Well heaven and hell do exist in Japanese religious beliefs, though they arent the exactly the same as western heaven and hell - the Japanese just dont have angels in their religious myths like westerners do (I believe). :)

As for angels having wings... in the bible Im not sure they actually say that angels have wings, the only one who are written as having them are the seraphim - so I guess they just expanded on the idea and said angels do too. ^_^

heh, this is the last pic (i think) in my Haibane Renmei artbook... XD

btw, his first name is Yoshitoshi, a male name. ABe is his last/family name. An honest mistake though, since by Japanese addressing, his name would be "ABe Yoshitoshi". (first name last, last name first, for those who didn't know.)

And some of us prefer to call him by what in Japanese, as you pointed out, is considered to be his *first* name (i.e., some of us prefer to call him ABe and not Yoshitoshi because of the fact that, for all intents and purposes, ABe *is* his first name in Japanese culture).

Also according to Japanese culture, if you were to call him by his first name (ie Yoshitoshi), youd be considered impolite... In fact, I believe that its more proper to call artists and authors and the like sensei. :)

It's only a pen name anyway.

(His real name is Yoshiwara Abe)

Erm never thougth about his pen name and what would be his first or last. In general I refer to him as "ABe" because thats the handle he used early on on bbs and on his site. Before all this lain business and what not he was part of a EARLY CG group. Quite accessable to. Sadly shortly after the PSX release of lain the site stopped getting regular updates and much of the work was removed due to request from poineer. -_-;' If memeory serves His name was listed as Yoshitoshi ABe so go figure if that JP style or ENG style. lol Either way I loved his style then and still do.

early CG? like this?

There's been a set of his older artwork floating around on WinNY forever... I don't think it's remotely comprehensive, but here's a sample, anyhow.

I *really* like that picture.

Abe, the one time I caught him at a con said that it was largely a personal story for him and that it wasn't intended to evoke any particular religion at all. it was about something that happened in his own life that he couched in some metaphors.

Nice. I've only ever seen the DJ and the school one. I didn't know any others existed.

>>2

there are 5 total:
school uniform
street clothes
with guitar
dj
bear pajamas

ABe only did five pages for it. (I believe the images are around on one of the older pages) The rest of the doujin is very adult.. dealing with the usual cruddy underage lolicon content.. abe's stuff is really out of place in it in my opinion.

I don't suppose anyone has scans of his contribution?

I'd post it here, but the board is whining that it's already up somewhere. Will be back with link-age momentarily...

And here it is:
http://shii.oppresstheweak.com/hr/res/29.html
We either need to do spring cleaning or get some kind of search function, badly.

yeah, I bought this sight and immediately regretted so upon opening it up. couldn't even sell the damn thing on ebay, so I tossed it.

Well. Lots of stuff. He does full-blown manga, occasionally (see: NieA_7 manga, his contributions to Robot), as well as lots of independent doujinshi work (like White Rain or the Pochiyama stories). He's done character designs for several anime shows (including Serial Experiments Lain and Texhnolyze), and he's also done writing and directing for others (including Haibane-Renmei and NieA_7).

Also he just does art and design - lots of the doujins he releases are artbook/sketchbook type deals. His art is influenced by his experience with traditional Japanese painting, and he's got a fairly distinctive style, in part because he doesn't use a straight-edge in any of his drawings.

Aaand that's pretty much ABe in a nutshell. Cool art style, has worked on lots of pretty awesome and reasonably intellectual series. Unfortunately his (drawn, not animated) work isn't easy to get outside of Japan, but that's slowly changing, with nice people like DMP mirroring Wani's artbook/anthology releases in the US.

He is also the president of Japan. True story.

http://www.s-abe.or.jp/abe_top.jpg

Whatever happened to this? I remember it being slated for US publication at one point, and then it vanished.

Tokyopop had the license, and... well, they're sitting on it, it seems. I'm pretty sure that I even saw it listed under their "coming soon" titles in a copy of Planetes or GTO at some point (though unfortunately I don't have either on hand to check with).

If you don't mind it being in Japanese, it's in the uber-torrent.

>>3

I think you mean Prime Minister. Japan doesn't have a president in their government.

>>7
no, I think they know. it's a joke. I'd say "lurk moar" but it would sound lame on this board.

>>1
ABE-CHAN! STOP BROWSING THE INTERNET AND GET BACK TO WORK!

>>6

Actually, because of some problems on the Japanese (publishers going under or something like that,) NieA's in licensing hell. TPOP would like to publish it (they were actually in the middle of doing typesetting on the first volume when they found out their was a licensing problem,) but they can't. Noone can it seems for the moment.

At least one of the PAL editions came with some really nice stuff - over on Naimoka, someone posted pics of some postcards included with their set (including at least one piece of exclusive artwork). I'm not sure if that extends to the German version, but I'll check their forums to see which version was on display.

...no go, it seems to have been wiped from their forums. or my search-fu is off today.

>>2
It's the french edition.

Sorry, I can't help you for the german one. If you get nothing here, ask the publisher directly!

>>5
Thanks. I bought the collectors edition and it's exactly the same as the one in the image you posted.

>>6
Not sure if that's the same as the postcards that came with the individual DVDs in the US, but that box is a lot nicer. I just have a box that holds all four individuals; nothing fold-out like that.
The postcards are gorgeous though.

Wikipedia has him credited for doing "sketches and wallpaint" in that episode. The paintings are very important in that episode, by the way, if you haven't seen that series.

Here is the scan http://kei.iichan.net/ph/res/4031.html

How come the max file size here is set to just 1000 KB?

I thought it was changed to something bigger, but apparently not.

Up to translating anything? I got someone to look at Pochiyama 2 and it frightened him.

>>3
thank you :)

Day saved.

http://www.cronos.ne.jp/~tazim/top/b/kitune/kitunemen-top.HTML

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw/104-3831547-5963926?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=robot

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot_%28manga%29

she does have a Sadistic charm about her :)

well in the PSX version she does

>>3

Got any pics to back that up?

>>4

i would post a pic but it might spoil the PSX game for ppl

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_75cz29noE

a AMV of lain from PSX i found a while ago . you will need a youtube account since it contains blood :)

enjoy