Subatomic Brainfreeze

On Read Or Die's new Yomiko: IT COULD BE A LOT WORSE

A lot of people I follow on Twitter are a little upset. Remember Read or Die? It was a really fun OVA series from the early 00s about a bibliophile secret agent who could manipulate paper.

It's still fondly remembered, in part due to the obvious nerd-fantasy appeal of the protagonist: she's the "cute, meek librarian" type to a tee.

So here's the Yomiko from the new ROD manga. Everybody's really pissed off about it, even though this is the only image that exists, because it's such a tremendous departure. Yomiko was one of anime's only reasonably dressed heroines, you know. I consider the new Yomiko offensive myself, but mostly because of how blatantly unoriginal this new character design is: the guy who drew Black Rock Shooter should sue!

They're trading common nerd fantasy X (the librarian, old Yomiko) for the new cutting-edge nerd fantasy straight off the Nicovideo weekly top ten. I bet the new Yomiko will be aloof, depressed and robotic. But you know, as bad as it is in cartoons, it can always get worse. As such, I decided to write a little something.

"Taro Toshokan is just an ordinary Japanese high-schooler-- until a girl falls from the Sadness Dimension into his life and changes everything!

"Are you the one who will call me into a new, ecstatic despair? Read it slowly and gently... Yomiko's heart."

This girl wants to organize Taro's shelves, literally and figuratively! But the movement of books is the least of Taro's concerns, because when a new twintailed menace appears from the Gate of Disenchantment, Taro's going to find out fast that he's got to read... or die!"

So be glad you aren't watching that anime I just made up in ten minutes. Japanese media companies, if you're paying, I'll write it.

Comipo is just a toy, and that's okay BUT THERE ARE SOME KEY POINTS THEY'RE MISSING

So I became a webcomic author this past week. Of course, I've no artistic talent and no hope of being as good as the webcomics I like. But never mind all that. I realized I could do a webcomic, and moments after that realization came the comic itself. It's only been a week but it's drawing a tiny Tumblr audience, and these comics are easy enough to make that hey, sure, I can do this for a while. Let's see what happens, right?t The plot summary follows.

"MASAKA THE YOUNG LADY OF HIGH SPIRITS. MAJIDE THE KNOWING OF MYSTERY. THEIR ADVENTURES IN GAMING KINGDOM IT BEGINS TO MOVE WITH LAUGHTER AND E KIMOCHI"

The program I'm making this in is called Comipo, and make no mistake, it's a toy. It works for my purposes-- because I'm making an absurd 4-panel gag comic written in Bad Scanlation English-- but this program isn't going to magically crank out pro-quality work for you. That's not what it's about. That's kind of why my comic is the way it is. Play to the tool you're working with, right?

The fundamental idea of Comipo is that rather than drawing characters (which we all know is totally hard and stuff), we manipulate 3D models and 2D images into the comic we've had in mind. Really simple images like the print club-style avatar I use for the Tumblr (seen above) come out in minutes. All this one involved was picking out facial expressions from a menu, and a little tilting of the models to make it look natural. Working with the models is easy and smooth and fun: you just have to be careful with zooming and expanding the models, as the black cel-shaded lines can come out looking rough and choppy depending on how the character is posed.

You can import any image you like into the comic, but Comipo's very extensive library of premade backgrounds and sound effects actually cover quite a lot of ground. I don't use the many supplied photo backgrounds, for the most part: I think the clash between 3D models and live images is too distracting, especially when they're supposed to be directly interacting with those backgrounds. I use effects and patterns, and Comipo also has a truckload of those.

The characters I'm using for the comic are the exact same as Comipo's default characters. The thing is, you see... you really can't get very far from these defaults. Comipo uses just two base bodies, a male and a female. The two characters you see above share the same body, and there's no adjusting body type or other physical features. The second female model, meant to be a teacher, is the same girl body in a schoolteacher's outfit. The male models are the same way.

