30 Day Baseball Card Challenge

Friday, November 15, 2013

The Coolest 'Graph In My Collection

Last weekend my friend invited me to the JAMsj (Japanese American Museum of San Jose) Winter Boutique.  There was a lot of "arts and crafts" stuff like homemade cards, jewelry, and pottery so I used the opportunity to buy Christmas presents.

Well... being a guy, I finished checking out the boutique in about 15... maybe 30 minutes.  That's about the same time it took my friend to browse one or two vendors.  In other words... I had some time to kill.

There was a family who specialized in books written by Japanese authors, so I decided to hang out in their booth while I waited for my friend to try on jewelry and clothing.  They had a bunch of cool Manga books... including several that were autographed by the authors.

While flipping through one of them, I came across this:


Is this signature awesome or what?  It's a quick sketch of Miyamoto Usagi along with Stan Sakai's standard autograph.

If you're not familiar with Mr. Sakai, he's the creator of Usagi Yojimbo... a comic book series that tells the tales of a rabbit ronin who is walking the musha shugyo (warrior's pilgrimage).

I've been wanting to read one of these comics for over 20 years and after finding this awesome autograph, I figured this was the perfect place to start.  So, I plopped down my $18 and purchased my first Sakai graphic novel:


I have two more (unsigned) that I just ordered off of Amazon.  I look forward to finally reading this series.

Okay... it's your turn:


Who do you think has the coolest signature?  What are your favorites?

Happy Friday and sayonara!

13 comments:

Marcus said...

I remember Usagi from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles! That is awesome!

I'm always partial to Tony Gwynn's signature, but I'm incredibly biased.

Chuck's Used Cards said...

Having the signature of an author is cool, but having a sketch from the artists is WAAAAY better !
Well done.

Fuji said...

Can't argue with your choice... but I'm incredibly biased too ;-)

Fuji said...

Thanks Chuck!

Anonymous said...

I'm not an autograph collector, and I don't have this particular autograph, but I've always thought former pitcher Doug Corbett had a cool signature... The descender on the "g" in "Doug" becomes the capital "C" in "Corbett". You can see it on his 1982 Topps cards, or you can look here:
http://www.comc.com/Cards/Baseball/1982/Topps/560/Doug_Corbett/1880709

Fuji said...

Wow you're right. That is pretty cool. Thanks for sharing.

Spiegel83 said...

I am a big fan of Usagi Yojimbo. I have read about 5 of the books and even have a cool t-shirt that I picked up at the Japanese American Museum in LA. Have fun reading the books.

Ana Lu said...

For me the best sigs are those you can picture the person's name in it. Those 'artistic' sigs look always like they didn't want to spend much time signing it. Those dedicated to a specific person are the top. Specially if they are dedicated to you.
Usagi for Usagi I'm more into Tsukino Usagi ;)
The manga I'm collecting right now is Death Note. But I got to watch the anime first. Couldn't help.

Fuji said...

I just picked up book #1 and #2. I hope to finish the first one this weekend. Back in the early 90's when the Japanese-American Museum opened up on LA, they hired my sister do some art/graphic design work. I'm sure her work is long gone by now... but one of these days I hope to go down there an check the museum out for myself.

Fuji said...

Had to look up Tsukino Usagi. Unfortunately, I've never watched or ready anything involving Sailor Moon. On the other hand, I have several students who read Death Note.

Ana Lu said...

Sailor Moon is shojo (for girls) so it's normal you would not know about it (Shōnen for boys). Even if the anime was aired in the US for all I know. But as usually I think your version of it got way cut. There were sometimes when 2 or 3 episodes became 1 because of all the cuts they did.

Play at the Plate said...

Will Clark has a pretty nice signature.

Fuji said...

Yeah. Love how his autograph looks the same as it did 20 years ago.