I’ll be all over this book like a bad f’n smell! Check it out at Alt Japan. There are WAAAAYYY too few books in English that look at the various military specialists, legendary bandits and unsung shadow-heroes that are today … Continued
Dark Horse’s expanded English-language version of the Blade of the Immortal artbook we first reported on here is now out, and priced under $30! Here’s a few more fleeting glimpses: These are just details of full-page, superbly repro’d art from … Continued
The highly regarded alt-manga blog Same Hat! Same Hat! has some photos up of the amazing GARO exhibition at the Center for Book Arts in NYC. I haven’t studied up much on GARO, but it seems to me (from a … Continued
As we saw yesterday, Marvel always seemed more interested in jobbing out hundreds of ninja to the claws of Wolverine than they were in developing a lasting ninja hero of their own. There were, however, several shinobi super heroes in … Continued
As its Iron Man 2 weekend, here’s a quick look at some Marvel comics takes on ninja throughout the decades. The b&w magazine era for Marvel Comics (ala the Curtis imprint) was soooooooo f’n cool! Deadly Hands was part B&W … Continued
This kid’s book-and-record (flexi-disc that is) Sarutobi Sasuke: Ninja Shugyou (Ninja Training?) is from 1973, and I know little more than that. The art throughout its 10 cardboard pages is no great shakes – and is actually quite stiff at … Continued
Check out this impressively thorough archive of martial arts magazine covers and topics going back 50 years: Vintage Martial Arts Magazines When the titles and decades are laid out like this, you can really see the trends and transitions of … Continued
I’ve loved Hiroaki Samura‘s out-of-the-box manga Blade of the Immortal for it’s entire loooong run, but the latest volume (still coming out in trades from Dark Horse) starts a new storyline featuring some masked goons rather familiar to fans of … Continued
I was already down with owning Eric Nash‘s Manga Kamishibai: The Art of Japanese Paper Theater, a great look at the all-but-extinct art of panel-art based itinerant pop-theater. Imagine an actor gathering dozens of kids around a portable wooden box … Continued
It takes 100 ninja to properly celebrate the 100th post on Vintage Ninja! Since going live in June, enthusiastic response from readers and thousands of visits from every continent on the globe have given me a real sense of connecting … Continued