Above: a very nice chirashi mini-poster made in 1995 to promote a cinematic triple-bill of three Ed Wood films—Plan 9 from Outer Space, Glen or Glenda, and Bride of the Monster. None of the three played in Japan when originally released—and if you’ve seen any of them you realize there’s no reason they should have—so this poster is for their premieres. The reason this happened is because Tim Burton’s biopic Ed Wood became a hit in the U.S. in 1994 and this triple bill occurred about a month in advance of that film’s arrival in Japan.
The art is signed, which you can see in the inset image at right, but we can make neither heads nor tails of it. Or rather, we can make out the letters just fine for the most part, but we can’t really determine how they should be arranged. Conjizukin or Comjizukin seem most likely, but we get nothing on either of those names with online searches. We weren’t surprised. These artists with their esoteric signatures. We guess none of them imagine they might one day be obscure and their abstract autographs might actually be a hinderance to recognition. If anyone can identify who this is drop us a line.
Update: The answer has arrived. A reader has informed us the artist is Kōji Suzuki, who works under the moniker Cohjizukin. We’ll dig up more work from him a bit later, and thanks very much to the person who wrote in.