In short, in the world of Comipo everybody is made of different parts swapped onto the same two doll bodies. And they're all moe-style highschoolers with only hairstyles and eye colors to separate them. (The guys are really half-assed: imagine a "make your own boring, nondescript lead of a harem anime" generator.) Again, there isn't a huge variety of those distinguishing factors either, and the more characters you try and make with Comipo the more obvious it is that they all look just like each other.

Poses and facial expressions are better, but here there's interface trouble as you have to slog through a long list to get close to the one you need. I've already started to make note of the numbers of useful poses (like the above). While time-intensive, a manual posing option would be nice for people who really want to work this program hard.

Your subject matter is pretty severely limited by all these factors: it's cutesy high-school comedy or go home. The more strenuous the posing you put these models through, the weirder they start to look. Obviously the biggest request by Comipo users has been the ability to import other 3D models into the program-- the vast world of Miku Miku Dance models will make this very interesting when it finally makes its way into the English version of the program.

As it stands, Comipo is absolutely not worth $50 unless you're just that curious, which I was after toying with the free demo. $25 is the absolute highest this should be going for. With a little more variety and freedom this toy could be a vast playground, but as it is it's a walled-in high school. Of course, that doesn't matter much to me: I already have more than enough here to make the Kawaiikochans go on for a decade or three. But then, I never said I was an ambitious creator!

Jmanga.com - A BAD DEAL I REALLY DON'T WANT TO REFUSE, BUT PROBABLY WILL ANYWAY

For the last few months we've been hearing from Japanese manga publishers that they're going to try and stem the massive (and very profitable) tide of online manga piracy with a legal solution of their own. This sounds good in theory, but then jmanga.com was unveiled. I wanted this to work out, but I'll put it bluntly: this system isn't going to fly.

Jmanga offers online manga in English at steep prices: on average $2 a chapter a la carte, with full books coming out to anywhere from $8 to $11. These are the same prices we would pay for a brand-new manga volume in a US bookstore, and double to triple the cost of the average small Japanese volume. In exchange for that high price, Jmanga offers no actual advantages. You can't actually download the comic-- it must be read at jmanga.com and at jmanga.com only-- so it's hard to say that you even really "own" the book you bought. If jmanga were to ever go down, and it's hardly guaranteed that this site will stick around long, you wouldn't be able to enjoy any of the stuff you'd paid for.

What's worse is that you can't even "buy" manga right away. First you have to become a subscriber. $10 gets you a one-month subscription and 1000 "points" (since it's launch, you get 1500 right now): basically jmanga's Fun Bucks that correspond directly to dollars and cents. Once you're subscribed, you're treated to the option of buying more points, in case you want to read more than one book in the month.

Free members have a small amount of free content available to them: however, "free previews" of titles are strictly limited to under ten pages. This includes the cover, table of contents, and so on. I kid you not. As such, the previews are completely unhelpful: one I read (Gokudo Meshi) was over before anything even happened. jmanga claims that free members will be handed out small amounts of points, but I can't imagine theyd be able to do much but save up for weeks until they could read a single chapter of a title.

Keep in mind that just next door to this stifling system are at least four or five major, free manga reader sites that illegally provide more manga than you could read in a lifetime and rake in the cash via advertising. Jmanga does not have a chance against these sites, and they've proven that without major legal action, they're not going anywhere. Hell, Mangafox is so flagrant that they've even opened a bootleg merchandise shop.

Plus, yes, a lot of fans fundamentally aren't into the idea of supporting what they like. Hanging out at the Vertical table at Otakon, a girl came by oh-so-excited that Chi's Sweet Home was on the table. She gushed about how cute it was and that she loved it and so on, but when it came to "great, wanna buy it?" she started to waffle and told the folks manning the table that, well, she was saving up for something else at the con, you know how it is, etc. Finally she let it out: "I just read Chi online! But I'm so happy to see it here! Bye!" And she bounded away. She probably didn't even know she was saying "fuck you".

In this market, with this audience, a model like jmanga's isn't going to work anymore. Not in the West, not on the Internet, not in 2011. Even if we're talking about legal choices, Netflix gives you a library of media big enough for several lifetimes for $8 a month. Crunchyroll gives you a massive Japanese library for $8 a month. And people are going to pay $10 for a single volume of Japanese comics in this age of infinite entertainment for anyone with an Internet connection? It doesn't make any sense.

