I'm MJ Munoz bringing you a little notice, a little advertisement.
Ishinomori Shatari Ishinomori's birthday is January 25th, 2025 this year.
However, Shatari Ishinomori is no longer with us.
He died.
He would have been 87 years old this year.
He died at 60 years old.
It's been 27 years since his death and interestingly enough he died January 28th which is just
a couple days after his 60th birthday which is kind of an interesting factoid.
I have been thinking a lot about Ishinomori because I have a very strong emotional attachment
to some of his work, not all of his work.
I'm not going to pretend that I've read everything.
I haven't even read all of Cyborg 009.
I haven't read all of Kikaiiter, Ori Nazuman.
I've watched a decent amount of Kamen Rider for me.
I'd like to watch more and I've read all of the Kamen Rider manga which I absolutely love.
There's so much good in the Kamen Rider manga.
I've also read Skull Man which I have a review of.
I also have a review of the official Seven Seas Go!
Ranger and the official Seven Seas Kamen Rider collections that they did which is the original
1971 Kamen Rider and the Go!
Ranger from whenever that was, 75 or something like that.
Anyway, I have reviews of both of those up on my website and on the YouTube channel and
wherever else you can get it in the podcast feed and whatnot.
But as we're coming up on Shitao Ishinomori's first anniversary, 87 years, I decided I'll
go ahead and check out some things of Ishinomori because I again have been thinking about him
a lot recently for various reasons, mostly because of my own creative work that I'm doing,
the creative projects that I'm doing.
And I decided I'm going to put a little thing out for people to say, hey, you know what,
why don't you read something from Shitao Ishinomori?
Why don't you, yeah, why don't you read something that he wrote or watch the, I think it's the
Scissors Jaguar episode, no, Scissors Jaguar is from V3.
Anyway, there's a specific episode that I know like Iggy Devil from a long time ago,
Paul, had suggested that people check out.
Ishinomori is, I think he's the director of the episode of Kamen Riders, like episode
78 or something like that.
You can look it up on a wiki, I'm sure.
You can watch that.
I think he makes an appearance in it or you can go ahead and read some of his officially
released manga or you can read some of his unofficially released manga, whatever you
want to do.
But just to kind of tap into and tune into the wavelength of the, and the frequency of
this genius mangaka, I really do think that the manga, the Go!
Ranger manga, the Kamen Rider manga are wonderful.
They do have their flaws.
There are imperfect things in there that either because I'm not Japanese or because he made
me messed up and you know, it may sound ridiculous and it may sound like cope, but I'm suggesting
those two things as reasons.
There were some things in the manga, panel to panel, in some areas that I just didn't
understand and connect with, didn't make sense to me, didn't like, honestly, and thought
like, hey, why'd you do that?
You wasted time and energy drawing this cityscape or whatever, as opposed to just giving me
more story.
And the thing is, I'm into the stories I enjoy, the media I enjoy, because I love the stories.
And I do think there's a deep, beautiful, emotional story in Kamen Rider, in Go!
Ranger, to a lesser extent in Skullman, mostly because I think that's just so nihilistic,
although I do want to revisit that this year.
I'm actually, I pulled it up, I had bought the Skullman when the comicsology was still
a thing, and now it's just ported over to my Kindle store, so I have Skullman.
I'd like to read that and revisit it this year for sure.
But also, this isn't something that Ishinomori made, but it's something about his creative
process, and I'm hoping to get some insight into him and the other people who made Kamen
Rider, which is by checking out The Men Who Made Kamen Rider, which is a, I think it's
a pretty short, like 50 or so page, one-shot manga.
And I'm definitely interested in checking that out this year, because I just kind of
want to get a little closer to the old man, get a little closer to Ishinomori and get
a little more insight into what he was doing when he was creating Kamen Rider, what he
was thinking when he was creating Skullman.
I knew that Crossfire is kind of like an in-between design thing, which is something that actually
got rolled into the Shin Kamen Rider manga, which is the Shocker manga, really, which
I can't remember what, it's like the ugly world or something like that.
Anyway, but there's a Shin Kamen Rider prequel manga that seems really fabulous, and I just
haven't checked it out enough, but Crossfire ends up being in there, which is pretty cool.
Anyway, I'm talking about early pre-Kamen Rider stuff, because when, I think it was
Toei or maybe it was just TV Asahi at the time, when they wanted this Tokusatsu show,
they went to Ishinomori because I believe he had done some designs for some other stuff,
and they liked his design work.
I'm sure they liked him as a mangaka, but they liked other TV design work that he'd
done, so they went to him again.
And then he, as I understand it, he upcycled Skullman into Kamen Rider and just made it
a different thing and gave it kind of a different flair, but you can see some of the bones there
of Skullman in Kamen Rider.
