Now Is The Winter Of Our Link Spam ('15 Edition)

Been a while since I've done one of these, yeah? I'll keep it short.

• The Comics Journal covers alternative manga as they talk about the Fukui Ei'ichi incident and the prehistory of Komaga-Gekiga. It's about Osamu Tezuka! Who, naturally, is a complicated man and manga-ka.
• For fans of cult/classic TV and film, Shout! Factory now has a free streaming service for the shows and movies it has licensed, including MST3K, The Saint, and some Roger Corman films (via Comics Worth Reading).
• A delightful read from the poetry Dreamwidth community: If Dr Seuss Were A Technical Writer by Gene Ziegler.
• For the ladies of Star Trek fandom, this 'A Woman's Place Is On The Bridge' t-shirt seems like a must have.
• Snack food has a fandom? Apparently so! Stumbled across snack food review site Taquitos, which reviews snacks from across the globe, albeit with a North American bias.
• Lastly, did someone say Space Dandy deck-building tabletop card game? Because Seven Seas and Funimation are saying just that and it looks awesome.
  
  

Kubo Tite: Writer, Artist, Poet?

A little food for thought late Friday night, in the form of a blog post by the author of the Manga Therapy blog: Tite Kubo - The Best Poet In Manga? The Poetry Of BLEACH.

In this post, the MT blog takes a close look at the poems that introduce every volume of Bleach and how they add insight into the characters they are paired with as well as the manga-ka himself. It also contains an excerpt from an interview with Kubo Tite himself, in which he talks about his poetry writing process.

MT also makes a good point about how Kubo Tite's poetry are stories, stories of the people that populate his long-running shonen series, in ways his scripts cannot:

Clever metaphors and imagery have powerful applications. Kubo’s passion for poems shows how much he is intrigued by the psychology of humanity. Individuals are filled with stories and experiences. Stories that are meant to be told. Experiences that are meant to be shared.

I've always been a great fan of the poems KT puts into his tankoubon releases of Bleach, so it's cool to find a blogger who agrees with me: Kubo's poetry deserve more love! Feel free to share your own favorite poems of his in the comment section of either this post or the original post at Manga Therapy's blog.

P.S. I think we could also make the argument that the way he titles his volumes verges on the poetic as well. Yes or no?