Unfortunately for me, there's a lot of content on jmanga that is exactly what I am interested in. The site boasts healthy selections well beyond just the shounen and shoujo stuff that dominates the racks at Barnes and Noble: really unusual stuff, like manga about a woman who finds herself as a pro dog-walker and a guy who goes around eating bento boxes at different Japanese train stations. It's material so niche you could only sell it digitally... but unfortunately, they want to do it at $10 a digital book.

Did I mention that there's a huge amount of decades-old work from Golgo 13 author Takao Saito?

It's really frustrating to be an manga/anime fan who actually gives a shit about supporting the creators and their work, because Japanese companies go through so much to make that difficult for us. Time and again we've seen Japanese companies attempt to enter the foreign manga/anime markets their way, sticking to high prices and premium membership plans: strategies that are proven not to work in the West. When $50 DVDs and "spend even more!" point programs don't work, the companies in charge say "Well, they just weren't interested" and walk away.

But we know it's not that, because I was just in Baltimore with 30,000 people (of whom I'll charitably say 20,000 actually cared about manga and anime) who paid out the nose just to be with other people who shared that interest, just to share a space and be passionate. So don't give me this "they weren't interested" shit, Japan. We may be some of the problem, but we aren't all of the problem. If nothing changes, Jmanga will simply wind up the next Raijin Comics. I loved Raijin. It still failed.

Let's play Mahjong Videogames: USAGI

Since I became infatuated with Japanese mahjong about a year ago, I've just been digging and digging for related material. I've got bookmarked searches on Nicovideo, I'm always clearing out the $1 Kindai Mahjong manga section at Book-Off, and I often find myself looking for mahjong videogames despite the fact that the best online MJ client is just a click away. This kind of thing is just what otaku do.

Anyway, there was a website a couple years back called Mahjong in MAME. The arcade emulator constantly adds new stuff, and there must have been a severe glut in the 80s and 90s, because in almost every update MAME used to add a bunch of mahjong games. They were mostly incomprehensible to the audience, so this site saw and filled the "educate the masses on mahjong videogames" niche. Now it's been a long time since that site was active, and as I find myself digging though mahjong roms in MAME these days, I thought I'd give writeups a shot.

For those of you who maybe were at our panel (I plan to run it again at a certain upcoming convention, but Carl's far, far away) or stumbled upon my old "help with learning" posts, I want to make a note. Do not learn mahjong on arcade mahjong games (unless you're in Japan and on Sega MJ or Fight Club in which case you don't really need me, do you?). Use proper simulations instead: there are plenty. These arcade games are strictly curiosities, and those who know me know too well that I am a curious man.

So, that said, here is Usagi. This is a game by Warashi-- if they're known for anything it's probably for their shooters, like Shienryu and Trigger Heart Excelica-- based on the manga by Makoto Itou (no relation), a regular $1 Book-Off pickup of mine. I will allow the English blurb on the back of the book to explain for me:

FIGHT LIKE A WILD ANIMALS!
A MAHJONG GROUP "ZOO"
BY HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS
GOING INTO ACTION!!

 

So that's what it's about. You play standard mahjong rounds (East-only) with a few twists. First, this is a team match. The character you see in the middle of the screen is your partner, and likewise the players to your left and right are allied against you. This creates some interesting dynamics. For example, dealing into your teammate is not a disaster. All the points go to them, after all, and that just means you've exchanged points amongst yourselves for no actual gain. It's also a way to end a round quickly when you get the feeling the other team has something good and you want to deny them their points.

Second, the characters are all nicknamed for animals (the title Usagi is the name of the protagonist, who is in the above screenshot) and as such they have certain in-game powers that seem to come up at random. If you're playing the title character, for example, the game will tell you what tiles are dangerous. I recommend picking Jackal (the blonde girl) as your partner. She'll probably win for you!

