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The Mike Toole Show - Manga in the USA

Multiple repeated grafs: "In that same month…", "If you jump just one year…", etc.

Strange. Should be fixed now.

While the first printing of Gen of Hiroshima # 1 sold out, this just made it harder to shift copies of #2 - and despite receiving notable critical acclaim and, bizarrely, an angry rant from Virginia Congressman Thomas J. Bliley, who'd seen the comic and wrongly assumed it was made for schoolchildren, I Saw It! didn't sell enough to break even.

It is too important to leave behind.

Historical manga epics are well-loved nowadays, but Kamui was one of the first that really carried cultural cachet (it was the first serialized story to appear in Japan's trendsetting Garo manga magazine) and had a story that mixed fearless social criticism with its tales of ninja derring-do. Viz's release featured beautiful, more modern-looking color covers by Shirato and his studio, and they did take the series into book form in reprints, but the vast majority of the voluminous 23-book series remains unreleased in English.

Also, weren't those Kamai floppies (as well as Area 88 and Mai) first adapted by Studio Proteus and published by Eclipse Comics rather than by Viz (who did the later collected editions)? Or were they a joint venture by Viz and Eclipse? None of the Eclipse manga I own mentions Viz anywhere but I only have the trades of those first three titles so I'm not sure.

[...] despite receiving notable critical acclaim and, bizarrely, an angry rant from Virginia Congressman Thomas J. Bliley, who'd seen the comic and wrongly assumed it was made for schoolchildren[...].

As this topic has to do with "[...] eliminat[ing] the threat of any further use of nuclear weapons", I was interested in more historical context. It seems in line with some of the idiocy that the current version of the GOP spouts, both in attitude and factual accuracy, and having a historical reference point - regardless of what the context was - is helpful in any number of ways.

I am hoping you'd be kind enough to post links or point me to where I can read more about his rant. [....].

Thomas Bliley's comments can be found in the transcript of the Hearings "Children’s Fears of Wars. Youth and Families. United States Congress House Select Committee on Children. 1984, page 134."

I did not find his comments "bizarre" and when I read them, I did not interpret his tone as "angry." One might guess that having a comic book that I had published singled out for criticism in this very public way formed a memorable part of my history as a publisher, and it did… twenty-three years later when, to my complete astonishment, I discovered his testimony for the first time while “ego-surfing” on the web. No one had told me about it.