Update on the Miyazaki Comics - More to Come

I wanted to post a short follow-up on the Miyazaki comics that were posted this weekend. For whatever reasons, most likely my lack of recent posts, I decided I would just dump everything that's sitting on my computer and share them with everyone. This is something I was probably planning to do more slowly, one at a a time, but these things always run away from you, and real life intervenes. So that's why we're seeing so much at once.

I should also say that I'm not finished. There are still several more comics to share with you, and it's only the stubbornness of Blogger that has kept me back. This is also, by the way, the reason I threw up Heidi...which then led to one of my rambling commentaries. Yadda yadda.

So, anyway, here's what's on deck for the Ghibli blog. I have some pages from the newspaper comics version of Toei's Puss in Boots and Animal Treasure Island. These comics, of course, were drawn by Miyazaki. These are the earliest Miyazaki comics I've yet discovered on the internet.

Next up is the 1969-70 adventure manga People of the Desert. I've mentioned it before once or twice here on the blog, just to point out one of the riffs (the hero's sidekick returns in '74 as Heidi's friend Peter). It's a fairly long saga, a little over two dozen pages...which are very, very wide. The web page that originally posted these (from many years ago) included a translation of the text, so I'll probably be best served by posting in installments.

Stuck on my draft file is another gem in Miyazaki's canon, a 15-page short story called The Return of Hans. It's watercolor and appears alike other comics like the Porco Rosso one and Air Meal. It tells the story of a young spectalced pig (of course) who tries to sneak his tank crew back home across enemy lines in WWII. He picks up a small family, including our beloved Heroine. They are mistakenly attacked by the Americans, they are chased by the Nazis, and they eventually wind up carrying an entire small town. It's great fun.

Finally, there's Miyazaki's most recent work, a watercolor comic that appeared in a recent reprint of Robert Westall's "Blackham's Wimpy." I've mentioned that one before on the blog, too, and I finally found a full translation, which I'm sure you'll enjoy. It's very multi-dimensional and rich and deep, and concludes with the master filmmaker speaking with the author he so admired. The two never met in life (Westall died a number of years ago), so this is an imagined meeting between the two. I think it's as touching and honest as Miyazaki's best work.

Let's see...there still is another one of his books, a minor work called Shuna's Journey. This full-color manga was written in the early '80s, around the time Nausicaa had begun, and works along a parallel theme. Many of its elements would be absorbed into the Nausicaa universe. Goro Miyazaki...sigh...well, let's just say he stole from this work in his lousy movie. I don't have the entire story, so I'll have to dig around and see if I can track that down before posting. We'll keep our fingers crossed.

Oh, and somewhere along the line I'm supposed to keep posting videos. I really want to get through Lupin III in a timely fashion, then start seriously getting to work on one of the other shows. Maybe Conan, maybe Anne. But we'll make a serious effort at getting to the bottom of things.