>Hugz<

Ramunne Ikki(ラムネイッキ) is a now out-of-print short stories compilation of Sansuke Yamada(山田参助). Some of his previous works are newly published by major publishers after he got more famous after his Areyo Hoshikuzo . But this one is not yet. Ramune refers a bottled lemonade widely sold throughout Japan. Ikki means "at once" or in this context, "bottoms up," I guess. The book is described as "hard cover" in Amazon Japan. And one of the customers reviewed that "cover is not the only thing that is hard..." Maybe Japaneses also refer something extreme as "hard" as Koreans do. This is how "Ramune" looks like. By the way, I want the book so badly. Maybe Mr. Yamada re-release the book.

Recently I had a chance to read some of Howard Cruse's works. He is renowned for his work, Stuck Rubber Baby , but instead, I grabbed From Headrack to Claude , thinking short stories would be easier to understand, which turned out to be a huge mistake. The stories were somewhat hard to get it. I didn't know where to laugh and why the stories went that way.. I found some hard time to relate to the stories. Anyway, it was a pleasure to see each frame. He used dots to express shades and it could have taken some time, I suppose. Unique. This time, I am thinking of trying Wendel, one of his comic strip series.