[ENGLISH] Radical Publishing tells us : Yoshitaka Amano will be signing copies of Yoshitaka Amano’s Mateki: The Magic Flute Saturday, July 26th at the 2008 San Diego Comic-Con convention. Based on the opera by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, The Magic Flute, Yoshitaka Amano presents the story with his own unique vision using 128 pages of original artwork in a full color, oversized, hardcover book, set for release in June, 2008. Mateki: The Magic Flute has never been published outside of Japan leaving Radical Publishing exclusive world-wide rights for this international edition.

“Having Yoshitaka Amano on board for our first book is like a dream come true”, explained Radical Publishing’s President, Barry Levine. “His style is simply amazing. When Amano showed me the pages for Mateki: The Magic Flute, I knew immediately that this deserved a world wide release and I wanted it to be a part of Radical Books. In addition, the whole Radical team is honored to have Amano stopping by our booth and signing Saturday during the Comic-Con show. We have a huge lineup this year and expect to see more announcements like this in the coming months.”

MATEKI is a beautiful and dark tale of a young man who must put away his flute to become a warrior so he may save his lover from the lord of darkness. Mateki: The Magic Flute is a fantasy story told by an artist known around the world for his work on Vampire Hunter D, Neil Gaiman’s Sandman: The Dream Hunters, and the Final Fantasy games. In discussing Mateki: The Magic Flute in a recent interview, Amano explained

“The story itself is so well known, I don’t think I need to repeat it here. What actually attracted me most is the music Mozart wrote. Even though I knew the story from the accompanied texts, just listening to music gave me an inspiration of making it more like a ballet sequence, without words but the movements of images.”

Edmund Shern of Imaginary Friends Studios provides the English adaptation and the supervision for the design of this magical volume.

Yoshitaka Amano’s Mateki: The Magic Flute will ship in June of this year in the US.