Some recent additions to the ol' book collection:
Pen Magazine is a popular men's life-style magazines in Japan. So during the summer last year when the LP film was released, they dedicated an entire issue to Godzilla. To be honest, I think the contents in this particular issue of Pen is on par (and in some cases better) than some of the Godzilla books released last year, so this magazine really surprised me. Besides covering the 2014 film, they covered all 28 of the TOHO films, movie posters, a kaiju encyclopedia profile all of the TOHO kaiju that appeared in a G film, a nice little map outline of cities/sites trampled by Godzilla and co. throughout the series, and a surprisingly extensive section covering all of the various mecha/vehicles.. Even Bob Eggleton is featured with some of his IDW work.
This book was originally released back in 2010, but was reprinted this past January in light to Kawakita's recent passing. This book is very text heavy and not for everyone. However, the few stills that are scattered throughout the book are very interesting, with quite a few rare stills of Kawakita on the sets of Showa films from
Matango to
GvsMG cutting his teeth under Tsuburaya and Nakano. Also included are some stills of the likes of James Cameron, Steven Spielberg, Tim Burton, and Roland Emmerich (yes, that last one was not a typo) visiting TOHO studios. I'm not the biggest fan of Kawakita, but this book seems a lot more deeper than most Kawakita-focused books that focus almost exclusively on his Heisei series work.
This just came about 2 months ago and as the title suggest, is a photo book dedicated to everyone's favorite ass-kicking karate babe Yuriko Hishimi (aka Momagon) from
GvsGigan and
Ultra-Seven. Actually, there weren't many stills from this book that I could show here, for as one might guess, it's filled with a lot of...um...shall we say "natural, artistic" photo shoots she did between 1967-73. Let's just say that she's a very lovely woman.
Overall, a nice photo book of an actress who often gets lost in the shuffle with the likes Kumi Mizuno, Mie Hama, Akiko Wakabayashi, Tomoko Ai and overlooked for her contributions to the tokusatsu genre.