Subatomic Brainfreeze

Afterschool Charisma is either the BEST or the WORST comic THAT I HAVE READ IN YEARS

Let's start with a sad fact I was tipped off to a few days back: did you know that Colony Drop's got a higher Alexa rank than Viz's Sigikki? Something's wrong with that, Internet. People should be more interested in reading good manga than they are in listening to angry ol' us!

And by and large, Ikki runs a great bunch of comics. The only outright misfire is probably Tokyo Flow Chart, and considering they run stuff like Kingyo Used Books, Dorohedoro, and Bokurano that's a small price to pay. On the other hand, one Ikki comic toes a line the other titles in the line do not. It might be really bad. It might be brilliant. It's been five chapters and I still don't know what the hell is going on with Afterschool Charisma.

The premise is Clone High, except while that cartoon fully realizes the inherent silliness of its premise, Afterschool Charisma takes itself dead seriously. The protagonist is the lone natural-born human in a school full of clones of great leaders: just for starters, his crew consists of Freud, Florence Nightingale, Napoleon, Queen Elizabeth, and Marie Curie. Most of the chapters open with some kind of school-days hi-jinx (oh my god I just saw Queen Elizabeth and Florence Nightingale topless) and end with a shocking, bizarre revelation.

They're trying to establish a mystery here: odd things begin to happen, and the incidents only exaggerate the teenage clones' deep insecurity over who they are, the expectations that are held for them, and their ultimate fates. This sounds good in theory, but the treatment is so heavy-handed I found it hard not to chuckle. If you're at all capable of reading between the lines, what's terribly wrong with this place is pretty much spelled out from the first chapter, but the kids are oblivious. From there, all the crazy starts to pile up on itself. You want to know how crazy? A small cult starts, one which apparently worships Dolly, the cloned sheep. It's that crazy, and it it always plays these moments as gravely as possible.

It's really hard to talk about this without spoiling major events, because major events are simply thrown out at the reader-- usually as abrupt cliffhangers- whether or not they make any sense. A certain major character, (whose identity is also an "are you fucking kidding me" moment) for example, is just tossed out there five chapters in. He's been the hero's roommate and best buddy all this time and we just haven't seen him, even though the lead has been hanging out with his friends this entire story!

I get the feeling that the story really has no idea how ridiculous it is, so it's probably going to continue to chug along like this. I can't imagine what the hell this thing is going to look like two or three books down the line. It's definitely not a good comic, but it's entertaining the hell out of me and that's all I care about.

New York Anime Fest 09: THINGS THAT AREN'T TOMINO

Well, I'd better get all this out of the way before I forget it happened. New York Anime Fest was last weekend: this is the con's third year, I pretty much knew what to expect coming in, and I got exactly what I thought I would. Let's go through the pros and cons of this convention really quick, as they are the same every year.

As an NYC commuter I'm obviously very happy to be able to go to a con where I don't have to put down a couple hundred for room and board, but the convenient location comes at great cost. Everything that's wrong with NYAF is something that can't really be helped. They don't have enough room in the Javits: to visualize how crowded the place is, imagine Otakon numbers walking around in a space a quarter of Otakon's size at best. Of course, the Javits is really expensive-- during the CPM retrospective our host guessed that it was probably a couple hundred bucks a minute just to be in that room-- and high rent is just a fact of NYC life.

Side note: food prices are through the roof ($2.50 Coke cans!) in the building, so I advise anybody going to anything at the Javits load up on food beforehand. I did this at Go Go Curry on the first day and Subway on the second.

Because this is a for-profit con, the dealer's room is really the main attraction, with panels running on the side. Nothing really unusual there: one booth was selling really obvious bootlegs (HK DVD box sets and Prince of Tennis figures that weren't quite Sader but were really bootleg-ugly) and another had a ton of old VHS that I might have put up the cash for if it had been a buck or two cheaper per tape.

