Glaeolia 1 (Paperback)

Glaeolia 1 is the first volume of our flagship indie manga anthology series GLAEOLIA. Swiftly heralded on multiple best of year lists across sites like TCJ and Solrad, Glaeolia volume 2 was subsequently awarded the 2021 Ignatz Award for Outstanding Anthology, and Glaeolia 3 was finally released earlier this year.

The book contained stories by 12 artists from the contemporary underground manga scene: Arantoochika, Hiuchi tana, Kawakatsu Tokushige, Masumura Jūshichi, mogcom, Moriizumi Takehito, Morita Rui, Okuda Akiko, Onta Niwako, Shinnosuke Saika, Yamakawa Naoto, Yosomachi, with cover artwork by Mori Masayuki.

At the time, almost all of these authors were debuting in English. For those who had already had work published in English, this was their second publication, reinforcing that the selection for this book (and the series as a whole) was oriented toward an under-examined area of comics. There is a breadth of styles, storytelling, and artistic technique on display - between the nostalgia of Okuda Akiko's Watching the House, the carefully measured, elegiac tone of mogcom's Meeting at Mandarake, and the fantastic, delicately scratchy ink-water washes of Moriizumi Takehito's Spring Has Come, there is an incredible amount of artistic imagination packed into the thin space of these ~256 pages (and this is just scratching the surface).

Glaeolia 1 was first released in June / July of 2020 with a print run of about 300 or so, and quickly sold out in a few months. Since then, there has been a quiet but consistent demand for a reprint.