Screw-Style by Yoshiharu Tsuge

The above image comes from The Crib Sheet, yet another fantastic comics blog that I found through Journalista tipping me off to another Tsuge enthusiast. Domingos Isabelinho is a fantastic scholar of the medium, and a remarkable connoisseur. The typographic images found below come from him as well, and quickly helped me wipe off that feeling of profound disgust and disappointment that arose from an atrocious design course that I struggled through this (just today finished) semester, taught by an utterly vapid and boring fool that perfectly personifies how design is taught, particularly to those that are presumed to know no better. But hey... fuck that guy and his truly terrible lack of artistic ambition. I may die in poverty, but at least I'll know that I had taste!

What was I talking about? Oh yeah, the Hugo Pratt/Héctor Oesterheld page above. I wanted to point it out in relation to a conversation that Jon and I have been having for quite a while now as perhaps exactly the type of sequence and clarity that we're missing so often in today's hyperactive, super frenetic action sequences that are becoming the accepted standard of basically every big-budget Hollywood film that sells itself on its preposterously indecipherable action. In fact, señor black-shirt above even resembles Daniel Craig a bit. Odd that. And for just a smidge more synchronicity to push us into the realm of the truly bizarre, apparently Jon and Domingos know one another from some previous forum discussions on The Comics Journal site.

I think no one knows what the fuck I'm talking about anymore. Regardless, I'm hoping that my failure to provide a better, more comprehensive Tsuge appreciation post a little while ago can be offset by my providing the entirety of one of his most highly regarded strips, Screw-Style, discovered from a link provided by Domingos. Of course, you'll have to put in the work to open each of the 21 images in a separate tab and either read them there, or save each and read them in whatever piece of software you prefer. However, I trust that none of my readers will crush my enthusiasm by griping about such petty inconveniences in the face of a classic strip that English language readers are blessed to have access to (in addition to the three great strips made available by Kotonoha that I linked to previously).

It's an odd paradox of the times we're in. We have access to more free, fantastic art than we could ever find time to appreciate. Does anyone else find themselves almost resentful when someone tries to give us something? No, not something... that's too vague. As an example, I gave a friend a radio show I did last night for WHFR that you can bet I'll provide here for download once it's available. But it was an hour. One hour of music. And she turned around and put 30 albums on my portable hard drive. What am I supposed to do with that?


I guess what I'm trying to say is that I want, if you're giving me something, recommending something, I want you to love it intensely. I want you to obsess about it, for it to be all that you could think about for a while until you figured out why and that I need to see/hear/read this one part, because it changed your life a little, just a little, right here. See?

I think this one is finished. Games updates certainly pending. And I'm working on a best of '08 list, which is simply ludicrous since it will just be things I liked in '08, but it's my site and it sounds somehow fun. I like lists. Hopefully you do as well.