Behind the dealer's room was the World Cyber Games. A pro gaming league-- especially one that deals primarily in real-time strategy and first-person shooters-- is kind of out pf place at an anime convention, and for its part WCG made no attempt to reach out. Anime con people didn't go into WCG, WCG people didn't go into the con, you get the idea. I stopped by here a few times because they were playing nationals for Virtua Fighter 5 and many of the players are friends. I woke up a little too late to catch the finals though. I regret it: just watching the guys play really made me miss the game, and it was an even bigger bummer thinking about what's up with VF5R. It's so bad that every time I talk to one of my old VF buddies, we talk about jumping ship to Tekken 6 when it comes out for consoles. Sega, Sega, look what you've done to yourselves!

On the side, you've got your maid cafe, which has always been peculiar. The law ensures that the maids can't actually serve food or drink, so they're more all-purpose entertainers: last year we chatted with a maid while we rested from the con, and it was nice. This year, probably to avoid crowding, the event stage and the maid cafe were put together, to pretty ugly results. See, having a stage there means having huge, loud speakers there, and this means that the area was no longer a place to relax and get away from the con. We sat down for about ten minutes before getting hit with the maids yelling at people to come up and dance on the speakers, and we left juuust when they started Boom Boom Boom Boom (I Want You In My Room). Later, we would find that escaping the con entirely and sitting at the tables at the closed food court was what the cool kids do.

You kind of want to get away from the con after a couple hours of it, because man, the kids are really out in full force, being as obnoxious as they wanna be. This is a given at any anime con, but it's worse at NYAF because unlike many fan-run cons, nobody's come up with such wise rules as "no hug me signs", "no yaoi paddles", and "stop running and screaming and flailing and swinging that fucking ridiculous thing you bought at the dealer's room around". In summary, a cosplayer raised a sign inviting us to a con orgy on the way out Friday.

The only not-Tomino panel I went to was the CPM Retrospective, which was loads of fun and really deserved to pull more people. Did you know that when CPM hired you, they'd show you a highlight reel of their most atrocious porn (my buddy who used to work for them said he'd seen all these shows before) and then plop a "I am not offended by this" form in front of you? Because that's how they used to roll.

Highlight of the panel was definitely the anecdote about the host, his boss, the CEO, and a lawyer standing around watching Night Shift Nurses and trying to figure out if they were going to sell it. They were on the fence about the pissing, but CEO John O'Donnell decided "If it's in Penthouse, it's fine!", sent a secretary for a Penthouse, and sure enough, there was the pissing. Or maybe the time they took Utena's Kunihiko Ikuhara to a trashy bar where the hot chick bartenders made out with each other, and Ikuhara was all "RESBIANS!!" God, what a company. It really makes you wish they were still in business. Also, there was an apology for the Patlabor dub and that fucked-up Slayers DVD box, which I appreciated. I described this panel as both "owns" on Twitter while I was at it, and then "owned" on Twitter once I had left. This is the proper use of a Web 2.0.

The only anime I saw was Cencoroll: produced by one dude (Atsuya Uki), the story is basically JD Salinger's Pokemon. An antisocial young man and his pet shapeshifter fight another antisocial young man and his pet shapeshifter, and visual fireworks ensue. There's probably more creative animation in this half-hour than there is in many anime TV series' entire runs. People in the crowd after the movie were complaining that everything wasn't explained and spelled out to them, and to these people I say "go back to Jump and leave the animator alone".

I didn't take a ton of pictures but I'm going to go ahead and authoritatively pronounce that Maetel and her luggage (and, yeah, the Bumblebee guy) won cosplay.

Onani Master Kurosawa IS THE BEST COMIC ABOUT A SERIAL MASTURBATOR I HAVE EVER READ

A year ago, I made a post about a comic called Onani Master Kurosawa, or "Masturbation Master Kurosawa". It was like Death Note, except the hero dished out justice by masturbating on the belongings of his enemies. The story was shaping up to be effective parody, but the group that was translating it released chapters really, really slowly and so it eventually fell out of my mind.

