Urban legend says that toilets flush backwards in Australia. This is correct, but slightly mis-aimed – move the location a few thousand kilometers north to Japan and change “toilets” to “comic adaptations”. In the west, film adaptations tend to be worse than the books they’re based on. In Japan, anime films tend to be better than the comics they’re based on.

Shut your piehole. I have history on my side.

Tony Tanazaki’s Genocyber manga was a confused melange of ideas jacked from Blade Runner. Under the direction of Koichi Ohata it became a series of stylish, brutal anime OVAs. Masamune Shirow’s Ghost in the Shell manga was a futuristic counter-terrorism story that happened to tackle some philosophical master/puppet stuff. The movie stripped away much of the uninteresting police crap and showcased the existential climax as the story’s principle feature. Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira manga was a sprawling, unfocused sci-fi epic of tree-massacring length. The film incarnation burned away all the unnecessary additives, turning 2200 pages of comic into an efficient two hour film.

OVAs and anime adaptations have a good track record.

Why? I have some theories. Jews. Illuminati. The fact that manga are traditionally made in a high-pressure sweat shop atmosphere where the deadline is king, while animated movies are so expensive and slow that you can’t afford not to have everything planned out properly. Hollywood hates creativity, and I’m sure the anime industry does as well. The difference is that the manga industry hates creativity even more, so the effect of an anime adaptation is a net improvement.

So what potentially amazing anime adaptations are we missing out on? How would they be different?

Iqura Sugimoto’s Variante comes to mind. It’s action packed. It has an appealing moe heroine. “Everyman who fuses with a monster” is a hopelessly cliche’d premise, but if they could reproduce the manga’s murky groping-in-the-dark-for-answers atmosphere it could work.

Kazuo Umezu’s The Drifting Classroom is another. There was a low budget live action version, but we’ll forget that. We need Akira treatment on this one. It’s a powerful story, but there’s way too much going on in it. A stripped down version with some of the more bizarre subplots removed (like the dreaming kid) would be something to see.

Junji Ito’s Uzumaki might work as a manga. Again, there’s some arcs that could be cut while preserving the integrity of the work.

Hideo Yamamoto’s Homunculus is a disturbing and bold manga that really needs to be adapted in some way. But Satoshi Kon was probably the only guy who could do it justice, and now he’s dead.

“If you want to shine like the sun, first you have to burn like it.”
– Adolf Hitler

“He was marooned in the jaws of a human minefield, and with every step the noose grew tighter.”
– Paul and Anthony Cuneo, quoting sports columnist Jerry Izenberg in the New Jersey Star Ledger

“I am pleased to announce that, although attitudes have improved immensely, the beatings will continue.”
– M. Boots

“When I was a kid I found a pocket dictionary that defined ‘bucket’ as ‘pail’ and vice-versa and realized that no one’s in charge of anything.”
– Daniel Kibblesmith

“Never let the guy with the broom decide how many elephants can be in the parade.”
– Merlin Mann

“It matters not whether you win or lose; what matters is whether I win or lose.”
– Weinberg

“Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again,”
– CS Lewis

“No man who ever held the office of President would congratulate a friend on obtaining it.”
– John Adams

“He who laughs last thinks slowest”
– Anon

“Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word.”
– Stephen King

“You can’t do anything about the length of your life, but you can do something about its width and depth.”
– H.L. Mencken

“I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited.”
– Borges

Creation is destruction waiting to happen. It’s also a publishing house. Founded in the late 80s, Creation Books started as a semi-endorsed offshoot of Creation Records and became one of Britain’s foremost underground publishers, releasing bug-eyed normie-baiting stuff of the sort that got David Britton sent to prison a few years previously under the Obscene Publications Act.

As the millennium turned, the company changed focus, and became largely a reissues house for books out of copyright (or books whose authors were incapable of disputing potential violations of such). In 2013, the company closed after 25 years in business. Lest you think this is a case of all good things coming to an end, Creation’s demise may have been accelerated by a wave of accusations of fraud and intellectual property theft against sole proprietor James Williamson. He returned fire online, protesting his innocence. It reminds me of the joke about Bill Cosby, and how it’s yet another case of his word against her word, and her word, and her word, and her word…

Dust is one of several Creation samplers/readers, containing excerpts and selections from Creation’s 1995 stable of authors circa. The publisher’s bailiwick was Gernsback-era pulp horror, French decadence, underground art films, assorted counterculture weirdness, (questionably translated) Japanese manga, and general drunken insanity. Imagine going to see Joseph Merrick at the Grand Guignol at the Bowery in Rhode Island after getting off the train at Akibahara Station: that’s the Creation experience, a kaleidoscopic drug-trip of semi-literary nonsense. If you enjoy that sort of thing, you’ll like Dust.

Kathy Acker shoves her clitdick into historical fiction with “I Become a Murderess”, retelling archetypal stories from the perspective of a rage-filled woman. Not bad. Pierre Guyotat gives us an explosion of words from Eden Eden Eden: brutal language-rending writing that picks up where Octave Mirbeau and Georges Bataille left off. Your eyes will unionise and demand overtime.

Much of the book is underground poetry from writers like Aaron Williamson, Geraldine Monk, and Jeremy Reed. A Williamson’s probably the most talented of the bunch. He’s deaf, which may have refined his aesthetic sense (vide Borges, Goya, etc.)

James Havoc (James Williamson’s pen name) contributes three pieces. “Mauve Zone” is an excerpt from his novel White Skull, detailing bloody adventures on the high seas. The other two are fragments that never have or will see completion. Adele Olivia Garcia (Williamson’s girlfriend, I’ve heard) writes a ton of stuff. She’s completely unreadable.

Alan Moore delivers “Zaman’s Hill” from the collection Yuggoth Cultures (as well as The Starry Wisdom). Good story, but short. Stewart Home contributes some unmemorable sleaze and sin – I found it difficult to tell whether he’s endorsing 90s corporate feminism or mocking it. Simon Whitechapel’s “Xerampeline” was strange but interesting. It’s like a Buñuel film, switching gears between shocking violence and erudite artistry, laving Corinthian columns in blood.

Not everything in it is great, but if you want to quickly experience a large number of Creation authors, I’d recommend Dust ahead of Starry Wisdom if you can find it cheap (although Starry Wisdom is far superior as a work of literature). And if you can’t find it cheap, well, your financial loss is yet another way of getting the Creation Books experience.