Mistakes of Youth: The Blog (Powered by EXCELLENCE!)

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I don’t like explaining my jokes (speaking of which, I need to get around to updating the reference guide) but since no-one for some reason watches Zettai “The Best Show Ever” Karen Children I figure I should explain myself. A trio of young girls called Karen Girl’s (yes, there is an apostrophe) sing the opening themes to Zettai Karen Children. In episode forty of Zettai Karen Children, they make an animated cameo, which is what’s pictured in the opening panel. The rest is pretty self explanatory. Next week I’ll stop with the lolita jokes, I promise. I have one great script left I want to use, then that’ll hopefully be the end of it… for a while.

I’m pretty happy with the art here. It’s nothing amazing, but it’s nice and clean. It devolves into closeups, but I think it works. The more astute of you may notice that I’ve signed this comic simply as “wah”, and that over the past week I’ve changed my nick in various places to just “wah”. Why? President Obama said to put away childish things, so I figure I should put away my childish screenname I made when I was thirteen years old! Also, all the classy moe aficionados like my colleagues mt-i and pkjd have short, cryptic names, so I figure I’ll force my way into the club, too! Oh, and let’s not forget our dearly departed abq. No, he isn’t dead. I don’t think.

I’m giving the doujinshi orders another week before we just give up and distribute them digitally to the people who want them. We’re actually half-way there, but I doubt we’ll get fifteen requests over the next week. Like I said last week, this was an experiment by a friend and I, so we weren’t expecting much. But on the other hand, the doujin has loli jokes, gay jokes and violence! People like that stuff, right? It’s highbrow stuff. Oh, and I’d like to thank the warlocks on 4chan for advertising this. Your kind words of encouragement mean so much! Ever so much!

One show I’ve started to enjoy is Sora Wo Kakeru Shoujo, or Sora Kake Girl. It took a while to get going, but by episode three I was pretty hooked. I love the design work, both on the characters and the world, and the plot is dumb enough to work. So far it’s about ten times better than Code Geass. I’m going to get to watching episode four in a bit!

That’s all for this week. Hopefully I can come up with some not-pedo related scripts to break monotony of the past couple of weeks.

You probably can’t tell, but over the past couple of days I’ve devoted a lot of time to drawing practice. Along with that, I also approached this new piece with a different mindset–something I probably should have been keeping in mind for the past 20 years–that is, thinking in 3D. I realized that the first step to being able to project what you want onto the page with your mind simply involves getting into the basic mindset. Come to think of it, my drawing teachers told me this millions of times; I just didn’t really listen. Another thing I tried to was to relax while drawing. I have a terrible habit of tensing up no matter what I do, but I really just tried to take it easy here. I did tense up, but when I realized that I was, I just relaxed again. Relaxing is generally just something good to do in life, so I should probably just take it easy in my normal life!

I think this lineart turned out pretty okay. Hopefully I won’t screw up on the colouring.

Akibanana just brought it to my attention, but apparently news of Hayate no Gotoku’s second season being produced by an entirely different studio has been floating around the tubes for a while now! Usually when production of an established franchise’s sequel gets delegated to a different studio, people become skeptical of the newer show’s quality, and for good reason. However, production of this sequel isn’t in the hands of a spotty studio like Artland, nor is it being handled by the rookies at asread–the vets at J.C. Staff are handling this one, which does put my mind to rest. Somewhat.

Closer observation of the characters involved in this cartoon’s production brings about a myriad of varied emotions and expectations. First off is Iwasaki Yoshiaki on direction–his resumé is larger than that of the previous series’ Kawaguchi Keiichiro, but his quality of work seems to vary more. Second is Kuroda Yousuke on series composition, which I’m going to assume means “head writer” or something like that. Compared to the two guys who worked on season one, he seems to have a lot more experience. Hell, he started a company devoted entierly to writing anime scripts and the like. The duo that ANN lists as handling the first series is comprised of Takegami Junki and Inotsume Shinichi–the former of which worked on a bunch of kids shows along with the masterpiece Crystal Triangle, and the latter worked on just about nothing. J.C. Staff on the whole is a competent studio, so I’m not too worried about production values slipping.

