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Anywhere but Here by Tori Miki β€” book cover

Anywhere but Here

by Tori Miki
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Overview

The American debut of one of Japan's most distinctive humorous voices.

Tori Miki has won awards for his essays, screenplays and manga, including the prestigious Bunshun Manga Award. With four best-selling volumes released to date, the comic strip series Anywhere But Here is one of his greatest successes.

Running weekly in Japan's TV Bros, a respected magazine of television and media criticism, Anywhere But Here is a wordless comic strip that could perhaps best be described as "Monty Python meets The Far Side meets Zen humor." Miki's unnamed lead character (modeled after himself) works as a bookstore owner but somehow finds himself entangled with aliens, alternate realities, and other mysterious disturbances in the space-time continuum.

Like Gary Larson's The Far Side, Anywhere But Here is can leave you scratching your head in bemusement almost as often as it makes you laugh, but we've selected the very best of his first two volumes for this special collection, printed in an elegant two-color edition.

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Editorials

Publishers Weekly

Miki is a renowned Japanese cartoonist and writer who specializes in the kind of scratch-your-head-and-laugh humor popularized in comics like Nancy and The Far Side. His unnamed protagonist is a squat little bookstore clerk of blank expression and deadpan movements. Each adventure occurs in just nine well-paced panels on a single page. The strips always begin with a simple premise: the man walking, fishing, talking or looking, and then, around panel six or seven, a surreal twist takes shape, revealing itself in the very last panel for maximum effect. Each development is wonderfully hallucinatory and inventive-never monotonous or predictable. Miki's patient, steady storytelling is well suited to his quirky artwork, which looks a little like manga around the eyes, but thereafter departs into his own seductively simple-looking cartoon language. With minimal tools, Miki portrays all sorts of expressions and atmospheres in his vignettes. Characters' limbs elongate, deform and are cut off-others turn into objects, and still others are monstrous looking. Miki treats them all the same, his poker-faced humor evident in every line. (Apr.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Book Details

Published
May 1, 2005
Publisher
Fantagraphics
Pages
96
Format
Paperback
ISBN
9781560976301

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