There are two Usagi arcade games which I haven't bothered distinguishing between: MAME runs the first, which runs on PS1 hardware, but I've taken my screenshots from the sequel, which runs on the Naomi board. The game has weird input problems on my setup (the D and L buttons just do not work for some reason and there's nothing I can do about it) but I used it for screenshots on account of the beautiful high-resolution art. As always in the grey area of emulation, finding the goods is 100% your responsibility. Happy Googling!

Yotsuba&: THINK LIKE A CHILD, MANCHILD

(I didn't realize the Manga Movable Feast was going on until a few hours ago, so this is going under the wire. I will begin with the words of a great man.)

"The emptier your head is, the more room there is for dreams!"

-Hironobu Kageyama

There is a mindset that runs throughout Kiyohiko Azuma's Yotsuba&!. It's a simple comic about a strange little girl (she says she comes from "the left") who, every chapter, experiences something mundane and injects it with joy.

And that's it. There isn't a central plot to concentrate on, and the only real mystery-- the green-haired Yotsuba's origin-- is ignored. If you need to know where Yotsuba came from or what things will be like in five years in the Koiwai household, your mind's not in the place that Azuma wants you to be.

The tagline of Yotsuba&! is simply "Enjoy everything." Stop for a second. We're all overloaded with stimuli: the first piece is gone and replaced with a fresh signal too fast for us to appreciate it. Allow yourself to be impressed. One doesn't have to regress towards childhood to simply remember joy, to try and look at the world through its eyes.

Since Yotsuba&! runs in an explicitly otaku-targeted magazine, and because this is an otaku blog, and because if you ask me, the world is going otaku, think about your relationship with media. Geeks of all stripes are in a unique place in this decade: the Internet has absolutely exploded our access. Between a Netflix subscription, Hulu, online retailers, and my hard drive, there is far more video content immediately available to me, right this second, than I can ever possibly finish in my lifetime. My videogame collection contains another several lifetimes.

And that's if I just plopped down on the couch (or perhaps, in ten years, some kind of gigantic, soundproof Facebook-compatible media bubble) and spent the rest of my time as a terrible mockery of life, a media glutton. If our theoretical couch potato's mind is just on getting through it, will the poor spud ever actually get any happiness out of the images flashing in front of his eyes? Isn't beauty worth a pause?

This is one of the reasons I started blogging, actually. I realized how much time I was spending on things like this, so often without really appreciating them. I felt that without pulling anything back out into the world from the experience, without engaging in a conversation, I was just wasting that time. So now otaku culture and I have this friendly arrangement where I try to look deeply and contribute. I think I get more out of the things I love now than I ever did before.

When a new volume of Yotsuba&! comes in, I'm enthusiastic but I try to take it slow. I let my eyes linger on the average, beautiful places Azuma wants to show us. I let myself laugh: at the end of the chapter about making a cake, I just put the book down and fell down laughing for a few minutes. It was all I could do. Yotsuba&! may not have a plot, but it does have a message, one it shows much more often than it tells. It is contagious, and it is something we need to remember.

Otakon 2010: Saturday and Sunday - STILL DOIN' THANGS

Alright guys, let's see if I still remember. Saturday morning I was hitting the dealer's and game rooms again, getting breakfast, waiting for Space Show.

Welcome to the Space Show was probably the biggest thing going on at the con as far as I cared: it's a new movie by the Read or Die and Kamichu staff. I dunno about it: it wants to be a kids' movie but really it's an animator's movie, and the animators overindulge themselves severely while the plot and characters lie mostly forgotten over two and a half hours. When the movie tries to take itself seriously at the end, it just lands with a thud.

It was also one of the few times I've ever seen a kids' movie actually make a character out of the pedophile in the audience: thankfully they only kept the outright fawning over a seven-year-old to a few scenes but it's really creepy. I don't think they'd be able to give this one a theatrical run in the states. Hope they weren't looking for one!

As the credits rolled for Space Show and we walked out of the theater, we heard an alarm. Now I'd heard a lot of things during Space Show through the thin walls-- the Yoshida Brothers unwittingly contributing some totally harsh shamisen solos to the film's score, the Hetalia fangirls squealing at the top of their lungs for no particular reason-- so I'm thinking "this is just another noise". As you might already be aware, it was in fact a fire alarm. The real thing. We were very calmly and efficiently moved out of the place, though it was seriously hard not to laugh-- even with the possibility of life-threatening danger in my mind-- when the staffer directing me out had fuzzy cat ears on his head.

