at Hellsing, specifically the 2006-2008 OVA series Hellsing Ultimate, a joint production of Satelight (who animated the first half) and Madhouse (who animated the second). What’s it about? It’s about Alucard, a vampire in the service of a British aristocrat, who hunts Nazi vampires with a great deal of gleeful violence.

This one is memorable to me because I actually ended up with a DVD of it when I was a kid, and watched the dub, which is hilarious because it’s packed with British accents or absurd movie German in a really hammy way.

The full Hellsing Ultimate is very long, consisting of ten episodes that are each almost an hour, so there’s no way I can pack it into this format. (We still never got round to the second half of Alexander Senki!) Nevertheless, I think it would be really fun to give everyone a little sampling of it.

Meanwhile, continuing the stop motion theme, I have this fascinating little oddity courtesy of @mogsk​: The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb (1993) directed by a British guy, Dave Borthwick, at his studio bolexbrothers in Bristol - the city where I was born funnily enough, and basically the home of UK animation. It’s a surreal story of a tiny guy who escapes from a lab and into a weird swamp.

Dave Borthwick sadly died in 2013, and so a lot of the information about his life comes from his obituary. From there, we know that he was - like me! - born in Bristol, and graduated the West of English College of Art (now UWE) in 1969, spending many years working in experimental theatre, where he used traditional animation techniques in light shows, and then as a cameraman in the film industry. He founded bolexbrothers in the mid 80s, at first creating mostly short films, ads and music videos such as Feel Free (1984), I Can Hear the Grass Grow (1986), Vikings Go Pumping (1987) and Igors Horn (1988).

The studio was known for their experimental animation, using not just the familiar claymation of studios like Aardman but also pixilation (stop motion animation using living human actors). Their short films tend to involve a lot of industrial settings and favour mood (set particularly by music) over a lot of dialogue or plot.

Tom Thumb is an evolution of that to a longer format, and I’m really curious to see how it plays out. Honestly I had no idea anyone was doing anything cool like this in the UK! It would have been really cool to have met Borthman. Alas...

Besides these main features? We have our usual sampling of shorter stuff - Yamishibai in particular! If you have any cool bits of horror animation, please throw em my way!

To finish up, let me point at some exciting incoming stuff! Alberto Vasquez, the director of the incredible Birdboy: The Forgotten Children and Decorado, has put a release date on his latest film, Unicorn Wars. The film is notable for being animated entirely in Blender Grease Pencil, with much of the same team as J’ai Perdu mon Corps (Animation Night 32). Much as with Birdboy, it’s an expansion of one of Vasquez’s earlier short films into a full length movie. Here’s the trailer...

We can look forward to that in December this year! So if I’m still running Animation Night in a year, maybe it will be our next halloween pick. If I can wait that long.

The other one I have my eye on with decidedly more mixed feelings is... Shintaro Kago, the legendary ero-guro mangaka and one of my favourite illustrators, is directing an anime film, putting his unique spin on Christian mythology. Fantastic, I should be over the moon right? Only, the thing is, to fund this anime film, Kago has been selling NFTs. Apparently very successful NFTs. From a purely mercenary perspective, it’s not a bad move to exploit the vast amount of money flowing through the NFT bubble - but proof-of-work cryptocurrency is massive gaping environmental wound, and it fucking sucks to see an artist I admire like Kago lending the weight of his reputation to this exhausting ponzi scheme.

Course, I’m still gonna watch a Shintaro Kago anime. No idea who’ll be hired to animate it or whether Kago’s style - one of incredibly precise finicky detail - will translate well to animation.

Which brings me to the adaptation of Junji Ito’s Uzumaki to anime by Drive, a young studio that also made Mamoru Oshii’s comedy series VladLove, for Adult Swim and Production I.G. USA (did you know they had a US branch? I didn’t!). The animation they’ve been able to accomplish is nothing short of extraordinary, using designs straight from the manga that are anything but animation-friendly, with subtle, slow motions and drawing counts that would be at home in an expensive film. You have to see this...

The project’s release has been moved back several times, and is currently indefinitely delayed, in part due to the pandemic - something which is frankly a much better state of affairs than animators and production staff working themselves to death trying to get this done on a deadline. I’m sure, whenever it arrives, it will be worth the wait.

And that’s what’s going on - at least to my knowledge - in horror animation at the moment. Hopefully a worthy introduction to these four films. So, without further ado...

Round about the cauldron go, In the poisoned entrails throw...

Animation Night 129 will be starting in about half an hour at https://twitch.tv/canmom - that’s about 9pm UK time!

My Current Reading List (Also an Idea for my Publication)

NOTES:

This reading list is the most current and up to date version of my current books and what I’ve been reading since studying my higher education, with hopefully even more books to come soon as with any student’s growing library, especially when you’re a hermit who pays more attention to books than you do to the current political climate. Bar submitting this as a reference list for the end of Ma I also wanted to have this prepared for my books, maybe also for my website, I liked the idea of having all my current references, philosophical, visual, scientific and speculative, all available to the audience. I only want this because I find it to be a total shame when an artist’s references aren’t totally available after their death, it means some of their greatest inspiration goes misunderstood and lacks proper context, after all, death does nothing for the ignorant expect feed their assumption monkey quick on the spoils of those who can’t defend themselves. So out of transparency and my beliefs as a studio realist, here is my current list, warts and all, the only things that could be left of are the books I haven’t read or am waiting to read once I start a PhD, then I will keep expanding on this list until I die pretty much, give the people my recipe for creativity, no matter the media, although I clearly have a love for books considering these are all physical media and bought and stored from only 2 years of actively searching and stuffing my collection like a proud rat building a den of whatever morsel can fit their hand at the time. 

Either way, and have mercy on the fact that it’s not perfectly Alphabetical yet, It will be for the books so have no worry, but this should be a good research tool for anyone who wants to read into the minutia of my work with all the detail available, it really reads as a biography of books, an elitists biography, no spaces for simpler reading for sure. It’ll look good in the books I’m working on too as I won’t be captioning my pieces so all the audience will have is a preface and a reading list, it leaves more up to them, something I really enjoy as a studios artist that I think others would enjoy more if they allowed themselves to go on a book hunt now and then. 

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-Ito, Junji (2011) Deserter. US: Viz Media.

-Ito, Junji (2021) Venus in the Blind Spot. US: Viz Media.

 -Maruo, Suehiro (2020) La Jeune Fille Aux Camelias (Shojo Tsubaki). France: Imho.

 -Spiegelman, Art (1996) Maus. UK: Penguin Books (2003).

