Category: Anime, Manga, Etc

Yubisaki Milk Tea Volume 4 is out now and continues to cross all sorts of lines. I’m pleased and surprised that it has made it to volume 4. Without giving any spoilers, this volume features tales of duel attempted lolicon seduction, well sort of… And guys kissing guys, also with some qualifiers, which is actually one of the highlights of this volume because it almost feels like the completion of some part of Nori-kun journey of self discovery or it could just be bowing to the inevitable. After all, with everything else that has happened in the series, what’s one more kiss between friends?

I love crazy love triangles, but one of the things that endears this particular series to me is the incredible selfishness of Nori-kun/Yuki-san. Perhaps this is a sad commentary on humanity in general, but this selfishness is what makes him very real to me and a fascinating character. This guy isn’t always going to do the right thing which makes it harder to predict where the story may be going which I like. And with a healthy dose of fan service, Yubisaki Milk Tea is a guilty pleasure that I hope will continue for at least a few more volumes!

After a very long wait, Neon Genesis Evangelion Volume 10 is finally out in English! I was pleasantly surprised to find it on my lunch time stroll to Borders. They probably had about 6 or 7 copies on the shelf, and perhaps more in the back, but after such a long wait, I didn’t want to take a chance on missing it. So I picked up a copy today rather than wait for a coupon I have to activate later this week. But, being the cheapskate I am, I did use my Borders shopping day for 10% off! ^_^

It’s hard to say exactly what the appeal of Evangelion is to me. It’s certainly more than giant robots, curvacious babes, and the end of the world, which alone are pretty good hooks! LOL For me it’s mostly about being able to identify with the feelings of many of the characters, particularly Rei and Shinji. My school days are far removed from me by this time, but I still remember the alienation, trying to be perfect, falling in love, and being angry with my father all too well. I learned to cope with it all, and turned out pretty well, I guess. ;^_^

After about 3 weeks of work and learning I finished my first anime music video! Yay! Last night I bundled up and uploaded my entry for the Anime Central AMV competition and now only hope that it will at the very least be shown at the con. It would be nice to win something too, but my whole reason for doing it was a love of the song and the anime, which I won’t name here, at least not yet. One of the most important things I learned from the process was that you’d better really love the song because by the time it’s done you’ll have heard it a lot! I mean a whole lot!

After the con, I’ll put the video up on YouTube. Three weeks is a long time, but with what I’ve learned, I’m hoping to produce one more entry for the competition before the April 20 deadline.

It looks like Perfect Hair Forever has taken over Adult Swim tonight. I’m guessing now that this is their now annual April Fools joke on the viewers. I suppose this is better than last year’s farting noises during Ghost in the Shell.  Hyuk Hyuk Hyuk! I never got into the Perfect Hair thing, so I’m using the time to catch up on some of my web forums.

Inspired somewhat by the anime music videos I’ve seen at conventions and on YouTube, I decided to try my hand at it and create an entry for the Anime Central Anime Music Video competition. Being a cheapskate, as always, I really didn’t want to buy anything new or expensive, at least not until I really know what I’m doing.

So I got started by gathering the free tools referred to in VicBond007’s Guide to Working with DVD Footage on AnimeMusicVideos.org. I then used this very good guide to create my AVI clips. I read the rest of the guide which describes how to edit the video with Adobe Premiere, but since I don’t have that, I had to fend for myself and use what I had handy.

I ended up using Windows Movie Maker 2.1 to import the AVI clips and music. (Note, I used Audacity to convert the MP3 music file to an uncompressed WAV file since the guide warned of synch issues using a compressed music source.) Windows MovieMaker could only save my video to WMV format, so I then used NeroVision Express, which came with my DVD-RW drive to create a DVD that I could play in the living room.

The end result, though, at this point, is still a rough draft, looked really good on the TV. So I’m hopeful I’ll have something that everyone will enjoy!

I heard about this via the news box at mangaKabob. A free manga magazine is launching in Japan, Comic Gumbo, which will be entirely supported by ads. The only surprising thing here is that it had not happened already. The Japanese and US markets are different, but if an ad supported manga mag can make it in Japan, perhaps someone will try it here as well. Given the media hype about how manga in the US is attracting a lot of female readers (an attractive demographic), there could be a lot of advertiser interest in a free manga publication.

