Dreams and Dragons Page 7

New Dreams and Dragons page! Pockymonster can even makes a talking head page look good.

http://dreamsanddragons.smackjeeves.com

Interview up with Melvin Calingo/Buckethead/Taga-ilog, artist of the Seven Sea's pirate manga Destiny's Hand http://www.gomanga.com/news/features_destiny_002.php.

Not really related, but there's also a preview of Last Hope vol. 2 on Gomanga.com, and it's great.

Dreams and Dragons page 6 up

Page six of Dreams and Dragons is now up at Smackjeeves: http://dreamsanddragons.smackjeeves.com. It's a little late, but not through any fault of the artist (or mine). The internet ate the e-mail she had sent me of the page, and so I never replied to say it looked good and to put it online. But it's up now, and that's all that matters. I'm a little nervous because the next few pages are a little confusing, but very important. If things don't make sense at first, just bear with us and it will in time. Thanks!

Prim and proper yaoi girl

While doing reserch on yaoi, I found this on DMP's website, 'A What kind of Yaoi fan are you?' quiz. Pretty accurate, for a online quiz that doubles as a marketing reserch tool.


Yaoi Personality Quiz brought to you by Yaoi-manga.com

Another 'Ooooh, look at what I bought!' post

Another Wednesday, another hit to the bank account. I've been trying to limit how much I spend on anime and manga, but when your local comic bookstore has a 50% off all manga (except new releases) sale, well, it's hard to stick to a budget.

Actully, I only got two books, so I did resist temptation to splurge for the most part. I bought volume one of Antique Bakery. I'm really curious, as the art is rather plain and it's not the kind of manga that whips yaoi fan-girls into a frenzy, yet I've only heard good things about it. For a while now the high price tag has kept me from taking a chance on it. Sure, it's only $17.99 (plus the tax), but that's a relatively high price for a manga. But when it's half off...

I'll admit I have an ulterior motive for buying it besides just good buzz. I've been noticing lately that there are a couple of English yaoi publishing houses looking for writers, such as Yaoi Press and Iris Print. I love writing comics, and would love to do so for a living, so anywhere that is looking for submissions I always check out. But I've been having some trouble coming up with a yaoi or shounen-ai story. It's not that I don't dislike the genre (though I don't classify myself as a yaoi fan: I just see it as another aspect of anime), and I love writing the short kind of comics that get used in the boy's love genre so often, but for some reason I'm stuck. I'm hoping that by reading Antique Bakery, a kind of non-traditional shounen-ai book, it will help lift the block in mind and I can some up with some awesome boy lovin' manga.

The other item I bought was Vampire Hunter D: Raiser of Gales, the second novel in the Vampire hunter D series. I got the fourth book a month or so ago from Dark Horse for 'review purposes' (I guess because I'm their Animefringe contact, even though the magazines been defunct since 2005). I loved it. I'm sure the other books in the series will be good as well, with their sci-fi/horror/western trappings. One Animefringe article that I've been re-reading since reading the series is Patrick King's interview with the series' translator: http://www.animefringe.com/magazine/2005/12/feature/06.php. A very good read, even if you haven't read the books.

And last but not least, I went to HMV and was pleasantly surprised to see Munto 2 for sale. Last year at CNAnime in Toronto, I was lucky enough to meet Peter Tatara, then working in marketing at Central Park Media. He gave me a copy of Munto which is one of the prettiest OVA's out there. The character designs are sharp and the animation is beautiful (though I happen to like the solid colouring used, some people don't). The sequel expands on the universe introduced in part one and deepens the characters. I though it was interesting how the POV character changed from Yumemi to her down to Earth friend Ichigo.

In the recent round of lay-offs, Peter was one of the many employees who lost their job. I really hope CPM is able to pull themselves together. They do a good job of putting a high number of episodes onto DVDS (i.e. all six episodes of Shamanic Princess onto one disc), have dubs that I actually don't mind listening to, and have always been friendly in my dealing with them, whether I was a fan or a journalist.

I'm glad I had the day off, so I could go out and spend money and read magazines at the library (Shojo Beat, Anime Insider and Giant Robot all in one place w/air conditioning = heaven), but I do have work tomorrow so I better get to bed.

Dreams and Dragons page 5

Page 5 of the webcomic that I'm writing (and is being drawn by Pockymonster) is up now at Smackjeeves: http://dreamsanddragons.smackjeeves.com/comics/?PHPSESSID=1e445d41373fca291e0fd304d7649fb0

While I'm far from an unbiased commenter, this page is my favorite so far. Sometimes Pockymonter (the artist) turns out a page that looks exactly how I pictured it in my mind (which is cool), while other times it's different and a lot better, like today's page. I'm looking forward to the next few pages, when the story takes a bit of a strange turn.

Adam Arnold interview

With Aoi House volume one hitting shelves now, I interviewed writer Adam Arnold for Seven Seas' website Gomanga.com. He talks a lot about writing and editing manga, but plays coy when asked about the future of certain Aoi House pairings. C'mon Adam! You gotta give us Alex/Morgan shippers something to hope for!

The interview (minus my fan-girl rantings) can be found here: http://www.gomanga.com/news/features_aoi_003.php

Dreams and Dragons Page 4

While Random Play is more of an experimental comic that I'm doing mostly for myself, Dreams and Dragons is a fantasy comic that can appeal to a lot of different people. Page four of the story is up on Smackjeeves: http://dreamsanddragons.smackjeeves.com/comics/

New Random Play story

Last Friday there was a new Random Play page, but I forgot to link it here. It's about a college student named Robbie who comes home for Christmas holidays only to find parts of his childhood waiting for him. And now that he's back, they don't want Robbie to leave...
Page two will be up tomorrow, but for now here's page 1:
http://randomplay.smackjeeves.com/comics/?PHPSESSID=a74667ed83c9c204a9e6f5f64b04438d