 -Foster, Michael Dylan (2015) The Book of Yokai. US: University of California.

 -Yamamoto, Noriko (2016) Something Wicked from Japan. Translated by Sharni Wilson. Japan: PIE International Inc.

 -Goya, Francisco (1877) Great Goya Etchings, The Proverbs, The Tauromaquia and the Bulls of Bordeaux. US: Dover (2018).

 -Barnett, Richard (2017) Crucial Inventions, An Illustrated Treatise on the Principles & Practices of Nineteenth-Century Surgery. UK: Thames & Hudson.

-Barnett, Richard (2016) The Sick Rose, or; Disease and the Art of Medical Illustration. UK: Thames & Hudson.

 -James, Kale (2020) Flowers and Plants, An Image Archive for Artists and Designers. Vault Editions, UK: Amazon.

-James, Kale (2021) Greek & Roman Mythology, An Image Archive for Artists and Designers. Vault Editions, UK: Amazon.

 -Paquet, Marcel (2000) Magritte. Germany: Taschen.

 -Le Minor, Jean-Marie and Sick, Henri (2015) Atlas of Human Anatomy and Surgery. Germany: Taschen.

 -Voltaire (2005) Candide, or Optimism. Translated by Theo Cuffe. UK: Penguin Books.

 -Machiavelli, Niccolò (2003) The Prince. Translated by George Bull. UK: Penguin Books.

 -Le Comte De Lautreamont (1978) Maldoror and Poems. Translated by Paul Knight. UK: Penguin Books.

 -The Marquis De Sade (2016) The 120 Days of Sodom. Translated by Will McMorran and Thomas Wynn. UK: Penguin Books.

-The Marquis De Sade (1992) Justine or The Misfortune of Virtue. Translated by John Phillips. UK: Oxford University Press (2012).

 -Manson, Mark (2016) The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck. US: HarperCollins.

 -Huxley, Aldous (1932) Brave New World. UK: Vintage Books (2007).

 -Rushdie, Salman (1988) The Satanic Verses. UK: Vintage Books (1998).

 -Joyce, James (1916) A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. US: Viking Compass (1974).

 -Nabokov, Vladimir (1959) Lolita. UK: Penguin Books (2015).

 -Dalley, Stephanie (2008) Myths from Mesopotamia. UK: Oxford University Press.

 -Goliath (2018) Marquis De Sade, 100 erotic Illustrations. Germany: Goliath.

 -Hennessy, Kathryn (2019) Signs & Symbols, An Illustrated Guide to their Origins and Meanings. UK: Penguin Random House.

 -Ebenstein, Joanna (2021) Anatomica, The Exquisite & Unsettling Art of Human Anatomy. UK: Laurence King Publishing.

 -Alighieri, Dante (2020) The Divine Comedy. UK: Hyperborea Classica.

 -Nietzsche, Friedrich (1986) Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Translated by Ryan J. Hollingdale. UK: Penguin Books.

 -Nietzsche, Friedrich (2018) The Joyous Science. Translated by R. Kevin Hill. UK: Penguin Books.

-Nietzsche, Friedrich (2003) The Birth of Tragedy. Translated by Shaun Whiteside. UK: Penguin Books.

-Nietzsche, Friedrich (2003) Beyond Good and Evil. Translated by Ryan J. Hollingdale. UK: Penguin Books.

 -Tzu, Sun (1910) The Art of War. Translated by Lionel Giles. UK: Pax Librorium Publishing House (2009).

 -Sacher-Masoch, Leopold (2021) Venus in Furs. Translated by Fernanda Savage. UK. Amazon.

 -Gaiman, Neil (2018) Norse Mythology. UK: Bloomsbury Publishing.

 -Hobbes, Thomas (2008) Leviathan. UK: Oxford University Press.

 -Harari, Yuval Noah (2015) Sapiens, A Brief History of Humankind. UK: Penguin Random House.

 -Lauricella, Michel (2020) Morpho, Simplified Forms. Translated by Joan Dixon. US: Rocky Nook.

-Lauricella, Michel (2019) Morpho, Skeleton and Bone Reference Points. Translated by Joan Dixon. US: Rocky Nook.

-Lauricella, Michel (2019) Morpho, Joint Forms and Muscular Functions. Translated by Joan Dixon. US: Rocky Nook.

-Lauricella, Michel (2020) Morpho, Fat and Skin Folds. Translated by Joan Dixon. US: Rocky Nook.

-Lauricella, Michel (2020) Morpho, Hands and Feet. Translated by Joan Dixon. US: Rocky Nook.

-Norling, Ernest R. (1939) Perspective Made Easy. US: Dover (2020).

-Cooper, J.C. (1987) An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Traditional Symbols. US: Thames & Hudson.

-Hall, James (1996) Subjects & Symbols in Art. UK: John Murray.

-Rousseau, Jean Jacques (1762) The Social Contract. Translated by Christopher Betts. US: Oxford University Press Inc (2008)

-LaVey, Anton Szandor (1969) The Satanic Bible. US: Avon Books (2005).

-LaVey, Anton Szandor (1992) The Devil’s Notebook. US: Feral House.

-LaVey, Anton Szandor (1970) The Satanic Witch. US: Feral House (2003).

-LaVey, Anton Szandor (1972) The Satanic Rituals. US: Avon Books.

 -LaVey, Anton Szandor (1998) Satan Speaks. US: Feral House.

 -Rice, Boyd (2019) The Last Testament of Anton Szandor LaVey. US: Hierarchy Books.

 -Gilmore, Peter (2017) The Satanic Scriptures. US: Underworld Amusements.

 -Crowley, Aleister (2018) The Book of the Law. US: Strigoi Publishing.

 -Walther, Ingo F. (2016) Van Gogh. Germany: Taschen.

 -Winslow, Valerie L. (2009) Classic Human Anatomy. US: Crown Publishing.

-Apollodorus (1st-2nd century BC) The Library of Greek Mythology. Translated by Robin Hard. UK: Oxford University Press (2008).

-Bataille, Georges (1957) Eroticism. Translated by Mary Dalwood. UK: Penguin Books (2012).

-Blackwood, Algernon (2019) Roaring From Further Out, Four Weird Novellas by Algernon Blackwood. UK: British Library.

-Bosing, Walter (2000) The Complete Paintings of Bosch. Germany: Taschen.

-Bruce, Scott G. (2018) The Penguin Book of Hell. USA: Penguin Books.

-Chambers, Robert W. (2010) The King in Yellow. UK: Wordsworth Editions (2010).