Fujii Masahiro of Zero no Tsukaima and Mahoraba fame is on character design this time around, and going by the few pieces of production art available, it seems he just made the characters even cuter. The difference isn’t as jarring as it is between Minami-ke and Minami-ke ~Okawari~, but his own flavour is quite clearly present, and I really like it. Neither show’s designs seems to really capture the spirit of the comic’s artwork, but the only studio who could really do that justice is SHAFT.

Overall, one could say that the team in charge of this series has more experience under their belt, and should, in theory, put forward a better product. The problem is, Hayate no Gotoku is an A+ show in my eyes, and the kinds of shows this team has put out have been real B-range affairs for me. Zero no Tsukaima is great–you guys all know I love it–but it’s not A+ material. One thing SynergySP really has going for them is insane energy–it’s ever present throughout Hayate’s first outing, and it’s turned up to eleven in Zettai Karen Children. I have never seen any show by J.C. Staff harness that kind of raw energy, and I’m not really sure they’re up for the task. I’m guessing they’ll play up the moé and the romance, while making the jokes less rapidfire. This is fine, but the issue at hand is if it can really hit me as hard as season one did. Also, one other thing to mull over is the length of this second series–as far as I know, J.C. Staff has never worked on a fifty-two episode series, while Synergy SP has almost perfected the art of making a good looking, long-running series. My guess is that the show will run for two cours– a thirteen episode season following a year-long one would lame, but half a year isn’t that bad.

In any case, I’m hoping for the best.

For what it’s worth, I’m going to give a little shout-out to Kokujin for putting out a more or less exceptional sub of the latest entry into the Kodomo No Jikan anime arsenal: Kuro-chan and Shiro-chan. It’s completely soft-subbed, has a nice re-write that reads like conversational English, and near as I can tell the translation is fairly accurate. I do have issues with the some of the slang words used, and I think the typesetting could use a bit of work, but on the whole this is the best fansub I’ve watched since ADTRW put out the first episode of Gurren Lagann.

So, watch it.

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My word! I’ve yet to do any Gunslinger Girl fanart! This is an outrage, to be sure.

I still have a ways to go, but this lineart doesn’t look totally horrible. I just looks kind of horrible. I think my main weakness is that I lack the ability to project a 3D image onto the page with my mind, then draw lines around said image accordingly. To be able to draw with such confidence requires, a) confidence, of course and b) experience. I took a few drawing classes back in Freshman year, but in retrospect they weren’t nearly enough. I need more experience in life drawing–learning about how certain things should look in certain situations. So, what’s the best way? I suppose more classes would be the most prudent course of action, but say I don’t have that option available to me at the moment? Should I just start drawing from images of Asian U-15 swimsuit models until I get good? Men in suits? Both?

One thing that really hurts me is when it comes time to clean up my rough linework. I tend to be fairly happy with what I have sketched out, but when the sketch makes the transition to clean lineart by way of the lightbox, it always looks worse. Part of this is because I don’t have a steady hand, so when I trace over with my 0.3mm pencil, my lines are somewhat squiggly. It could also be because I lack a proper drawing table, so I can’t get the kind of support I need to keep a steady hand. Confidence once again plays into this–I find when I trace with more confidence, my strokes look better.

Another couple of things that really screw me up are fabric folds and shadows. It seems every single artist out there but me is good at fabric folds, so the fact that I’m really terrible at them kills a good amount of the soldiers in my Self Esteem army, but I suppose it’s just one of those things that takes practice. And more life drawing. Shadows are probably the easiest thing to be bad yet, yet they’ll still look decent if you have an okay handle over them. Once again, mastering the shadow, and where it falls simply requires more practice.