Just a little something I put together for mangakabob this month.

Manga artist Ken Akamatsu is probably best known for the Love Hina manga series in which a loser guy is surrounded by a harem of beautiful young women who have a habit of somehow ending up naked. His current series, Negima, is similar, being a something of a mashup of Love Hina and Harry Potter wherein a 10 year old wizard is the precocious teacher of a harem of young female students who also have a habit of ending up naked.

Clearly, if you like seeing naked girls, you’ll probably enjoy Akamatsu-san’s work a great deal. But the thing that makes him one of my favorite manga-ka is the unexpected depth of the numerous characters he creates. They’re a lot more than just pretty faces, and instances of nudity are used for comedic effect, never anything truly dirty, in my opinion. From his first manga, A.I. Love You, through the current Negima, Akamatsu’s story telling gets better and better. Ken Akamatsu is a manga-ka you don’t want to pass up.

A.I. Love You
Love Hina
Negima

Ken Akamatsu on Wikipedia

It is a terrible thing to have something in the mind’s eye that you just can’t get out on the paper right away! I’ve been working on art for my mangaKabob site in between taking care of sick kids. And boy am I rusty, but it is still quite satisfying to be able to just pick up a pencil and draw!

I still do it the old fashioned way. First I do a sketch with pencil and paper and then scan it into the computer. From that point I generally trace over the sketch in Fireworks and start dealing with things in layers. It can take a long time, but is quite a lot of fun for me. I really need to do this more often. Since I haven’t been able to spend too much time at the computer with sick kids about, I’ve had a chance to leaf through many back issues of Newtype USA for challenges and inspiration. I’m thinking of trying to do a drawing a day, just to get back into practice and to show the kids that their old dad still has it!

It felt like Christmas came a little early when I saw that Kashimashi Girl Meets Girl vol. 1 was already out in the State Street Borders. This is another of those weird gender bending stories, only this time space aliens are responsible for initiating the gender confusion. This is another one of those manga niches that has become rather popular in Japan, and despite the puritanical origins of American culture, may be gaining some traction here as well. At least someone, namely Seven Seas Entertainment, felt it would be popular enough the take the risk of selling it here. Well thank you very much Seven Seas! I think I’m going to enjoy this a great deal! :3

This morning I woke up thinking, I’ll create a little manga and anime aStore! Thus mangaKabob, a tasty shishkabob of manga and anime was born. Creating these Amazon aStores is so easy and addictive that I imagine there will be a great increase in little Amazon powered boutique web storefronts soon. I still have some original artwork to add, but most of what I had in mind is there, a variety of genres build around things I’ve read or seen, and breaking things out into categories like shonen ai, yaoi, shoujo ai, and yuri. Finding yaoi was relatively easy, so I wasn’t expecting as much trouble as I had trying to fill out yuri from the Amazon catalog. I guess yuri hasn’t quite taken off yet, at least not enough to be listed as such.

Netflix must love customers like me. I’ll rent a bunch of anime DVDs and then keep them out for months because I don’t have time to sit down and watch them. Still, it ends up being cheaper for me than buying and less hassle than a traditional rental outlet which wouldn’t have the stuff I’m watching anyway in most cases.

I finally got around to finishing R.O.D. the TV series. I liked the movie more for its style than plot or characters, so I decided to give the series a shot. After watching the whole thing, all I’m really left with is the feeling that the show was about a bunch of women who did an awful lot of crying. Most of the crying was about how these women were so close like sisters, but really weren’t and how the baddies had even given them fake memories about their good times together in Hong Kong. Huh? Oh yeah, the British Library tries to take over the world by reconstituting a sort of super Methuselah-like man known as Mr. Gentleman who can rewrite all of the world’s history. Or something like that. I guess I can forgive a pretty wacky plot like that, but all of the crying was a bit much. It was like some anime version of Steel Magnolias.

Oddly, I actually liked Steel Magnolias and I don’t mind the occasional “chick flick”. But R.O.D. TV doesn’t really work on that level either. And that’s why I keep renting!

Hurray for pink haired girls! I saw my first pink haired woman outside of an anime convention today, a nice highlight to an otherwise cold dreary day in Chicago. The most interesting thing about it was that it looked pretty good, so kudos to Sakura!