But Kurosawa was going on. It was changing dramatically. It was actually getting good. Believe it or not, this story about the loser kid who heroically jerks off on things was becoming one of the most honest and heartwarming things I'd read in a while. Kurosawa himself very slowly transforms from a creepy loner doing his impression of Light/Lelouch (the typical male anime convention attendee) into a slightly more mature, slightly more functional human being. Over the course of the story, he learns to live with people and grow out of the adolescent, melodramatic "it's me against them!!" mentality of a kid this age.

And we were stuck during Kurosawa's big crisis of faith-- his "to jerk or not to jerk" moment. As it was a back-burner project for the translators, only 18 chapters were out as of a week or two ago. The cliffhangers were getting worse and worse, and the translators were taking longer and longer to get chapters done. But then, a hero arrived.

The one-man Emergency Exit team started putting out chapters: two or three in a day. The story was finished up yesterday. In the space of a week, with a better translation than the frequently-awkward script the last group was giving us. Kurosawa finished his journey, and everybody was happy. Except for the previous translation team, who called the guy a retard and posted WE DUN CARE in big red letters on their stunningly illiterate forums. Unbeknownst to them, that was just additional entertainment for me.

I mentioned already that what I like about Kurosawa is its honesty. It's a surprisingly feel-good story without ever ringing false or dipping into cliche. Kurosawa is neither sold as an irredeemable monster nor a justified hero. The comic doesn't forget that these are just stupid middle school kids who do stupid things, and it's able to forgive them. The protagonist goes through some big changes, and he doesn't just wake up a new and better man one morning. He just gets progressively closer to seeing the world and the people around them for what they are: from Death Note to... normal, everyday people trying to live happy lives.

It's really unusual to see this kind of thoughtful, even-handed story at all-- nevermind out of such a bizarre premise. I'm not sure whether the comic matures on purpose or by accident, but it's probably more mature than many of its contemporaries. This comes highly recommended, but, uh, you probably still shouldn't read it at work.

IKKI: Naruto continues to fund COMICS I ACTUALLY WANT TO READ

I've always liked Viz's plan in the US manga market: release safe, boring hit titles, make a ton of cash, and then use some of it to fund the distribution of awesome under-the-radar titles that could never possibly break even.

For example, why not have an anthology for older readers? Viz used to run Pulp, but the mag arrived before its time-- it was over before I knew it existed-- and as we know, the market for anime/manga just gets younger and younger as it moves further into the mainstream. Today, Viz is back at it with IKKI, an online magazine focusing on the kind of unusual Japanese comics that are both sorely needed and completely unwanted by the print market.

Technically, sigikki.com launched a while back with one title, Children of the Sea, a beautiful coming of age story about mysterious kids who are bonded to the sea in a way which isn't quite human and isn't quite animal either. I was considering making a post back then, but decided to wait until a formal rollout: a one-title anthology just isn't much to talk about. Of course, as Children of the Sea has been ongoing for a few months, there are ten chapters available. All of the other titles only have one chapter available, or are listed as "coming soon". The site seems to update on Thursdays, and I assume that each week we'll have new chapters for half of the titles, and the next week we'll have new chapters for the rest.

The other titles currently up are Bokurano, Dorohedoro, Saturn Apartments, and I'll Give It My All... Tomorrow. There isn't too much to say about these titles or where they're going from one chapter, but I'll do what I can. Bokurano is by the guy who did Narutaru, and his thing seems to be realist deconstructions of stock kids' manga stories with kids who are as cruel as real children. Narutaru was Pokemon, were it cruel, and Bokurano is going to be a take on super robot stuff. Obviously, I'm looking forward to it. Dorohedoro, being violent fantasy, is probably the most mainstream-attractive title: you can't really beat a first panel where a lizard-head is about to bite a dude's head off.