-Charles, Darwin (1871) The Descent of man. 2nd Edition. UK: Penguin Books (2004).

-Cioran, Emil M. (2018) A Short History of Decay. UK: Penguin Books.

-Dell, Christopher (2016) Monsters, A Beastiary of the Bizarre. UK: Thames and Hudson.

-Descartes, Rene (1637) Discourse on Method and the Meditations. Translated by F.E. Sutcliffe. UK: Penguin Books (1968).

-Descharmes, Robert and Neret, Gilles (2006) Dali. Germany: Taschen.

-Dore, Gustave (1863) The Dore Bible Illustrations. US: Dover (1974)

-Dore, Gustave (1868) The Dore Illustrations for Dante’s Divine Comedy. US: Dover (1976).

-Ellison, Harlan (1968) I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream. US: Open Road (2014).

-Epicurus (270 BC) The Philosophy of Epicurus. Translated by George K. Strodach. US: Dover (2019).

-Ernst, Max (1934) Une Semaine De Bronte. Translated by Stanley Applebaum (1976). US: Dover (1976).

-Ficacci, Luigi (2003) Bacon. Germany: Taschen.

-Freud, Sigmund (1923) The Ego and the Id. US: W. W. Norton & Company (1961).

-Friedrich, Ernst (1924) War Against War. UK: Spokesman (2014).

-Goya, Francisco (1876) Great Goya Etchings, The Proverbs, The Tauromaquia and The Bulls of Bordeaux (2018).

-Goya, Francisco (1799) Los Caprichos. Translated by Hilda Harris (1964). US: Dover (1969).

-Goya, Francisco (1863) The Disasters of War. US: Dover (1967).

-Hart-Davis, Adam (2018) Schrodinger’s Cat and 49 Other Experiments that Revolutionised Physics. New Zealand: Modern Books.

-Hogarth, William (1764) Engravings by Hogarth. US: Dover (1973).

-Ito, Junji (2018) Frankenstein. US: Viz Media.

-Ito, Junji (2015) Shiver. US: Viz Media.

-Ito, Junji (2013) Uzumaki, Spiral into Horror. US: Viz Media.

-Kafka, Franz (1924) The Essential Kafka. Translated by John R. Williams. UK: Wordsworth Editions (2014).

-Kant, Immanuel (1781) Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Marcus Weigelt. UK: Penguin Books (2007).

-Land, Nick (2021) Fanged Noumena, Collected Writings 1987-2007. 9th Edition. UK: Urbanomic, Sequence Press.

-Ligotti, Thomas (2019) The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. US: Penguin Books.

-Lovecraft, H.P. (2016) The Classical Horror Stories of HP Lovecraft. UK: Oxford University Press.

-Machen, Arthur (2019) The Great God Pan, and Other Horror Stories. UK: Oxford University Press.

-Orwell, George (1949) Nineteen Eighty-Four. UK: Penguin Books (2009)

-Orwell, George (1950) Orwell on Truth. Compiled by David Milner. Great Britain: Penguin Books (2017).

-Poe, Edgar Allan 1849) The Collected Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. UK: Wordsworth Edition (2004).

-Peterson, Jordan B. (2019) 12 Rules for life, An Antidote to Chaos. UK: Penguin Books.

-Russel, John (1993) Francis Bacon. UK: Thames and Hudson.

-Sartre, Jean-Paul (1945) Existentialism is a Humanism. Translated by Carol Macomber. US: Yale Books (2007).

-Sartre, Jean-Paul (1949) No Exit and Three Other Plays. Translated by Stuart Gilbert and Lionel Abel. US: Vintage International (1989).

-Smith, Clark Ashton. (2014) The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies. US: Penguin Books.

-Sontag, Susan (2003) Regarding the Pain of Others. UK: Penguin Books (2019)

-Thacker, Eugene (2011) In the Dust of the Planet, Horror of Philosophy Vol. 1. UK: Zero Books.

-Thacker, Eugene (2015) Starry Speculative Corpse, Horror of Philosophy Vol. 2. UK: Zero Books.

-Thacker, Eugene (2015) Tentacles Longer Than Night, Horror of Philosophy Vol. 3. UK: Zero Books.

Bloody Ukiyo-e In 1866 & 1988 (The New Atrocities In Blood)

by: Suehiro Maruo (author) Kazuichi Hanawa (author)Yoshitoshi (author) Yoshiiku (author)

In 1866, renowned UKIYO-E artists Yoshitoshi and Yoshiiku collaborated on a shocking series of MUZAN-E (atrocity prints), EIMEI NIJUHASSHUUKU – also known as "28 NOTORIOUS MURDERS" or "THE SADISTIC COLLECTION OF BLOOD". featuring not only infamous Japanese murderers such as Sada Abe but also the likes of Fritz Haarmann and Adolf Hitler, take the premise of the original collection and stretch it to the very limits of ultra-violence. 

format: hardcover publish date: 1988 Publisher: Yubari Books edition language: English

( creationbooks.com | goodreads.com )

Your art is so amazing, I am in LOVE. What/who inspired your art style? If there were any.

hahaha shoot thank you so much!!! ive been working with MEANBOSS super closely on our collaborative freak comix since 2018 so over time i definitely starting aping off what he was doing & vice versa, i loved his hatching & studied what he was doing with faces super closely cus theyre amazing

ALSO im in my 30s & grew up back when they used to play old ultraviolent 80s anime movies at 6am on the scifi channel on saturdays, & one of my true loves to this day is yoshiaki kawajiri. he directed vampire hunter d bloodlust, bio-hunter, wicked city, demon city shinjuku, cyber city oedo 808, & like 5billion other weird movies with the word city in em LOL. im not a one-for-one copy but if you look at kawajiri's stuff you can absolutely see his fingerprint on what i do! the general influence of gritty weird cybernetics & overall cyber terror before technology became a normal thing to culture at large is also firmly from this era, & it's something i wanna continue to emulate going forward in LOVOS4017.

ALSO another big influence was masayuki taguchi's work on the 15 volume-long battle royale manga which is just about the most alienating & disgusting extreme gore comic you can find, significantly worse than anything uziga or kago is putting out imo. (quick addendum but fuck uziga.) i read this in highschool with my buddy at the time, we used to own different volumes & trade them back and forth during class depending on which one we were missing LOL. my roughs for sad sack had battle royale manga all over it, i LOVE how grotesque taguchi pushes faces, like not one person is pleasant to look at.

