Friday, October 16, 2009

Kiba Kouichi gets screwed again

Many years ago, I randomly picked up a weird looking manga called Mariogun: The End of Violence. The content utterly blew my mind. The scale of the story was unhinged in a way unseen since Devilman stopped being about monsters fighting and started depicting the fall of man. From page one. In fact, it seems to have been so unhinged that the author himself failed to complete the series, plans for a second volume were scrapped, and his career has never recovered. He has released one volume of short stories in the last seven years. But even before that, his career was a scrappy one; a four volume early hit, a two volume book he wrote but did not drawn and which I've never been able to find, a fantastic chunky one volume about a man who dives Psychonauts style into the memories of objects, and several series that were killed so fast they never made it to trades.
After a long time spent working on a novel, apparently, Kiba Kouichi finally started up a new series earlier this year, in Kodansha's Michao online magazine. Which promptly got itself shut down. Apparently while he was busy drawing chapter three.
King Gonta's awesome Fire King was also in that misbegotten magazine, and I've yet to find out whether it will survive the premature death, but Kiba's blog post on the issue makes it pretty clear that his series is stone dead, and will not be continued. I hope someone wakes up and realizes that this is a man who deserves to be working, but each time he gets screwed over my hopes dim.

2 comments:

  1. That's a shame. KILICO was great shit.

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  2. There's a lot of great authors that have scrappy careers in manga and he is one of few really great ones. Shit.

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