Saturn Apartments is a laid-back piece of sci-fi in the vein I particularly enjoy: the world is dramatically changed, but the story isn't about the tech that guides that, it's about the ordinary struggles of people living in that world. Specifically, the story revolves around a humble window-washer, cleaning the outside of the gigantic space colony/apartment building that surrounds the now-vacant Earth. I'll Give It My All... Tomorrow is a mid-life crisis story about a pathetic salaryman who quits his job for a quest to find meaning... and ends up laying around his house playing videogames all day. Meanwhile, his elderly father and teenage daughter cope.

I'm not too crazy about the interface, though: the notable (and less legitimate) manga-reader sites out there allow you to read as much of the title as you like in a single window. The Viz reader, though it thoughtfully loads pages of a chapter in advance, must be closed and reopened every time a chapter is over. This feels really unintuitive, and I hope that in the future they fix up the interface so I don't have to do this little, annoying thing.

Viz has also started a Shonen Sunday site which I'll probably take a look at too, but the titles obviously don't interest me nearly as much. When I do read it, I doubt I'll actually post about it, you know?

I think this is the first time I've used "Naruto" in a post title. I expect my hits to skyrocket. This will eventually lead to tagging all of my posts with "Twilight." Look forward to it!

New York Asian Film Fest '09: Be a Man!! Samurai School: THIS MATCH WILL END IN AN INSTANT

This next movie is an adaptation of a series I've talked about briefly before: Sakigake!! Otokojuku. I even posted my anticipation back when the film came out in Japan and then immediately forgot it existed! As you can probably determine from the English title, this is a story about manning up in a comically harsh Japanese nationalist private school. It's one of the classics of Shonen Jump fight manga, and director/star Tak Sakaguchi grew up reading it and wanting to be hero Momotaro Tsurugi. I guess there was only one way to make that happen, huh?

As it's made by a fan, the movie is extremely faithful to the source material, particularly the hyperactive shifts between relatively serious action and extremely stupid comedy. They did it so well that one guy complained during the Q&A after the movie. That's just Otokojuku, man! They even hired the inimitable Shigeru Chiba, who played a couple of roles in the anime version, to narrate. There is no greater entertainment than a freeze-frame on a fancily-named martial arts maneuver as Shigeru Chiba shouts its name at the top of his lungs. The video I linked is from 25 years ago, and the man hasn't lost his touch one bit.

The story is hyper-compressed, as you'd expect from an adaptation of a shonen fight manga, and it covers as many of Otokojuku's characteristic tests of manliness as possible-- like Momo's buddy Genji proving himself by sitting in a vat of boiling oil-- before finishing with the classical shonen fighting tournament. All parties are constantly proving their manhood by fighting, screaming or both until they start to bleed, and then fighting or screaming harder in response. Manly spirit is in great supply here, and the booming yell of headmaster Hehachi Edajima in particular (without his hairdo, the one that Tekken's Heihachi got from him) is done magnificent CG justice.

Not that there's a lot of CG in the film: Sakaguchi kinda hates it, and he made a point to let us know in the Q&A that he tries to make action movies with as little CG as possible. It's all stuntmen here, doing crazy, crazy stuff. In the first five minutes of the movie, a character is hit by a car going about 40mph, which Tak and the stuntman who was hit (also present) are pretty sure is a record. As a result of this approach, his team's stuff has a lot of old-school spirit, like a Hong Kong movie without the kung-fu. After all, most of the guys of Otokojuku aren't suited to that fancy hop-around kinda stuff: just check out Momo's "punch everybody really, really fast" fighting style.

It was shot in two weeks on 400 grand, and yet it's still definitely the best live-action treatment that Otokojuku could ever have hoped for. Probably one of the best of the transitions from anime/manga to live-action that I've seen thus far. Dragonball Evolution probably cost a ton more. Just sayin'.

I have a question for those of you Japanese-fluent who have read all the manga or watched the anime: there's a subplot that doesn't really go anywhere in the film in which rough, scarred Genji goes out on a date with a cute schoolgirl who was really just pranking him the way that Japanese schoolgirls seem to have a thing for doing in the movies. After being humiliated by her and her friends, Genji yells "THIS WAS THE BEST DAY OF MY LIFE" and runs off to the park to cry while the girl looks on, ashamed. Momo has to cheer up his bro, and it never comes up again. I couldn't figure out whether they were just checking off the list of scenes from the manga, as they are in the rest of the film, or whether this was one of those studio-mandate scenes where they add a female character to expand the demographic. I expect a response, Internet!

