Uncivilized Books

Creative Team

• A/W/CAHideko Mizuno

Description

Fire! follows the meteoric rise and fall of Aaron Browning, a troubled and poor Ohio teenager. In juvenile detention, Aaron meets the magnetic delinquent Fire Wolf—a motorcycle-riding rebel with an extraordinary musical talent. Their intense bond awakens a fiery passion for music in Aaron. Aaron moves to Detroit’s gritty factories and underground scene, where he forms the band Fire! to channel his emotions, rebellion, and raw energy. As fame explodes, he plunges into the era’s excesses—sex, drugs, rock ’n’ roll, Vietnam-era shadows—embodying the intoxicating yet destructive pursuit of freedom. Fire! immerses the reader in the turbulent late 1960s. A fascinating peek at the vibrant American rock music scene of the time. Aaron, inspired by Scott Walker, blazes across the pages, colliding with iconic personalities and legendary bands of the era. The collection also includes a short comic on Pink Floyd. Created by Hideko Mizuno, a trailblazing shojo pioneer mentored by Osamu Tezuka and a Tokiwa-so resident, Fire! broke new ground: one of the first shojo series with a male lead, featuring sex scenes that challenged post-WWII taboos and explored mature themes of desire, identity, and countercultural rebellion. Inspired by Scott Walker, Aaron is a flawed, hedonistic, and charismatic anti-hero. Fire! in English is long overdue. Classic shojo manga has been almost entirely absent from the English localization wave of the last two decades — a blind spot that has left anglophone readers without access to key works that shaped the medium. Mizuno is the acknowledged forerunner of the Year 24 Group. The artists — Moto Hagio, Keiko Takemiya, Riyoko Ikeda — are already familiar to all American Manga fans. Fire! is the missing ancestor.

Creative Team

• A/W/CATokunami Seiichiro

Description

“Papa, mama, please don’t be surprised. A year ago, my organs were replaced with gears and springs…” Tadashi is the lone son of a watchmaker. Clocks are his only friends. Ever since a nightmarish bicycle accident, he fears going to school. So, his parents hire him a special tutor—not a man, but a mustachioed pocket watch. He, too, fails to improve Tadashi’s grades, though he gifts him a magical wristwatch capable of transporting its wearer to a frighteningly surreal land of clock people. As the automatons begin to turn on their makers, Tadashi decides that it’s best to abandon his uneasy humanity and bestow his soul to the ticktocks. Originally published in 1962, Tokunami Seiichiro’s HUMAN CLOCK has no peer or parallel in manga history. Years before it was acceptable to be abstract and oneiric in Japanese comics, years before it was common to cartoon in an artistic manner that privileged form over function, Tokunami was expressionistically slashing through panels in a Kafka-esque fever dream of jagged and melting imagery. Including an equally weird second story, THE CAT’S MOURNING CLOTHES, and an essay by subculturalist Udagawa Takeo, HUMAN CLOCK is the ninth volume of SMUDGE, a line of vintage horror, occult, and dark fantasy manga curated and translated by award-winning historian Ryan Holmberg and published by Living the Line