And anyway, yeah, so I thought it hit me, like, I should check that out and see if it's
available, and sure enough, it is available.
There's a scanlation of it, so I'm going to be, I'd like to read that, I'd like to read
Skullman.
I'm going to kind of review and talk about both of them, because I think that doing that,
taking a second pass at Skullman will help me for my creative projects that I'm doing
on my own, because I basically, through a convoluted bunch of stuff I won't tell you
about right now, I've decided to look at Skullman and think about Skullman for a little while
and consider kind of doing my own not Skullman, and maybe even an old, my own not Skullman
literary universe of Tokusatsu Heroes, Henshin Heroes, and I think that could be pretty
cool, I think there's a lot of good, I think there's a lot of merit to that idea, and it's
something I'm planning to explore, but I thought, you know, while I'm doing that, let me just
check out Skullman itself and see what it's like, and it's, that project is actually something
I was thinking about, because I was thinking, ah, I want to do something, do a short story
or something, as like an homage to Isshin Amori, because the man created so much stuff.
I don't know about any beef he had with people, I don't think he was like a spiteful person,
I don't really know much about him as a person other than what he put into his stories, and
I definitely think he was an interesting guy, but something important about him is that
he was a man who focused on work, whether it's because he desperately needed the money,
or because he just loved the work, I think it was definitely rooted in his love for the
work, in drawing and writing stories that captivated people, I think that's, you know,
I think that was core to his prolific-ness, yeah, his prolific-ness as a writer, or as
a manga artist, which is why he has the, what is it, the God of Manga award that he was
given, or the title that he was given, and I just admire his ability to work so fast
and to work so hard and to do so much, and I thought, you know, maybe I should write
a short story, like a one-shot kind of deal, kind of homaging his work, maybe with some
of my work, and then the more I thought about it, I thought, you know, maybe I should do
a little something else, a little something a little more expansive, and I realized I'm
not going to have time to do everything I'd want to do to honor him and to say thank you
to him for his work, which has impacted me deeply, which the real thing that impacts
me about GoRanger and more specifically Kamen Rider, and maybe there's a little bit of something
there in Skullman, especially with the notes that he gave to have the Skullman reboot done,
is the finding redemption, like no matter all the dark things you've done, no matter
all the bad things you've done in your life, there is a path to redemption, and you can
do it, and you can do good even if you're unworthy, even if you're not a good person,
you can do good and make a difference in the world, and I think that beautiful core message
is what's at the heart of Kamen Rider specifically, and it's part of what draws me to it so dearly,
so neatly, so keenly, I don't know how to say that, but I'm very drawn to Kamen Rider
and the ideas within it, because not only is it his pursuit of justice, but it's also
his reclaiming of his humanity that's beautiful to me, and I feel like I should be a better
person than I am, and I feel like Kamen Rider gives me the permission to keep trying to
be that better person even though I fail, because well, that's who I am for now.
Anyway, so I encourage you to please read something by Shitaru Ishimori.
He's a great manga car, great storyteller, there's beautiful messages in his work, and
they are spectacular to look at and to behold as a visual medium, and so I plan on doing
that, and before I did that, I wanted to invite you to do the same, and anyway, yeah.
This is MJ, I just wanted to make it clear real quick that I did in fact read Skullman
again, and I have a re-review that I made.
I say it's short, but it's actually closer to 20 minutes long, which is fine, and then
I also read and kind of did a review of chapter one of The Men Who Made Kamen Rider.
I don't know if there's actually a chapter two, which I talked about in that review,
so I won't talk about it here anymore, but just letting you know, I did end up doing
some reading, and I'm going to get those out.
These will probably all come out on the same day because of time constraints, but I'll
kind of space them out, and hopefully folks check them out, and they check out at least
some of Ishimori's work, but yeah, definitely Skullman is a hard recommend, and so is The
Men Who Made Kamen Rider.
It's really interesting, really fascinating.
Check out his work, and I encourage you to stick around because I plan on making more
and getting back into the swing of things.
I had some family medical issues to deal with that kept me away from making my regular Tokusatsu
review content, and I hope that now that that's over, or forever, much at the end of it, that
I will get back into the swing of that, and I will get back to writing my own projects
because I feel the need, I feel the drive to create, and when I'm not writing and creating
stories it hurts me somewhere in my soul, and I feel a kinship with Ishimori because
I think he probably felt the same way about his manga.
Anyway, that's all I have to say for now.
Check out everything I have going on.
Go to MJWinters.com to keep up with me, and you can even check out GrowBugs.com for some
information about my middle grade novel that I'm working on.
You can sign up for the newsletter and find out updates on the book, find out little insights
about what it's about, and also find out when it's going to come out, and you can preorder
and all that good stuff and help me get this book going because it'd be really great.
Thank you so much for your time and attention, folks.
Take care.
I'll see you next time.