One Outs is over, BUT AKAGI BASEBALL WILL NEVER DIE

This post might have come a long time ago, but the last few episodes of One Outs were very slow to be subbed, and so, well into this season, I'm finishing up a show from last season. Being cliffhangered for two months is not fun. Here, by the way, is the first post I made about this show. If you need an explanation of the premise, go ahead and read that first.

I've gotten the feeling, from this and Liar Game, that Shinobu Kaitani is a more accessible, but not as talented Nobuyuki Fukumoto. Of course, considering the quality of Fukumoto's stuff (Kaiji, Akagi, Ten) this isn't a huge sacrifice. One Outs followed up pretty well on its initial promise, taking the idea of a gambling pitcher indirectly battling the J. Jonah Jameson-style team owner steadily to its logical extreme by the end of the show. At first Toua has to use unorthodox methods to deal with players who are better than him, but the show really hits its stride at the "trick stadium" arc, where Toua's Lycaons go up against the Blue Mars, a team of pro cheaters whose stadium is indeed a huge trap. From here, the problems and Toua's solutions get further and further out of the box, and One Outs just keeps showing us that yes, it can have less to do with baseball than it does now.

If there's one thing that bothered me about the show, it was the total invulnerability of the protagonist. Even Akagi has setbacks: Toua, on the other hand, just knows everything about everything, all the time. There's never a moment where he's genuinely troubled by his situation: he only acts like he is to further ensare his witless foes, who are in turn always outdone by their second-guessing him. After the first few episodes, I came to terms with the fact that this guy was never, ever going to have any trouble and allowed myself to enjoy the ride despite that. Unfortunately, this means that the only suspense for the viewer comes from "I wonder how he'll do it this time?". To the show's credit, Toua's solutions, while crazy, are never actually implausible.

As One Outs is a long-running, ongoing manga in Business Jump, the anime staff had no chance of offering a satisfying conclusion to the story-- one doesn't exist, after all-- so they had the kind of ending you've probably seen before in similar adaptations. At the end of the climactic game, Toua reminds batter Kojima (and us in the audience) that "it's not over yet" and the narrator tells us that Toua continued to have amazing adventures in gambling baseball, that J. Jonah Jameson continued to yell at his TV as Toua foiled his plans, the end. They at least stop short of telling you "READ ONE OUTS COMIX FOR MORE BALL-BLASTING BASEBALL BRAVADO". No, wait. That would have been pretty cool.

Gundam Sousei: WE'LL JUST HAVE TO MAKE TEN YEARS GO BY WITH OUR OWN HANDS

Gundam Sousei sure is meta. A franchise has to be established for at least as long as Gundam has been for anybody to even consider fictionalizing the story of its own creation. In the case of Gundam Sousei, it is to the story of Gundam's production what Sengoku Basara is to the Warring States period. Industry personalities who have, since this time, become legendary are recalled with the godlike awe that only thirty years of obsessive fandom could summon.

Creator Yoshiyuki Tomino is an omniscient ultra-badass who beats Amuro's voice actor up to get just the right brat line out of him ("You hit me twice! Even my old man never hit me!"). Character designer Yasuhiko Yoshikazu is the cold genius pretty boy archetype, living large off his work on Yamato at Academy Studios. At first dismssing the Gundam project as a toy commercial, he's compelled into the slums at Sunrise after seeing Tomino's ahead-of-its-time script ("Yoshiyuki Tomino, you bastard!") Char's voice actor, Shuichi Ikeda, walks into the audition puking drunk and bombs it, only falling into the role when he sees artwork of Char and realizes that he is this character.

