After a customarily long week in the real world, I always find it a little difficult to develop content on Fridays. To give myself a regular, relatively undemanding Friday project, I’m instituting License Request Day! (And since I’ve hidden the categories under a drop-down menu, it won’t make the sidebar any more ungainly. Bonus!)
This week’s choice is Daisuke Igarashi’s Witches.
Viz is about to publish Igarashi’s Children of the Sea in its Signature imprint, so I thought to myself, “Why not strike while the iron’s hot?” It was originally serialized in Ikki, one of Viz co-owner Shogakukan’s mangazines. Witches received the Excellence Prize at the 2004 Japan Media Arts Festival. The book has been published in French as Sorcières (Casterman). It was an Official Selection of the 2007 Angoulême Festival. Here’s the description from the festival catalog:
“Considered to be one of the best newcomers in Japan, Daisuke Igarashi is the high priest of Nature and its mysteries. In parallel to his comic activity, he has also been a farmer for several years… Be they kindly or fiendish, Igarashi’s witches are the guardians of an ancestral truth that is jeopardized by contemporary civilization. Spiritually close to Kenji Miyazawa’s poems, these collected stories distinguish by their graphic power and the strong animistic beliefs of their author.”
You can get a taste of Igarashi’s work in Fanfare/Ponent Mon’s Japan as Viewed by 17 Creators, which you should all want to read anyway.
Sample images:
Got a suggestion or a request of your own? I’ll be happy to post guest requests on future Fridays, so keep it in mind, and contact me if you’ve got an urgent item on your own wish list.
Posted by davidpwelsh 
The Manga Curmudgeon 