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
Takao Saito, best known as creator of Golgo 13, was also responsible for two ninja manga: Kage Gari in the 70’s (the Shadow Hunters, which also spawned two films), and Zanpei Kumotori in the 80’s. The latter featured a Connery-esque … Continued
And a few more awesome sonosheet sets from Japanese eBay: See more of these 70’s Flexi-Discs, in all genres, at the great Pink Tentacle blog.
It’s not that you can’t win auctions over international eBorders, but it’s a bit logistically tough – there’s the kanji barrier, shipping rates, communication delays over the dateline, etc. and so forth. All these are excuses enough to keep me … Continued