We only have three chapters of this (courtesy of a translating group consisting of one awesome dude), but I assume the treatment for everybody who worked on Gundam will be consistent throughout. For now, grab those chapters here, here, and here, because nobody's ever going to pick up something like this in the West ever. It assumes that Gundam is popular, you see.

Shin Mazinger Zero: KOUJI KABUTO DIES IN RUST HURRICANE

Even among the very few people who have taken notice of this impressive anime season's crown jewel (of black steel), the manga adaptation has flown under the radar. This is unfortunate, as the manga also comes from a very interesting creator: the duo of writer Yoshiaki Tabata and artist Yuki Yogo. You probably don't know these guys. It's okay, I don't know them very well either. But I know one of their works, and in this case one is enough. These dudes made Akumetsu, an insane revenge fantasy in which a young man gets total nonsense superpowers and uses them to personally murder everyone who had a hand in ruining the Japanese economy. Reading one chapter of Akumetsu is equivalent to having ten gallons of irrational angry-young-man rage injected into your bloodstream. If there is anybody who should be adapting Go Nagai, it is these guys.

Fortunately for us, they've gone Imagawa's route and created something new with the property. This Shin Mazinger is an entirely different story from either Nagai's original work or the encyclopedic Nagai epic that Imagawa is working on right now. The first chapter is a surreal dream sequence in which Kouji is disintegrated by a humanized version of Minerva X, the girl Mazinger who dated Mazinger and died not long afterwards on the TV show many, many years ago. (You can watch that episode here, subtitled in Italian, or a Spanish dub. English? Of course not, this is a robot anime!) Kouji then rises from the ashes in Mazinger Z as his theme song plays (no, seriously, they've actually just put the words to Kanjite Knight directly on the page.)

In the first chapter proper, of course, Kouji wakes up in the middle of class screaming MAZIN GO at the top of his lungs. In this story, Kouji has a bit of an issue with reality: he's remembering weird stuff like the previously-mentioned dream sequence and even an early scene of Nagai's original manga. He has no idea why, of course, and he's never even seen Mazinger or anything like it. Back at the Photon Power Labs, crazy grampa Juuzou has hijacked the place and demands to see Kouji and Sayaka (unlike the anime, these two are immediately positioned as a couple). Long story short, they see Mazinger standing there, and Kouji completely loses his shit and punches a robot about twenty feet with his bare hands. And that's when the disembodied head of Kouji's father appears!

The Akumetsu team leave no doubt that they were the right choice for the job here: who needed extreme closeups of guys screaming with GIANT TEXT on the page more than Mazinger? Nobody, of course. Unfortunately, Shin Mazinger Zero has yet to be translated by anybody. The best you're going to get right now is here, where I got the prologue and the first chapter untranslated, with an English script included for the first chapter. I do know a certain somebody working on a scanlation of that first chapter, seeing as there's a script, but I make no guarantees.

Christopher Handley pleads guilty: LET'S OUTRAGE

I wouldn't usually cover a story that everybody on the internet is already all over (I have a Mazinger blog to run here), but this one has worrying consequences for pretty much every American manga/anime fan. Christopher Handley has been in some very serious trouble lately. His crime was importing some manga from Japan: a package was randomly searched by the postal inspector, and they decided they did not like what they saw. They didn't like it so much, in fact, that Handley's house was raided. We don't yet know what the comic in question was, but that's not really the point. It can be the most unimaginably horrible thing ever put to print and the government still wouldn't have the right to break into a private citizen's home. Simple reason: it's not real.

Let's get to what's bubbling under the surface here: lolicon makes me sick, guys. Hell, a lot of my own comics make me sick. But it's got absolutely nothing to do with what makes us sick. Fiction contains these things. Should anybody ever be sent to jail for fiction? Why? What does that accomplish? At best, we've prevented something from happening that we had no way of knowing would actually happen, punished a theoretical crime. Good job?

Anyway, long story short, Handley's been in legal hell since '06. Jerked around and manipulated by clueless law enforcement (an ad for Gaogaigar was used against him, I kid you not), yesterday he finally put in a guilty plea, finishing the government's long work of wrecking his life. He could be put away for up to 15 years for comic books. This is insane.

