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

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!

The OVA is almost a dead art in the fast, 100MB-per-second world of today, but even so there were a few direct-to-video titles that hit shelves this year. Of course, they were either lame eroge adaptations, lackluster fanservice romps or straight up porn. However, despite these odds, an intrepid bunch of warriors came out on top, and wowed me with rape, psychoguns, and mad editing skills.

Sadly, my friends, this list will be free of porn. I did partake of a few ero titles this year, but I’ll leave commentary on them to the professional.

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I’m a pretty big Lupin fan, but I have to admit– the series hasn’t held up all too well since the 1980s ended. Sure, some of the ’90s specials were good, and Episode 0 was almost a masterpiece, but for the most part modern Lupin productions just… suck. I went into Green VS Red with low expectations, but at the very least expected a confrontation between a green jacketed Lupin and a red jacketed Lupin. And I got that. Along with a lot of other shit.

Before I go any further, let me set the scene: Green VS Red is an OVA meant to commemorate 40 years of Lupin, and to the film’s credit it does this spectacularly. In fact, I’d even venture to say that the entire point of watching this at all is for the sheer amount of Lupin fanservice and general otaku antics. The movie makes excuses time and time again just to make throwbacks to older Lupin works. For example: The film opens with a scene that involves millions of Lupin impersonators wreaking havoc on a city, which reminiscent of an episode from the 1971 TV series. Other bits of Lupin fan-pandering involve a scene in which all the Lupin character designs from the past 40 years are shown side by side, or flashing one after another; a scene with Lupin watching The Castle of Cagliostro; and an amazing 30 second sequence which is animated in Monkey Punch’s signature sketchy and crazy style.

Sadly, the story for this one is just a mess. There’s a bunch of elements thrown out there that, in the end, don’t really come together. It seems they only put a white guy in the movie just so they could have the real life white guy they had in the studio do some bad English voice acting. Similarly, they gave this one Lupin impersonator an afro just so he could look like Nabeshin. And there was a giant robot. No, really.

What saves most of these new Lupin productions are the characters. Even if a Lupin story sucks, these things are least kept watchable due to the series’ charming characters. Sadly, most of them don’t get much screen time. The main focus is on the conflict between Lupin and Yasuo (the main Lupin impersonator, who is named after the late Yasuo Yamada– Lupin’s old seiyuu) while the rest of the characters are pushed more into the background. Fujiko probably gets the least screentime, because I guess they wanted to hide the fact that her seiyuu is something like 70 years old now, and they also wanted to give Aya Hirano’s character more lines.

Fujiko aside (who really doesn’t sound all that bad after 40 years) the rest of the seiyuu have aged pretty well. Jigen and Goemon still sound about the same as they did 40 years ago, and Kurita’s Lupin is fine, but will never live up to Yasuo Yamada’s legendary work. The voice which has probably aged the most is Goro Naya’s Inspector Zenigata. In older Lupin productions, his perforamaces were filled with lots of energy, but these days (or at least in this special) Zenigata sounds very old. It works, though. One thing that’s always bothered me about most Lupin animated things is how Zetigata is often played for a fool. This was not so in the original manga, and I like how they brought some of that back for this OVA. He still gets to yell RUPAAAAAAAAAAAN, though.

I sound like I hate this movie, but it actually wasn’t too bad. If you want some good Lupin fanservice, it’s all here, but if you want a good Lupin story, watch the older stuff. I wish these new writers would stop trying to copy off of the old stuff and just make something that captures the spirit of the old stuff, but tells a completely new story. I understand it’s a tall order, but if they could do it with Episode 0, they could do it again.

Oh man, I just had a dream where Golgo 13 was fighting Lupin III. It was far more bizarre than that, but I can’t even begin to describe just how batshit this all was. For starters tough, Golgo had emotions.

Maybe this is because I watched an episode of Golgo 13 and a Lupin special yesterday.

[16:02:55] wildarmsheero: like apparently Golgo and Lupin III were fighting in the city of boston but boston was under a giant dome with a bunch of lasers on it that were shooting down on everyone and there were guys like attached to that dome too and there were like disco lights and golgo didn’t use a sniper rifle and aaaaaaaa
[16:03:36] TheBigN: XD
[16:05:15] wildarmsheero: that’s the best that I can put into the words
[16:05:19] wildarmsheero: it all happened so fast
[16:05:29] wildarmsheero: the word
[16:05:31] wildarmsheero: into words
[16:05:32] wildarmsheero: rather
[16:05:34] wildarmsheero: blah
[16:05:37] wildarmsheero: i just woke up

I hope everyone got this reference

DIE IN A FIRE

After a couple of months, I finally popped in Manga’s re-release of the classic Lupin film “Castle of Cagliostro” into my DVD drive with high expectations. I figured their last release was bad enough, so they couldn’t possibly do anything worse to the film with this new release, right?

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This is going to be a weird post.

In case you don’t already know, I’m a bit of a Lupin fan. So when a sub of the original pilot film surfaced yesterday, I simply had to download it.

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Using some of the extra funds I got for Christmas, I decided to catch up with my ol’ buddy Lupin. I ordered seven of the Lupin films; two being theatrical features (Mamo and Dead or Alive) and five of the TV Specials (in one of Funi’s nifty little thinpaks.) The first one that came in was Mystery of Mamo, which I had seen about two years ago, dubbed. I didn’t especially like the movie when I first saw it. I thought the first hour or so was pretty good, but after that I felt the story didn’t really go anywhere too interesting. I went into this second viewing with adjusted expectations, and while the story still came off as weak, I had far more fun watching it. Perhaps it’s because I opted to watch the movie in its original Japanese with the voice work I’ve come to know and love, or maybe I just appreciate movies like these more now. Probably both. The movie pretty much plays out like any given spy movie from the 1960s, but on a grander scale. If you’ve seen any of the older James Bond movies or something like Our Man Flint, you should know what kinds of antics to expect.

Technically, the film is just how I remember it. The character animation is decent. It shines at certain points, but for the most part it’s somewhere in between 1980s TV qualtiy and 1980s movie quality. Not bad, but not stunning. The animation on the mechanical things, like cars and airplanes wasn’t very good at all. The opening car chases resorted to a lot of cheap tricks. They worked, but they certainly weren’t on the level of the opening chase in Cagliostro, produced a year later. The film has great background art, though. Each background painting was extremely detailed and beautiful. This more or less made up for shortcomings with the animation. There are a lot of scenes and shots which are done very well, too, but these are few and far between. But, overall the film was a good way in which to start the string of Lupin animated features that followed after this one. A simple story, but brought to life with the characters we’ve come to know and love realized to their full potential, and a general tone of silliness that makes it fun to watch.