ALSOOOO definitely kouta hirano of hellsing fame but only the first 2 or 3 books when he was doing really sloppy inks as i only read the first couple books back in the day & didnt check out the rest of it until years later. my hair movement, inks with white outlines, & every tooth in the mouth thing are straight outta hirano's playbook!

ALSOOOOOOOOO id be a liar if i didnt give jhonen vasquez the credit he's due with johnny the homicidal maniac, hail to the king baby lol. i dont push it as hard as he does, but his stuff gave me total permission to completely shatter skull anatomy in the service of a Bigger More Crazy Facial Expression, & i still use that trick to this day!

there're smatterings of suehiro maruo, shintaro kago, junji ito, francisco goya (disasters of war era specifically), francis bacon, art spiegelman, & charles burns in there as well, but those up there in the list are the big influences! fun fact ive gotten comparisons to the old æon flux cartoon from mtv in the past, but i actually never saw æon flux until like Super recently so i just assume peter chung & i had similar inspirations lmao, like you can already follow the inspiration line pretty clearly with gustav klimt -> peter chung -> jhonen vasquez so i figure i just took my inspo from someone later down the line in that thread lol

ok thats all i got for this question THANK FOR PLAYIN i sincerely love getting the opportunity to talk shop!!!!!!

Do you have any favorite illustrators?

I'll restrict this to people who have illustrated books (no mangaka or BD artists). However, this still lets me mention Suehiro Maruo, Moto Hagio, Keiko Takemiya, Tomomi Kobayashi and Yoshitaka Amano.

Going historically, I'd begin with Blake's illuminated manuscripts then skip straight to late 19th/early 20th century pre-raphaelite, art nouveau and aesthetic stuff (Beardsley's illustrations for arthurian myth, Walter Crane's for The Faerie Queene, Jessie M. King's Wilde illustrations and The Glasgow Girls generally, Edmund Dulac and Harry Clarke's Poe illustrations, George Barbier generally).

Then early weird fiction illustrations, with Sidney Sime's illustrations for Lord Dunsany being the best here.

A little detour throught the occult illustrations of Austin Osman Spare.

And settling finally in 60s/70s sci-fi book covers (unfortuately frequently uncredited in the books themselves, so I don't have a ready list of illustrators) which always seem to wonderfully combine late 60s psychedelia, Theosophical and Thelemic influences, Weird Fiction Body Horror, and the gleaming chrome of early sci-fi covers into one delirious package. Small aside, but while there are a lot of interesting authors still operating under the vague umbrella 'speculative fiction' the cover illustrations have taken a serious nosedive. For example, I love the Caitlin R Kiernan collection 'Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart' but the cover illustrator should be shot.

What is the origin of Ahegao memes?

The hentai face (also known as the ahegao face) is a popular topic of discussion among anime fans. As a result, ahegao memes have gone incredibly widespread on the internet. So, what is the origin of ahegao? How did it go viral? Let’s all find out with ilovepauljack.com.

What is ahegao? 

Ahegao is a drawing genre in Japanese Hentai comics, in which the person (mainly female) is showing, during sexual intercourse, an intense amount of pleasure showed by her facial expression.

Ahegao is defined in several blogs and online user-created dictionaries’ articles, which list these features below.

Rolled-up Eyes

Stuck-out Tongue

Got wet with tears, snot, drool or semen or other body fluids

Flushed Face

Extremely strange moans: eg. Nhoooh! , Aheee!, Iguuh!, etc…

Ahegao memes

Where does the word ahegao come from? 

In the name, “Ahe” stems from Japanese onomatopoeia of “Aheahe” describing female’s flushed breath and moaning in sex & her sexual excitement, and “Gao” means “Face”. According to a forum article in Nico Nico Pedia’s entry for Ahegao, it’s confirmed that the term had come already used in porn magazines to simply explain porn actresses’ face with pleasure in early 1990s. Used in the same context, it also made looks on a handful of posts in 2channel and its sister board community in adult contents BBSPINK as well as descriptions for porn videos on adult e-commerce pages in the first half of 2000s. The oldest 2channel post in existence which includes this term was posted to a thread in /company/ (tip-off) in November 4th, 2001.

Meanwhile, according to 2008-2009 Japanese blog posts WebLab.ota’s “Ahegao History” & “Ahegao Chronology” , and Himajin no Dabun’s “Chronological Analyze of The Ahegao form in Adult Games”, it was around 2003-2005 that some hentai manga & anime creators began introducing extremely exaggerated face depictions of women’s abnormal orgasms with unwanted sexual intercourse, hardcore BDSMs, rapes or other sex assaults. Another blog aritcle by Bar Rikashitsu no Bibouroku suggested that Japanese ero guro mangaka/painter Suehiro Maruo has already introduced this kind of depiction to his works in early 1980s.

Continuing these prior researches on the web, Japanese bishoujo comic researcher Rito Kimi included “Genealogy of Ahegao” in his 2017 book The Expression History of Ero-Manga. At this book, he points Hiromitsu Takeda’s 2008 manga “I

Scraper” is that first commercial work where a character utters the word “Ahegao” in the meaning of this facial expression , and it suggests Ahegao had established its personal concept in the hentai subculture at that point. He also analyses the image board communities Futaba Channel (2chan) and Pixiv, where its users started to highly use this technique for pure jokes like Ahegaokin around 2007, also had the critical role to spread the concept on the internet.

Ahegao in nowaday’s meaning was formed by increase and evolution of this drawing style in that middle of 2000s, and its spreading to the otaku community via 2chan, 2channel/BBSPINK that became to host Ahegao-themed threads around the middle of 2007, and matome weblogs reprinting threads in those online communities. And in around 2008, it had adequate spread to be recognized as one of famous drawing techniques for climax. The first Ahegao-themed doujin comic anthology “A-H-E” was released in the winter in that year. 

Ahegao comic AHE

Related: Confused anime boy Is this a pigeon memes – The interesting story you need to know

The spread of ahegao memes

Against the backdrop of the large popularity in the otaku group, which had been developed in the late-2000s, Ahegao has earned a lots of on-screen visibility as both a hentai art technique and fodder for parody illustrations. At its early days, Ahegao had been a popular style in the Collage tradition in 2chan and 2channel. And Japanese illustrators communities Pixiv and Nico Nico’���’ Seiga which were launched in the same period have been popular Ahgao-sharing services from its beginning. As of June 2017, Pixiv holds over 20000 illustrations tagged involved Ahegao, and Nico Nico Seiga, which doesn’t have the adult section, also had plenty of illustrations featuring the face.

