Frederik Pohl passes away at 93 years old

Frederick Pohl
(1919 - 2013)
"And now who will take me to the stars 
when I sleep at night?"

• [Source: Syfy.com; by Trent Moore] After spending almost a century helping shape the genre of science fiction, legendary writer and editor Frederik Pohl, 93, passed away on Monday, September 2, 2013. He cut his teeth editing groundbreaking genre fare like Super Science Stories and Astonishing Stories in the early 1940s. He also edited Galaxy and If for most of the 1960s, along with numerous other books.
• 
  But, he’s likely best know for his original works — including the short story Day Million, the award-winning 1977 novel Gateway and his numerous collections of short stories and novellas. He leaves behind a treasure trove for sci-fi fans to rediscover, and hopefully he’ll keep inspiring for years to come.
• 
  Pohl also racked up numerous Hugo Awards, Nebula Awards, the Campbell Memorial Award and the National Book Award during his decades of work.
  

• He talked about what got him interested in science fiction in a great interview with Locus Magazine in 2009. Check out an excerpt below:
  

  “Then, some time later, someone else left one of the early copies of Astounding Stories around. That had 'Manape the Mighty' as the cover story: this King Kong-like creature doing something terrible to a girl. That led me to believe if there were two there had to be more, and I went to a second-hand magazine store and looked around and found lots of them. Then I discovered there were SF books in the public library -- not very many in the children's section, but there were some. And at 12 I discovered that one of my classmates also had one of those things, so we became fans.
  In the early days, we science fiction readers were like cellar Christians: they didn't talk to anybody else because everybody else laughed at them, but they kept running into each other. Mostly they were writing letters to each other, all over the country -- all over the world, actually. I had pen pals in France and England, although I had hardly ever been out of Brooklyn.”

  In honor of Pohl, and to show anyone who might not be familiar with his work how great he was, the following clips are of Pohl reading one of his most famous stories, with some nice editing sprinkled in to help accent his stark voice:
  

TATSUMI

A tribute to an artist who sought to make comics cinematic, Eric Khoo's animated feature TATSUMI brings the manga legend classic stories to the big screen for the first time. The North American independent label KimStim has confirmed that it will release Eric Khoo's Tatsumi film on DVD. The company will release the film on March 26 for US$29.99. The film will include the Japanese language track with English subtitles. Khoo's animated film adaptation of Yoshihiro Tatsumi's A Drifting Life autobiographical manga retells the namesake creator's struggle to make a living after World War II. Tatsumi and others began challenging normal standards of manga drawing by pioneering a nontraditional gekiga style of storytelling and art design. The film previously screened at France's Cannes film festival in the Un Certain Regard category, won the Best Animated Film award at Spain's Sitges International Fantastic Film Festival and the best film award at the Dubai International Film Festiva, and received special mention in the Winds of Asia-Middle East category at the Tokyo International Film Festival in 2011. Singapore submitted the film for consideration in the foreign-language film category for the 84th annual Academy Awards, but the film was not nominated. A Drifting Life originally shipped in Japan in November of 2008 as a two-volume series. The Canadian comic book publisher Drawn and Quarterly picked up the North American license and released the manga as a single, 840-page volume in April 2009. The manga since won two Eisner awards in 2010. Tatsumi himself was also nominated to enter the Eisner Hall of Fame that year, but was not selected. The film is currently screening in Toronto until January 25, and will also screen at the Videology theater in Brooklyn on January 26.

Keiji Nakazawa, “Barefoot Gen” Creator, dies at 73

"Barefoot Gen" manga documented his life in Hiroshima 
after the dropping of the atomic bomb in 1945

Keiji Nakazawa
(1939 - 2012)

 Spanning generations: Keiji Nakazawa, author of "Hadashi no Gen" ("Barefoot Gen"), takes in the 
view from Hiroshima's Aioibashi Bridge, where he played as a boy, in June 2008. KYODO
Keiji Nakazawa was born in Hiroshima and was in the city when it was destroyed by an atomic bomb in 1945. All of his family members who had not evacuated died as a result of the explosion after they became trapped under the debris of their house, except for his mother, as well as an infant sister who died several weeks afterward. In 1961, Nakazawa moved to Tokyo to become a full-time cartoonist, and produced short pieces for manga anthologies such as Shōnen Gaho, Shōnen King, and Bokura.

Following the death of his mother in 1966, Nakazawa returned to his memories of the destruction of Hiroshima and began to express them in his stories. Kuroi Ame ni Utarete (Struck by Black Rain), the first of a series of five books, was a fictional story of Hiroshima survivors involved in the postwar black market. Nakazawa chose to portray his own experience directly in the 1972 story Ore wa Mita, published in Monthly Shōnen Jump. The story was translated into English and published as a one-shot comic book by Educomics as I Saw It.

Immediately after completing I Saw It, Nakazawa began his major work, Hadashi no Gen (Barefoot Gen). This series, which eventually filled ten volumes, was based on the same events as I Saw It but fictionalized, with the young Gen as a stand-in for the author. Barefoot Gen depicted the bombing and its aftermath in graphic detail, with Gen's experiences being even more harrowing than Nakazawa's own. It also turned a critical eye on the militarization of Japanese society during World War II and on the sometimes abusive dynamics of the traditional family. Barefoot Gen was adapted into two animated films and a live action TV drama.

Nakazawa announced his retirement in September 2009, citing deteriorating diabetes and cataract conditions. He cancelled plans for a Barefoot Gen sequel. In September 2010, Nakazawa was diagnosed with lung cancer and in July 2011, metastasis from lung cancer was found. He died on December 19 2012.

 Mightier than the sword: An original scene for a picture book version of the comic 
series "Hadashi no Gen" ("Barefoot Gen") owned by the Hiroshima Peace 
Memorial Museum is shown in this illustration. HIROSHIMA CITY / KYODO

The Story of Tezuka Osamu

We found this wonderful website featuring the Life and Times of Tezuka Osamu, creator of Astroboy, Kimba the White Lion, and Black Jack. He is also known as the "Godfather of Anime." The website is in English with plenty of photos and facts covering not only his illustrious career in manga and anime, but his childhood upbringing and influences upon modern day animation. It's a great site if you are doing research on him. To check it out for yourself...

CLICK HERE

There also flash games available, but those are in Japanese. With some careful scrutiny, you should be able to figure out the rules for each. The game BANG! is a card matching game.  A card is drawn for you and you must match it with one of the face down cards above. You only have a few seconds to match as many as you can. It's a little more challenging than you may think.