All this said, I’m a little bit happy between where I used to be and where I am now. This is a generous estimate, but in the next year or two I suspect I’ll get to the level I want to be at if I keep working.

Original Post

I felt I needed to bleed the previous comic’s punchline a bit more, so I did. As far as artwork goes, I’m playing around with styles. By that I mean, I’m messing around with how I draw girls. And by that I mean, I’m changing how I draw Tina a bit, since she’s the only girl who consistently shows up in this comic. She comes out looking kind of like a Haruhi character, and I like it. I take this a bit further in the next comic, which is already done. I like this style, but I’m also partial to the style in this comic. I’m not sure what I’ll stick with, but don’t be surprised if drawings are more inconsistent than usual. Eventually I’ll find a style and stick to it, don’t worry.

In further art-related nonsense, the more astute of you may notice that panel layout in recent comics has become tighter. This is because instead of drawing each panel out on separate sheets of paper, I’m laying out the panels on one big piece of paper, and drawing the characters in those already laid-out panels. I know this newer method sounds like how one should make comics, but I’m not partial to drawing in small spaces. I do however like how the newer comics are looking, so I’m going to stick with this method.

We still don’t have enough requests in to the print the doujinshi. If we don’t reach our goal in the next week or so, we’ll probably just distribute digital copies to those who want one at a lower price point. To be honest, this whole thing was an experiment by my friend and I, and we weren’t expecting to make anything that’d sell like hotcakes. But buy one anyways!

Moving right along, for those who may not know, I’m studying abroad in Japan this summer. I just found out about where I am to be living, and as you can expect this has made me rather excited. I’m leaving in about two months, and in case you were wondering–yes, the comic is coming with me. I will be comic-ing in Japan, and I will most likely bring the characters over there as well. Oh god, then it’ll really turn into Megatokyo! Anyway, expect a lot of interesting in-the-field podcasts, stupid Japan-related blog posts and perhaps an account of my first Comiket experience.

And with that, I’ll wrap up this rant. Sorry for the lack of anime commentary, but nothing has captured my interest beyond stuff I’ve already written about in this space already. That and I’m just tired of writing for today! Time to watch Casshern Sins!

Twilight of the Dark Master is a silly cartoon based off of a silly comic with a silly title. What makes it notable, however, is the man behind it all–the dude, Akiyuki Shinbo. After proving himself as an animator, Shinbo then went on to direct a number of OVAs and a few TV series in the mid-to-late ’90s. While some of these earlier works are of questionable quality, they all tend to have something interesting to bring to the table, and are enlightening to those who follow the man’s work, such myself.

Twilight of the Dark Master is pretty typical of any OVA you’d find lurking on the shelves of Blockbuster in the late 90s–there’s a wealth of gore, naked women, and naked women being slaughtered horribly. It’s action, martial arts, sci-fi, comedy, straight from Japan AND NOT KIDS STUFF!!! Even though the piece’s narrative is about neck-deep in Japanese cartoon clichés, what makes it worth watching are the bold touches of Shinbo magic here and there.

In my eyes, Shinbo’s work is characterized by alternative colour schemes, abstraction and unique camera work. His style is fairly prevalent across the film’s forty-five minutes, but it doesn’t really save the piece from its cliché ridden plot. A lot of Shinbo techniques we see in later works make their appearances here, and do their work well enough. There’s a smattering of dutch angles, lots of faraway shots, a number of shots with silhouettes of random objects in the foreground, and a bunch of eccentrically designed interior locations. A 4:3 aspect ratio hurts all of this, as these techniques aren’t given the true cinematic presentation they require. Right at the end Shinbo decides enough is enough and everything goes widescreen for one pivotal moment.

While this is easier to recommend than the Hurricane Polymar OVA, it’s still a very flawed work, and probably not worth watching more than once. I’d only seriously recommend it to Shinbo fans, since that’s the best thing it has going for it.