On the Westerners Web, this specific facial expression is called in not only the original name, but also translated types “Fucked Silly Face” or “Mind Break Face”. Tagged under these names, loads of Ahegao illustrations have been drawn by DeviantArt users, or reprinted to Tumblr & Danbooru. Urban Disctonary’s article and Reddit’s subreddit Ahegao were launched in June’’ 2010. Besides, Instagram’s hashtag also has tons of Ahegao selfies by female otakus & cosplayers.

Readmore: Anime traps meme – What is it?

Some famous ahegao memes on the internet

Ahegaokin

Ahegaokin is a series of exploitables for the face. Started from an illustration which was inspired by 2chan’s Ahegao photoshopped image of Suiseiseki in Rozen Maiden, lots of illustrations of characters being infected by the bacillus was uploaded to Pixiv in 2008-2009.

Ahegaokin meme

Desu Desu

Desu Desu is a derivative from Desu meme and an Advice Dog spin-off which reused that Suiseiseki’s Ahegao face. As early as April 2010, this series became to be shared in Meme Generator.

Desu Desu

Ahegao Double Peace

As well as the face itself, its descendant Ahegao Double Peace is also one the iconic poses in the hentai subculture & online parody illustrations. This quite weird pose had established its concept at the middle of 2011.

Ahegao Double Peace meme

So, have you gotten all of the information about ahegao memes? We hope that the above article is helpful to you. Share it with your anime-obsessed friends so that they could understand more about the mentioned topic. 

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SKETCHY BEHAVIORS | INTERVIEW WITH LAUREN YS

From large scale murals to multi-layered works on canvas, LA based artist Lauren YS’s art captures everything from the female experience, addressing topics like sexuality, death, aliens, monsters, and the occult. Her works are complex much like her own experiences, so we’re super stoked to find out more about what drives her, who and what inspires her, and what challenges and advice she has for our readers in this awesome Sketchy Behaviors interview..

Take the leap!

Photographs courtesy of the artist. 

Introduce yourself. Hey! I’m Lauren YS - Hmm, something you might not know … I used to play ice hockey and my favorite candy are Peach O’s. I am a really good listener, but that also means I hate being interrupted. I dream, often, about being underwater.

Tell folks a little about your artwork and what do you love to make works about? I make work about the female experience, sexuality, identity, space, aliens, heritage, death, monsters, nature, emotions, natural phenomena, the occult and whatever else I might be obsessing about. I like slimy creatures, kitsch, psychedelia, sex and Halloween, and mixing repulsion with attraction. I want the viewer to feel unsettled as much as engaged. I make things in an effort to try to process the beautiful shit rocket that is the world around me.

When did art become something you were aware you could do for a living or as a career you wanted to pursue? I have always been making art, but I never thought it was possible to support oneself as an artist: It seemed really out of reach or surreal. It wasn’t until I had already been fully freelance for a year before I realized I was actually doing it. I think it’s just something that comes out of necessity, it’s like – if I want to keep making art as much as possible at the rate I am living, then damn, I’m going to learn how to make money off of it.

What’s a typical studio day for you like? I tend to work nocturnally. I’ll paint through the night and sleep through the day and watch horror movies, listen to podcasts about art, serial killers and cults, and eat anywhere from 1-2 sacks of tangerines every day. I like to really plow through paintings as well, it’s hard for me to stop working on something once I start. After about three weeks in the studio like this, your mind starts to wander off into deep strange places, and that’s when the really good stuff comes out.

What’s your studio or creative space like? What do you keep around to constantly motivate or inspire you? I have always worked best in a bit of “artistic chaos”–I like to fill my space with odds and ends, knick-knacks, items from my travels, talismans. I believe in the power of objects. I love my lava lamp and need to buy seven more. I also have this drawing I made of an Asian grandma screaming “DRAW, MOTHERFUCKER” which I plan to make into a screen print and give to all my artist friends.

When working on a body of paintings and works for a show, what is your process like? How long does it typically take you to complete a painting from start to finish? Depending on the size of the gallery, it can take anywhere from 2-6-10 months to create a show, given that it is often punctuated by mural tours and big projects to pay the bills. I like to work on lots of pieces at the same time, so generally it’ll take a few days to a week or two to finish a piece. I am trying to get better at reworking pieces rather than just pushing through them one by one. Workflow is still sorting itself out. I also make a ton of pieces that end up being nixed from the final show. I am very prolific but also very psychotic.

Not only do you work on canvas, but you are also known for some of your amazing murals! When did you start going from painting on a regular scale to large scale works? What’s your process like for mapping out these large works? Well shucks, thank you! I started painting murals around 2013, which was a sort of natural transition because I wanted to work bigger and bigger, I wanted to travel and be in the sun and use giant machines to make my art. I actually started learning color from using spray paint. I freehand everything because I like to feel independent of projectors or machines, especially if I’m in a foreign country or don’t have time or resources.

It makes me feel empowered to be able to make big things on my own. Maybe that comes from growing up under the common experience girls have, especially asian girls, where you’re expected to be small and quiet and obedient. I have always worked in active aggression against that stereotype.

Is there a medium you’d love to get your hands on, but yet to have the chance too? And what are your go-to materials? I’d really love to learn how to use an airbrush, a la Sorayama. Outside of 2D I am dying to get back into stop motion animation. My favorite brand of spray paint is Montana Black (high pressure forever!), and I use a wide variety of acrylics and gouache in my paintings, specifically the Holbein gouaches from Japan.

What do you love about where you live, and what is the art community like in your area? I never thought I’d move to LA, but I’ve been really enjoying it here. I’m a communal living person (been in and out of communities for about 9 years) and I am lucky to have found somewhere that fits with my work ethic (intense) and social vibe (weird). I like to be able to work alone while still having people bustling around and making things all the time. It helps me to feel like I’m not dead or a total solipsist.

I’ve also found that the artists in LA–especially the female artists–have proven to be really kind, generous and welcoming. There’s a lot of room for weirdos here; it might take a while to find them, but they’re here. We also have a one-eyed cat, did I mention that?

Who are some artists you’re inspired by and have influenced you throughout the years? I’m a big fan of dark/psychedelic/erotic artists like Keiichi Tanaami, Suehiro Maruo, Sorayama and the whole Ero Guro movement. I also love Goya’s dark paintings and the sculpture work of Bernini. Some contemporary artists I’ve been into lately are Christian Rex Van Minnen, David Altmejd, Robin Francesca Williams and the fabric sculptures of Do Ho-Suh. Jamie Hewlett, Swoon, Andrew Hem, Aryz. I find that my taste changes constantly and I am always thirsty for different influences.

