Special Blend #14
Long before he rocked my foundation with his amazing book of papercuts, my little Japanese pal, Ryohei Tanaka, has been making crazy art zines that can hardly contain his astronomical creative prowess. Dating back into the late 1990s, Ryohei has been self-publishing his comic strips, prints, poems, observations, sketches, found art, and writings as zines and editions. Luckily, I've been on his bandwagon from the day I met him and have been entertained by his artwork for half of my life.
During his final few years of art school in Northern California, Ryohei published a series of about 10 issues of Special Blend zine over the course of about 12 weeks. Each little zine was made from a single sheet of paper, cut and folded to make 8 action packed pages. If you ever see these anywhere, get them.
Following his graduation, he was able to snap off three more issues in the following 3 years, but these were much larger in size, page count, and ambition. These bigger issues of Special Blend featured the artwork of friends, lots of writing in both English and Japanese, and the never-ending torrent of sketches and comics coming from his own pen.
It all culminated in March of 2003 with the Special Blend art exhibit at Gallery AD in San Jose and the amazing issue #13. Then Ryohei moved back to Tokyo.
Ryohei continued his prolific creative output in Japan, release several new one-page-into-8-pages zines called Good Flat Communication and focusing on his papercut artwork and T-shirt printing. All was good.
Then, in August of 2008, Ryohei returned to the United States to participate in the epic You Only Excist Because of Us art show at Giant Robot in SF. During his two weeks preparing for the show and camping out in various couches and studios, Ryohei not only made more amazing artwork than I could in a year, he also dropped a special treat on us... Special Blend #14.
Special Blend #14 picks-up right where we left off with lots of artwork to make you jealous. There are papercuts that are even more amazing than the amazing ones from before (made even more outstanding once you have seen him cut one out in just a few minutes), caricatures from popular movies, excerpts from recent sketchbooks with drawings of family members and friends, lots of "Engrish" from Japanese packaging, and some rather twisted and disturbing comic strips involving defecation and superheros. Oh yeah, and, my personal favorite, pictures of things in the street that look life robot faces!
Ryohei only made 50 of these zines for release in the US. Most were given away or sold at the Giant Robot show, but there are still a few copies available while supplies last from us here at Rowan Morrison. Only 5 bucks. Signed by the artist. Special Blend is what zines are all about.
posted by Rowan Morrison at
2:27 PM
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