As fans of anime and manga, and under the insanely strict standards applied to Handley, I wouldn't be surprised if all of us have something that could be deemed obscene by an overzealous postal inspector. I've got my Koike comics, mainstream fans have their sexualized teenagers, and the moe fans have, well.. everything. How many jails would we need to fit everybody who ever bought that Hellsing volume where the Nazi vampire takes a big ol' bite out of a baby? It's child abuse, you know! So, yeah, it's draconian madness and all, but let's stay safe. Let's all not order any comics from Japan for a while, okay? Especially if we're in Iowa. Hell, if I was in Iowa I'd be getting around to burying my comic books under the earth forever about now. Write your representative, give to the CBLDF. Listen to Neil Gaiman.

(note: I am an hour from Book-Off NYC and sacrifice nothing by this course of action)

What pisses me off is that while the government is wasting its time legislating fantasy and law enforcement is wasting its time on hunting witches, children are hurt, abused and violated in this country. Actual children. What positive goal does putting Handley away achieve for us as a society? I just don't see one. The way I see it, the people doing this are just doing it so they can feel better about themselves, so they can say they "protected the children". The children in question, of course, are imaginary: but then, we seem unable to tell the difference anymore. Mission accomplished!

Welcome to Subatomic Brainfreeze From Bandai (TM)

Hi guys! As you may know, I'm an unemployed college student rapidly approaching the end of his happy-go-lucky, good-times, care-free life. As such, instead of going out and getting a real job, I've decided to sell out my life's work, this website, to the great people over at Namco Bandai. From now on, think of every post as just a little bit sponsored (TM Namco Bandai 2009).

One of the things I really love about Bandai is their brands. They've got so many of them! Have you guys seen an anime called Lucky Star? I haven't, but I hear it's the sensation destination right now with the kids! Whether they're engaging in your favorite activities or engaging in your favorite activities to watch high school girls engage in, how could these wacky children not capture your heart? Try out Lucky Star from Bandai Entertainment, now in limited edition box sets. I'll be signing copies at the Virgin Megastore in Times Square later today!

Have I talked to you guys about all the dead Bandai Visual USA stock my friends have got here? Listen, I've got a whole stash of premium anime, and all you guys are invited. But please, if you're going to come to this party (Virgin Megastore, Times Square) then come with some cash. I'm talking premium anime, and that privilege doesn't come cheap. You may have misunderstood BVUSA's sales strategy. The former Bandai Visual wasn't trying to overprice this anime. They weren't even trying to make money: they were just trying to keep it in the hands of the truly worthy. A lot of great anime gets released for reasonable prices these days, and they eventually end up in the bargain bin, where bottom-feeders and worse, used buyers scramble to desecrate them. This will never be the fate of premium anime. In the end, Bandai Visual USA died for your sins, but it's not too late to make penance! Come by and I'll hook you up with all the Galaxy Angel II you're willing to pay full retail price for! You'll be the coolest guy in your local anime club when you tell everybody you've got premium anime that they can never borrow or watch or rebroadcast without the express written consent of Bandai Visual USA. It's dappon!

So, like I was saying, come down to the Virgin Megastore at Times Square today. Johnny Yong Bosch and I will have set up a little table and we'll be signing pretty much anything you bring us, provided you  buy three of your favorite Bandai Visual USA titles or Bandai Entertainment deluxe box sets. We'll even be giving away free vacations to Easter Island courtesy of Bandai Visual and Emotion! Hours are from noon to "???": when me, Bandai, and the Bosch get a party going, not even God himself knows when we'll be done.

PS Bandai: How much do I have to blog to get an Urban Material Chogokin Mazinger Z?

(In this spirit, I heard that Akiyuki Shinbo comes over to your house and gives you ten bucks if you link to the to the Natsu no Arashi webpage. Taking care of that riiiight now. Don't worry, Bandai, I will send you five.)