What’s been the most challenging part of your art career? What’s been the most rewarding? What do you do to keep the balance? Something really challenging has been learning how to trust myself while growing in the industry and balancing business, work and travel. It’s a really solid test: moving to a new city, providing for yourself, going on tour, shifting from place to place, managing gallery work and mural work, all while protecting and nurturing your own ambition and positivity, and not feed into the shitstorm of capitalism and social media past what is required of you.

The muralist life is not for the faint of heart. I would hardly say that I keep any type of “balance”–art is my life and there isn’t much room for anything else, and that’s how I like it. It is the most rewarding thing to look around and feel like you’ve created something new and good and powerful, all on your own terms. It is similarly rewarding to feel the need to level up - I enjoy feeling stressed arguably more than I enjoy feeling accomplished.

What would your dream collaboration be? What do you enjoy most about collaborations with other artists or clients? I would love to do something with Takashi Murakami and/or his gallery (Kaikai Kiki Gallery). There’s also this amazing Australian animator named Felix Colgrave whose work I’ve been obsessed with lately, I’d love to find a way to make an animated short with him! I love collaborating - especially on mural work - because it’s such a cool experience to be able to intermingle your visual world with someone else’s. Working with ONEQ in Hawaii this year was really great, she had so many suggestions and ideas from out of left field that made me rethink my own work as well. It also forces you to relinquish some control on the way you work, and reflect on the basic joys of making shit in the first place.

If you could paint a portrait of anyone living or dead, who would you choose and why? I really want to do a tripped out portrait of Yayoi Kusama or Bjork or maybe Steve Buscemi—all heroes of mine.

What’s your advice to folks who see what you do and want to pursue art as a career? I would say, go at it as hard as you possibly can! Make sure you really enjoy doing it! Not all parts of painting murals are glamorous (actually, few are) and it’s important to truly love every part of it if you’re going to commit your life to it.

This means: hustling walls, handling machinery, travel, people, logistics, finding somewhere to pee, dealing with unexpected bullshit, not complaining, being comfortable handling yourself in dangerous situations, being independent and resourceful, etc. I have reservations about artists who genuinely don’t seem to enjoy all the elements of mural painting going too deep into it. But if it’s something you love, there’s nothing better.

What are your FAVORITE Vans? I’ve been rocking the classic authentic Vans in black/burgundy as paint shoes for years now. But I also love the Sk8-Hi boys in burgundy… I never wear them because I’m too scared to get paint on them, haha!

What other artists would you love to see interviewed for Sketchy Behaviors? I’m currently really into Andrea Wan, Louise Zhang and Caratoes. It would also be really cool if you covered a GNC or trans artist, like Nomi Chi or Laughing Loone!

What’s next for you that you can share? My first book is coming out this year with Von Zos, and I’m also going to be designing a tarot deck with them. April is my first mural tour in several months; I’ll be hopping from Australia - Guam - Peru, and then moving around South America for a while, trying to practice my spanish. After that, I’ll be starting work on my next big show, scheduled for a city in Asia, which I’m really, really excited about - keep an eye out!

FOLLOW LAUREN YS | WEBSITE | INSTAGRAM | SHOP

1 & 19

1) Favorite artist? As for music - Mötley Crüe, as for actual art - I have a few but Suehiro Maruo is definitely an inspiration for me

19) Favorite book? The Crow (actually a comic but I haven't been reading properly in a long time plus I never had an absolute favorite book), The Heroin Diaries

#Repost @mangaberg ・・・ With Bloody Stumps Samurai @retrofitcomics headed to the printer in a few hours, now seems like a good time to officially announce the following blockbuster event: as part of the "Yoshitoshi: Sprit and Spectacle" exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, yours truly and cartoonist Ronald Wimberly will be giving a tag team talk on the topic of "Yoshitoshi and Comics" on Wednesday, July 24 at 6PM in the Perelman Auditorium @philamuseum. Tickets are required. Not sure what @ronaldwimberly will be talking about, but given Yoshitoshi's many dynamic samurai images I can imagine. I will mainly talk about Yoshitoshi's shadow influence on manga of the 60s, focusing on Hirata Hiroshi, whose naturalistic style is a distant but direct descendant of Yoshitoshi via historical fiction illustration. I will also touch on artists like Shinohara Ushio, Hanawa Kazuichi, and Maruo Suehiro who have been inspired by Yoshitoshi's gory imagery in a more isolated way. By foregrounding Hirata, my goals are 1) to complicate the image of early gekiga by highlighting a trajectory that had little to do with Tezuka or American comics, 2) begin fleshing out the art history of jidaigeki manga, and 3) show that postwar manga can be linked concretely to 19th century woodblock prints without reference to Hokusai Manga or Edo picture books (kibyoshi, akahon, etc). Another goal is to promote Bloody Stumps Samurai, which unfortunately probably won't be out in time for the talk, but who knows? The above image: Tsukioka Yoshitoshi's badass drawing of Saito Daihachiro Toshitsugu brandishing the severed head of an enemy (1880s), from the @britishmuseum Manga catalogue. I gotta learn me a lot of samurai history in the next month! #yoshitoshi #月岡芳年 #hiroshihirata #平田弘史 https://www.instagram.com/p/BzGR7yxnI3v/?igshid=1xif55j5jbtwn

A confused start to Noumena:

