+Anima

Being a geek I naturally have a collector habit. Of course all I really seem to collect these days are comic books and video games, not that there’s anything wrong with that. When it comes to comics my tastes obviously tend to lean heavily toward the manga flavor (interrupted now and again by things like ElfQuest or Marvel’s Dark Tower adaptation) and since I’m only really collecting Fruits Basket and Fullmetal Alchemist right now (despite having read all of the former and up to the recent magazine chapters of the latter in scanlation) I will sometimes grab a random book for something fresh. Lately I’ve had no luck with series sticking for me, one volume of Trinity Blood and two volumes of Godchild (some part of the Cain series) sitting on my dusty  "manga I randomly have for whatever reason or are in Japanese, French or Spanish" shelf will attest to that.

While perusing the book store one day after work I spied something called "Anima" (not noticing the "+" at the time which would have otherwise scared me away, I hate titles like that, the godawful Blood the Last Vampire spinoff  Blood+ has not helped my opinion on that matter either), which looked kiddy but the style and the back description caught my interest and so I picked it up. Seven volumes later I have to say I’m diggin’ it.

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The Scienteers

My good colleague HPK, along with a brave rag-tag team, has just launched a bold new project called The Scienteers (you might have noticed him buying up my Project Wonderful space, the little dickens.) Basically this site is going to be all about promoting webcomics and collecting a fighting team of talent under one splendiforous web-roof. Granted I’m now just making up words, but let me let some press speak for itself:

"One of the features of The Scienteers website is the idea that we want to expose webcomics that may not be getting enough attention when they’re well done. So, one of the goals was to find a way to promote people’s webcomics frequently, thus we have two methods at our disposal. One, submit your news to us! You can either use the handy-dandy on-site form or you can e-mail us directly at thescienteers@gmail.com. We’ll be posting news and blurbs as frequently as we can, so don’t hesitate to get ahold of us! Secondly, we’re going to be running contributed promotional webcomics on our site. Essentially, you can send us 1-3 page promotional stories for us to run on the site and promote your work! Maybe a behind the scenes look, or a non-canon gag, or maybe even a preview of a much larger storyline. We’ll be pleased to run them during certain periods. It’s much better than a text link and a banner ad, right? The format of the comics, as well as further information can be found on the comic submission page. So, help The Scienteers help you. Send us news and comics so we can spread the word about your work!"

So whether you’re a struggling webcomic artist looking for some friendly promotion amongst your peers, or just an appreciator who wants a veridical smorgusboard of comic pages, blurbs, interviews and other comics culture oriented things to read be sure to check it out. It is a budding project at the moment but it’s bound to grow quite rapidly, so hold tight to your bookmarks.

Death Noted

Not too long ago, I found myself becoming a Death Note fan literally overnight. …It was kind of an accident. You see, after a year or so of people telling me over and over to read Death Note and me ignoring them, I happened to catch the second episode on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim, having turned on the TV to that station thinking it was Sunday. By the end of the episode I said to myself "Wow… I didn’t know the main character was this insane" and decided I needed to see more.

I had just been watching Avatar episodes on Veoh.com so I decided to see if Death Note was on there. Sure enough it was and I watched the entire anime series over the course of 3 days. Now I’ve also collected and read all 12 volumes of the manga. At this point I have come to the conclusion that the goth kiddies who carry around little black notebooks and worship "Kira" have completely misinterpreted the plot.

Without many spoilers, I’d like to give a little review of the anime, the manga, and the overall plot. But mostly I wish to discuss how I believe many fans of the show misconstrue the main character Light Yagami entirely.

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The Gunslinger Born

"The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed."

I was going into the bookstore for something else entirely the other week and happened to see Marvel’s The Gunslinger Born, hard cover and featuring all 7 chapters, sitting on a shelf right at the entrance with an offer of 40% off with my Border’s card.

I never finished reading Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, but I plan to some day, despite hearing of the abysmal ending. I sort of lost track of the books when Mr. King was out of commission, having been hit by a car, and then one day saw the 7th book sitting on the shelves of the bookstore. Despite all that, and despite that I had read the first four books many years ago and my recollection is fuzzy, I remember liking The Gunslinger. So this deal was naturally too good to pass up.

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A Jack Chick Halloween

I regret to inform that I was not able to come up with a good Halloween comic in time for the holiday this year. Truthfully it sort of snuck up on me, oh man, I’m getting old. However! I didn’t want to leave anyone high and dry in the giggle department so I decided to compensate by partaking in the grand tradition of remixing a Jack Chick tract (one about Halloween, of course.)

For those of you who don’t know, Jack Chick is an Evangelical Christian who founded a publishing empire of shitty, shitty comics that are supposed to somehow convert people to "crazy on fire Catholic-hating fundamentalist Christianity", many of which he’s drawn himself. These comics tend to follow the same formula, there’s the good Christian, the ugly, evil non-Christians who are all consciously on Satan’s side, and some moron who somehow never heard of Jesus ever and believes every single word the good Christian tells them, converting completely 5 minutes later. I mean, if you honestly never heard of Jesus before, and someone tried to explain the concept to you, seriously, would you believe it?

Jack Chick is also known to write absolute untrue bullshit about other religions and Halloween in his "tracts", and when he does cite a source it’s always something under his own publishing company. I chose a Halloween comic that has the biggest load of bull about the origins of Halloween you’ve ever seen, and as a bonus is stars a favorite Chick character of mine: Lil’ Susy, who he always inadvertently draws really insane and creepy looking when she talks about JEE-SAYZ.

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