Saturday, January 17, 2009

Desert Punk

When the Desert Punk is mentioned, it's not a troubled youth.  It's a Japanese comic book that was later turned into a TV series.

Desert Punk

The comic book form of Manga goes back a long way, but the modern style started at the end of World War II.  In Japan it's not just a kids thing.  There are such komikku (another word for Manga or comic) for subjects from fantasy and science fiction to sexuality and even business.  Manga books look like phone books, presenting individual episodes in a number of series like Desert Punk.  American comics that copy the Manga style are called Amerimanga.

Desert Punk

Anime dates back to 1917 in the earliest days of European and American cartoons being copied by Japanese.  In the first one a one of theis a samurai suffered defeat at the hands of a practice dummy.  Anime grew in popularity in Japan far beyond the popularity of animation in America because the live film industry in Japan was somewhat stifled by budgets and a lack of non-Japanese looking actors.  Many creative people express their ideas through the cartoon style Anime.  Manga that become popular are generally turned into Anime.  Many of these Anime series make their way to America where they are edited and dubbed into English.  FUNimation does much of this translation work.

Kanta Mizuno  is the main character of Desert Punk.  He's a handyman in post-apocalyptic Japan.  At 17, he's a member of a guild of handyman, and his reputation is he always gets the job done.  He is sex crazed, crude, but very skilled and diligent in his tasks.

Don't be fooled by the term “handyman.”.  Desert Punk, also known as the Demon of the Desert, doesn't go around fixing things in people's homes.  He fixes things by eliminating people.  But like a typical handyman, he has all the right tools.  Take his winch, for instance, which is used to pull him up to high places.  But his enemies often fail to see the winch.  They believe he can fly.

Desert Punk

Check out Desert Punk today.

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