I wrote these notes in March of this year, back when I needed to ground my concepts more readily for my actual research, as you can tell it’s confusing to say the least, but I wanted to represent it here as it is a proof of where my head was it at the beginning of my research and it shows my current strategies for this project’s concepts. Firstly, you’ll need to follow the key in the corner to full understand the mapping of this diagram, the colour palate is simple enough but the concept of marriages represents unions between ideas and how they combine to make their own concept within my work, the blue by the way is there as abit of variety for my eyes so it really isn’t too important until you see the section remarking on various exhibition modes in the mid to bottom left of my map, I’ll explain this in a few. However, Immediately at the top we have the current concepts coming from practical ideas (mosaic, geometry) to how I can tie those into a research context (Occult symbology, Keys), in particular to the many themes discussed in my essay regarding new age iconography and post-modern occultism. The reason why I chose these themes as the top priority is because I am already seeing my installation as a portal to my work and practice, a portal to the otherworldly and quite literally for the audience to see my work as a portal into the current japanese western fusion we are seeing in contemporary horror art practice, due to the motif of the spiral and the shared aesthetics with Junji Ito and Suehiro Maruo. This in turn speaks to various ideas on dimension and orientation of the work in a conceptual and practical sense, now leading me to the left side of the map we see the first theme, pragmatic philosophy, this concept comes directly from the fact that I see my work the same way Eugene Thacker sees horror fiction, to be read as works of philosophical interrogation and questioning, for me in particular that means I address my practical work as being pictorial philosophy, something that is majorly important in horror media, as imagery can typically outlast and outstand past the conceptual and the liminal, and so my work seeks to fill space with it’s ideas, while at the same time literally creating a huge presentation of complex and immensely detailed artworks, something that Ito himself is known for due to how he fills whole books with his explosively horrific style while confessing the greater concepts of his works through these mottled grimaces. This in turn has the ability to transport the audience not only into the mindset of the author behind the art, but also into the world of the art and it’s inevitable perspective once you consider it enough, again speaking to the reoccurring theme in my work wherein the pessimistic and nihilistic is inevitably found in all facets of discourse within my work and in the conversations around it, as beyond the shock and gore horror has the potential to engage us in conversations that at first seem fantastically bleak and cringey, but when considered enough they have the potential to shock you to your existential core, this of course is why I love the medium of horror as a topic and aesthetic so much. After all, horror can’t be soft and affective, it has to cut deep and take the audience into the noumena in full swing, to take them away from the mundane and demand emotional reactions from them, even if all the reaction actually ends being is the occasional nightmare and subconscious fright, that means it’s still affective enough to have gotten into you and had an impact no matter how small or desensitised you think you are. 

Now back into the practical aspects, this ability to overwhelm at the macro and micro level due to the detail and equally due to the scale of the collection I have made for this project we start to see the terms collective amoeba appearing, in reference to my previously discussed subject of mitochondrial existentialism within the work. This immediately leads to the work as being titles or cells in an installation sense, the smaller works in scale become greater when multiplied by 120 and when they take over a whole part of a room like a being of itself, like a giant seductive spiders web taunting the audience, such a negotiation with scale and spacial orientation leaves the audience to speculate on what kind of creature or thing would be able to make such a display, as you we as humans find large and gigantic arrangements to always seems otherworldly and alien due to us not being able to immediately associate such a marvel with the hands of one man, it has to be something more to justify such a large entity, it’s often why people still believe aliens are behind all the wonders of the world and not a few deeply capable designers and thousands of craftsman and builders. We want such a strange display to be strange and fantastical in authorship, which is why Deoffal is only an alias and the actual author will remain a mystery for as long as possible, it should add to the inhumanness of the work if I don’t make myself too predictable to my audience as a human being. This lead immediately to the subject of portraits as sigils section, this is a simpler note, that the portraits I make are inherently symbolic of all the topics you find in my research, acting as busts to the various comments and fascinations that my brain regurgitates into shapes and faces, something every artist does and will always be held to as their work is naturally their symbolism and their religious practice of which they are the high priest, we make our own iconography and it’s our philosophies that make the work all the better to understand and to want to learn from in the eyes of the audience, it keeps the work artefactual and characterful, even minimalism though bare has it’s intent and in turn symbolism no matter how natural or impulsive, not to say all art is reasonable, but that all art is and will be a symbol for someone or something, that’s just what people do with ideas and it has always been like this, after all christians wear the torture device of their hero, and my practice emblemises pessimistic and nihilistic subjects which originate in the works of Arthur Schopenhauer, Peter Wessel Zapffe, Emil Cioran and Eugene Thacker, they aren’t clerics but to the fanatic they are my mentors in spirit. All these aspects link well enough to occult symbology, which before speaking of the themes in that section, lead directly to my ideas for exhibition in tandem with the ideas previously mentioned, the ideas of geometry in particular being mentioned, with the spiral concept this bring to mind the Fibonacci sequence, the most iconic geometric rule within portraiture and figurative art in my experience and my opinion, whether I agree with it’s laws as being totally accurate to reality is not important, it plays into this idea of a sequence which represents nature as more complicated than first meets the eye and the spiral has always been synonymous with instability and entropy, i.e. the downward spiral and the innocuous as ever expanding into our own comprehension as something all the more terrifying for even thinking about it in the first place, almost the same as the pink elephant thought experiment, except with existential dread etc. The exhibition methods discussed here are not possible for the final show, but you can tell if I had time for a solo show then I would play with these ideas, the idea of suspending my work in a net from too, almost like a sheet of skin stretched flatly between two hanging posts, would look amazing and wouldn’t need a wall, just two anchoring poles to thread wire through, each individual work then have hooks in each corner and fit like onto the wires like the balls on an abacus, with the total collection split in half so the other works would cover the hooks and back of the front facing pieces, meaning both sides would have a portrait and give the spiral a physical effect of groundlessness in tribute to the idea of sunyata. The idea of Sunyata as raised here is to represent meontology and the subjects of groundless nothingness as first theorised in the context of nihilism by Keiji Nishitani, his belief was the the progression of nihilism as a study of nothingness would eventually need to go beyond metaphysics and discuss the objectively the groundless and abhumanness of nothingness itself away from the human centric understandings of it, a true challenge in of itself which makes for great weird fiction and lovecraftian horror when considering it’s implications, a universe where all abysses are blacker and deeper than we expect and can ever expect to study properly, this in turns leads to the subject and Nishitani’s origins in zen Buddhism, a religion which has more in common with pessimism than most like to admit when considering how it values consciousness, humanity and universe as completely without meaning or value outside of those defined by humanity to protect our fragile egos, something Schopenhauer was famous for writing about his entire life, especially about the will of nature as the only force which can truly be proven as existing, i.e. entropy in all things both universal and metaphysical. Before discussing this further I’ll throw more notes to the other ideas on the installation basis. The other modes are simple enough, hung is just another variant of the nets idea, having works hung from a washing line style of exhibition, maybe be again layering lines so the positions of various hung work in an abacus fashion resemble another sigil or symbol of some kind across a room, this time without anchoring as they would be hung across a larger space and anchored in the walls of the room, pegged is also a result of this idea and so wall anchored obviously, the only option here not listed being nailed and pinned, as I was optimistic (as the note “hopes for off the wall” points out rightly) I would get some space to experiment with but these ideas just aren’t possible for this current show, maybe in future though when I can get some kind of budget to work with. Also, 150 pieces have technically been made I guess, 133 ink pieces, an excess of currently 44 sketches for my next project (as documented with the 57, 63 sketches in this blog), 51 paintings and that seems to be it, though only 120 pieces are potentially going to be shown as already noted. 

