Comic Site Rant: BREAK+YOUR+DESTINY

Posted On February 7, 2009

Original Post

What you were going to see here was a comic about Haruhi getting a second season, but we all know how that turned out. After that, I was going to do some angry comic about how Newtype played us all for fools once again, then I realized a comic about some rumour that barely lasted 24 hours won’t age terribly well. So instead, you’re getting this comic I made about a week ago–the original comic 129.

I’m pretty happy with how this turned out on the whole. As far as writing goes, I’m not sure if Yu Aida and Keitaro Arima know each other or not, but in the end I just assumed that they’re not acquainted. I believe Yoshinobu “The Nish” Nishizaki is out of jail, however I’d like to think he just goes around wearing prison gear all the time. The girl in panel two is from some horribly creepy website that I learned about through Akiba Blog. I won’t link it for fear of getting arrested, but google “Candy Doll U-15” if you feel like being dangerous, and have an affinity for Russian lolis.

The art turned out quite well, I think. The backgrounds aren’t much at all, but I like the character art and how it all came together. The observant readers out there will notice I switched back to a traditional comic font. I started using fonts like Verdana after I saw Gone With The Blastwave do something similar, but then I realized he was only using boring fonts because he didn’t have a comic font for a good while. Nevertheless, I decided to keep using Verdana because it afforded me more freedom than Edible Pet II. After a while I noticed my choice of font made the comics look all the more amateur, so with this strip I switched to Penny Arcade’s font, which offers upper-case and lower-case letters, which I really like. I’ll probably keep using it.

I’m flipflopping like a politician here, but I’m going to give the doujin one more week for preorders. This is mostly because I just got an order from a guy for five books, and now we’re six books away from reaching the target. Another thing I want to bring up is that we’re going to accept international orders now, mostly because we’ve been getting lots of requests from overseas readers. Now, shipping overseas is going to cost a lot– more than the book itself. If you’re still cool with that, go ahead. But, to that guy who’s ordering three books to bring back to his friends overseas–keep doing that. It’ll be cheaper for all of you. Even if we don’t reach 30 orders by the end of the week, I suspect we’ll get close enough that we’ll print up the book anyways. Hope you all like it.

Recently I’ve been going back and watching the 16:9 releases of Clannad ~After Story~. I had fallen behind, and now I’ve finally found a chance to catch up. Going back, I’ve stated to appreciate some of the arcs more. Specifically Misae’s arc–it’s typical Key, but I liked it well enough. I still think Miyazawa’s arc is really dumb, though it does have a nice fight at the end. The show looks really great, and it’s such a shame that I don’t like it more. I probably won’t buy it. Oh, something important happened in the last episode, I guess, but I won’t talk about it. I have episode 17 sitting on my desktop, so I’ll get to that soon.

I also recently watched what I believe is the 2008 Lupin III special, Sweet Lost Night. It’s pretty good once it gets past the ridiculous (even for Lupin standards) plot. Lupin specials are always fun, and this one delivers that quite well. However, it’s not terribly rewatchable like 1$ Money Wars, Burning Zantetsuken, Walther P-38 and Episode 0. The main thing that bothers me here, and what bothers me in most Lupin anime, is how Zenigata constantly plays the part of the fool. In this special it’s notably bad, since he’s wandering around with amnesia for most of the runtime. In the manga Zenigata is on level with Lupin, yet in all the cartoons he’s cheap comic relief. I appreciate how in the opening sequence they demonstrated how Zetigata’s finally caught on to all of Lupin’s tricks over the years, but like I said, they quickly push him aside.

As April draws ever closer, I’m getting more excited about my stay in Japan. To bring everyone up to speed, I’ll be staying in Warabi, and taking classes at Sophia University. The acceptance materials along with stuff for my visa should come in today, so I’m eagerly waiting for the mailman like the stupid motherfucker I am. I guess in the meantime I could do something like brush up on my Japanese.

That’ll be all for this week. I somehow put out a normal sized rant this week, and I’ll try to do the same in the future. Later!