SHUEISHA Inc. All rights reserved.
A Bugler is an entity that can absorb matter through the holes in their hands and fuse with it. The Biorg Trinity depicts a world where such beings are encountered in everyday life. One of the heroines, Kiwako Imoto, is a Bugler who has fused with a motorcycle.
The motorcycle is depicted with its streamlined cover, hubless wheels, and a straight frame. The design is futuristic. With her goggles on and hair wrapped around her neck like a scarf, Kiwako outstretches her arms with her hands firmly on the bullhorn handlebars, her fingers resting lightly on the brake lever to the left.
In contrast to the smooth geometric lines, the hand-drawn sound effects are expressed with roughly drawn text, indicating that the motorcycle has an engine with an insane amount of horsepower, transmitting heavy vibrations throughout Kiwako's body.
The soft, warm body of a woman is contrasted with the hard metal of the motorcycle. This is a common theme that Oh! Great likes to include in his illustrations. But here he adds both speed and time.
Biorg Trinity is a unique Japanese manga in that much of the dialogue in the speech bubbles is laid out horizontally, while the pages are turned from right to left, in standard manga style. Thus, frames flow from right to left, and time flows from right to left.
After a large frame depicting Kiwako's entire body and motorcycle from diagonally above and in front, followed by a close-up of her face, the vertically cropped frame switches to a shot from behind. The ground is drawn geometrically, with pillars of light in the sky. As Kiwako approaches the horizon, she appears to be sitting still instead of speeding. In the following frame, only speed lines can be seen. Nothing is drawn in the next two frames depicting the passage of time.
The motorcycle must have been roaring as it speeds along, but time stands still, and the space that must have been real has now become abstract, and even abstract time and space seems to fade into the distance.
We have chosen this specific scene for our first opportunity to produce a work of art by Oh!great on a large flatbed letterpress. It is a scene where a soft female body, a hard machine, and roughly drawn sound effects all coexist.
To achieve both delicacy and impact, the screentone sections were separated and offset printed, and lines were printed with a letterpress. The patterns and lines have been produced using two different printing methods on Gmund Cotton Max White, a fine art paper made of 100% cotton.
The word "metaverse" has been in the spotlight again, and the Biorg Trinity is a work that transverses, destroys and recombines multiple metaverses. The excitement of this scene heralds the emergence of a new horizon, a new black hole.
Signature on the print (handwritten)
Due to the nature of the cotton paper, small black spots may be seen in the work. In addition, subtle color irregularities and small ink droplets may be present as a result of the letterpress printing process. Please be aware of this when applying.
Oh!great made his debut in 1995 with SEPTEMBER KISS, which appeared in Manga Hot Milk (Byakuya-Shobo).
He has serialized Tenjho Tenge and Biorg Trinity (co-created with Otaro Maijo) in Ultra Jump (Shueisha), and Air Gear in Weekly Shonen Magazine (Kodansha). He won the 30th Kodansha Manga Award in the shonen category for Air Gear.
He has also designed numerous characters for anime and games. He is currently serializing Bakemonogatari (original story by Ishin Nishio) in Weekly Shonen Magazine.
The Bio Bug is a disease that causes holes to appear in both palms and allows people to inhale and fuse with whatever they want. Featuring an ensemble of characters, the series is a coming-of-age drama set in a world with a fragile balance. It's a challenging work jointly created by the novelist Otaro Maijo and Oh!great with the aim of making a novel in the form of manga, rather than the manga version of a novel.
活版平台印刷
Since its inception, the black and white storytelling medium known as manga has been produced by the letterpress, the most primitive method of printing. Even today, Shonen Jump and other manga magazines are created using the letterpress rotary printing method commonly known as katsurin.
Letterpress printing is an old-style printing method in which ink adhered to a printing resin plate is transferred by directly pressing the plate onto the paper. The way manga is drawn has evolved to accommodate this method of printing.
One good example is the text. The standard typeface used in manga is called "Anti-Gothi." It is a combination of a sans-serif typeface (often called "Gothic" in Japan) for kanji characters and a serif typeface (Ming) for hiragana and katakana. It is said that this typeface was chosen in the early days of manga production, when they were printed by letterpress, so as not to compromise readability (see Idea, Issue 336, 2009, Seibundo-Shinkosha.) Screen tones also developed with the use of design materials to imitate the gray and other form patterns using letterpresses, which are not capable of printing in gray.
While rotary letterpress printing can only be used with huge rolls of recycled paper for mass production, a flatbed letterpress is capable of printing on a variety of types of paper. Flatbed letterpress machines were employed all over Japan, including in Tokyo, but they have been replaced by offset printing presses, there are only a few large flatbed letterpress machines to be found.
Is it possible to take manga, which has always been a medium optimized for letterpress, and turn it into artworks using the highest possible quality of letterpress? This was the question we wanted to answer.
Using a letterpress machine, the artwork is created using extremely strong pressure on a paper. This creates a unique surface with a physical impact that is impossible to achieve using offset, lithographic, or silkscreen printing. When you touch it, you can see that the printed surface is concave.
The aim of us is to pass on not only compelling manga artwork, but also the printing technology used by rare printing presses to future generations.
Tsutatomo Printing Co., Ltd. (Nagano) Tokyo Letterpress (Kagurazaka) Nikkodo (Asakusa)