This means I can finally get back to the concepts at hand, starting from the top right working down. The Enochian keys as first discussed by John Dee are married here with prisms and trapezoids as these are deeply LaVeyanist ideas represented here, John Dee believed prisms with their spectrum of light and ephemeral quality could through ritual magic, be used to open a gate to hell, the 19 enochian keys (written in enochian Sanskrit and translated to english) are part of the LaVeyanist idea that wicked shapes such as trapezoids and prisms represent the alternativity of new age religion within the western world, as something born out of the occult and dark mysticism, something Anton LaVey heavily dived into and used to push away sensible people from his religion, almost as a scare tactic, while still being someone deeply engaged in anti-christian and naturalistic dark magic, it’s not compulsory to practice dark magic as a satanist but we enjoy the stereotype and know that it stops ignorant people from watering down our culture and the worlds of LaVey, as the weak templeists have tried and failed to do with their Milton following ways. Either way, this idea of symbology and geometry again representing portals into otherworlds reads like gothic fiction, which while being intention for someone like Anton LaVey, is also a philosophical and astrophysical argument as raised by the very like of Albert Einstein and his parallel universes, even the idea that the universe can expand from a single point of singularity, thusly speaking to this hell of an otherworld found in the works of horror I cited in my essay which represent the abhuman potential when considering portals and gateways to the other and noumenal within my work and the works of many of other theorists alike as mentioned previously. I can connected these themes to hell as who wouldn’t discuss the subject of hell when thinking of bottomless abysses and endless darkness, a darkness that can’t exist without light to prove it’s existence though as later noted in the comment of the black and white paradox at the bottom of my map, this speaking to all my notes on achromaticity at the beginning of this project. Which in turn, speaks to the often cited Robert Fludd in my work and his diagrammatical works about the universe before us and the universe as we experience it, something which also brings into the debate the works of Heinrich Agrippa and his theory of the 3 fold world, where we have the elemental world (the world without us) the intellectual (the world for us) and the celestial (the world as it is). In attempts to stop myself from rambling even more, this sums up both the themes of spectrums and perception as important concepts within my work, as well as the subjects of the noumena (of which I’ll explain properly in it’s own post soon enough and why it is so important to this project) and post modernism as all these occult subjects and darkly surrealistic talking points are from my original essay, something of which I even had to reread a couple times more before even writing this post, in conclusion I clearly had a lot on my mind here and just need to focus on what is already established in this post and in my previous posts and get so more research cleared up. 

Do you know of any good places to collect horror memorabilia in Tokyo?

There are a few, but not as many as you’d expect. it’s quite the struggle to find horror memorabilia in Japan. That said, there are a few good places in Nakano.

 You can pick up some old horror manga in the Mandarake stores there. One, in particular, focused on older manga and has a bunch of good occult shojo collections. There’s also a good poster store there, though for horror posters and lobby cards Yahoo Auctions may be the better bet.

There’s also a good ero-guro shop in Nakano Broadway if you want to pick up some art books, posters and the like. I can’t remember the name of it, and it’s quite out of the way, but you’ll know it when you see it.

For horror, you really have to keep your eye out for pop up events. For example, Takato Yamamoto has an exhibit in Tower Records, Shinjuku at the moment. Likewise, when I was there last they had Kawanabe Kyosai and Suehiro Maruo exhibitions in Tokyo.

Akihabara is a waste for horror though. I did find this there, but it took me forever and I never did get Kayako. I lived there so had time to waste, but if you’re on holiday, you’ll be wasting valuable time digging for horror there.

torinomon replied to your post “Man, everybody keeps on repeating how conservative and insert-phobic...”

Doesnt Japan also have both maternity and paternity leave, two things I was absolutely shocked to discover the US doesn’t have? Regardless people saying Japan is conservative as an excuse for things (especially the people who think LGBT+ issues are a western concept) irk me as people don’t seem to understand how much of anime/manga is *counter culture*.

The US doesn’t even have regular nationalised health care, so it doesn’t entirely surprise me that they wouldn’t have parental leave either. It’s still fucked up, though.

In Japan, up until 2014, men who took parental leave were eligible for government benefits that covered up to 67% of their salaries, but only if they didn’t work more than 10 days a month. The current law is that they can work up to 80 hours and can receive up to 80% of their salaries.

Many companies in Japan do have more flexible paternity leave now, but a lot of men still don’t tend to take time off from work - only about 3%, and sometimes only for 1 or 2 weeks. There’s still that societal expectation that taking care of children is the “woman’s job”, but many Japanese men who have taken parental leave have talked about how their relationship with their wives was so much better and that they felt more connected to their family. The women themselves had nothing to say but positive things, as they were able to share the housework and taking care of the newborn with their husbands as a shared experience. The majority of pressure against paternity leave tends to be from the grandparents and older people who expect the man to put his work first, and not from the new father himself. [source]

And yeah, a lot like western comic books with the underground press of the 60s and 70s, niche anime and manga (meaning not mainstream, obvs) will usually be part of a counterculture in some way. Geicomi takes a lot of inspiration from western LGBT+ counterculture of the 70s and 80s, and I know that Tagame has specifically mentioned Tom of Finland as being a big influence in the development of his art.

I’ve also talked before about the development of “kawaii culture”- and how that was essentially counterculture to the “refined” expectations of modern Japanese women, and that’s just one among many Japanese countercultures.

If you’re curious about more, I suggest looking up Superflat and Ero Guro art movements, Go Nagai (of Devilman fame), Shintaro Kago and Suehiro Maruo, gekiga and underground manga magazines from the 60s, such as Garo, or even the works of Edogawa Ranpo - many of which contained that which was called “abnormal sexuality” at the time and thus was deemed ‘grotesque’. One example was The Demon of the Lonely Isle which involved a gay doctor that was in love with one of the other main characters - something very unheard of when it was written in the 1920s! (Ranpo and his friend Junichi Iwata actually had a friendly competition on who could find the most books about erotic desire between men - Ranpo focusing on western books, and Iwata focusing on Japanese books. Iwata passed away before the ‘competition’ could be finished, so Ranpo published Iwata’s findings in his memory.)

Is your Hiroko Nagata piece your own art or some of her artwork?

That’s a piece by Suehiro Maruo from “The New Atrocities in Blood” which is a book that features lots of his artwork, as well as artwork from Kazuichi Hanawa .Here is a link to read it online. CW: Gore, Sexual Abuse.https://yande.re/pool/show/753Here is a some more about it.https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5330546-bloody-ukiyo-e-in-1866-1988