None of us died, but I might have if I'd had to spend any time with all 30,000 of my fellow meme-yelling Otakon attendees standing out on the same city block. I retreated as fast as I reasonably could to the hotel room, where we all tried to figure out what the hell was going on in the aftermath of the evacuation. The official word was that "a fire alarm was pulled", which isn't very illuminating. Most likely scenario? Some kid pulled it on purpose. Could have been an accident, of course, but the former is more likely. Other scenarios that were going around at the time included basement fires and people in heavy costumes passing out from heat exhaustion. We'll probably never know the whole thing.

To their credit, Otakon and the fire department took care of this situation very quickly. We were all back in the building in an hour, when I'd expected the scare to put us out for at least two, if not three.

Around this time I had to cover the modeling competition for ANN and here's how that went. This is not an event that tends to get any major website coverage, so I thought it would be cool to use what little power I have as The Toy Guy and give it a little attention. Models are kinda like toys.

Unfortunately, after covering the contest I couldn't make it in for AWO's panel scheduled a little later: they were full long before they started anyway.

After that I spent a couple of hours talking with an old friend by the terrace as what Surat might call "THE TRUTH" took place all around us. While I was waiting for her and watching the people around me, I realized I just kind of hated the con crowd. I hadn't really had extended contact up until this point of the day, because I was always in transit from one event to the other or hanging out someplace with friends.

Sitting by the terrace, I got to see that yes, somebody on the con floor really would scream an internet meme as loud as their lungs could manage every two or three minutes, usually followed by ten more kids doing the same. The worst was the self-propagating "buttscratcher" scream, followed closely by impromptu games of Marco Polo. People aren't exaggerating when they tell you about this: the first couple times you brush it off and say "oh, kids", but they never, ever stop. The worst was when I was crossing the bridges, because there were so many people in such a concentrated space. Their voices-- from right behind me-- bounced off the walls, back and forth into my ears, over and over again. It's a serious annoyance.

It's irritating to the point where people wanted an (unenforceable) ban on such behavior even before the con, and it's just what happens whenever anybody has an anime convention anywhere. Otakon is actually pretty strict on annoying anime fan stuff: signs, yaoi paddles and (pre-emptively, after they were rampant at Anime Expo) vuvuzelas were banned as anime fans immediately demonstrated that they could be absoutely fucking unbearable with any one of these implements.

For whatever reason, a lot of the people who will go to anime cons are dead set on being as obnoxious as the con will let them get away with. This is why New York Anime Fest, which has no such rules, can be such a horrifying picture, for example. Signs are everywhere and getting in the way, people are whipping out live steel that they bought in the dealer's room in the middle of a crowded convention hall (someone's going to lose a limb at NYAF and I sincerely hope it isn't me), and the kids are running, screaming and crashing into each other the whole time.

THE TRUTH is the truth. It's not fair to just blame this on the kids, because they're not the only guilty parties. Many anime fans, especially the con-going ones, are just inherently obnoxious. Hell, a lot of con-goers don't even care that much about anime. You can't just make all these people wake up in the morning and decide they're not annoying as hell. They're here to scream unfunny memes and go to the rave, they're here to stay, and they are probably in the majority. This bums me out when the Madhouse panel is barely occupied, but the numbers are not going to change. We've got to live with the nerds we've got, and thankfully they're not all bad.

That said, I didn't really have the kind of strange encounters this weekend that I've had in past years, like Morrigan-who-really-shouldn't-be-wearing-that trying to pick me up, or a grown man not understanding why my friends and I won't vacate the our hotel room so he can bring a 15-year-old girl in for sex, or anything like that. I guess the more downtime you spend at these cons, the more likely something is to go down.

I dropped by wah's panel on Akiyuki Shinbo for a bit but I had to go for uh, reasons, and then we all looked for lunch on the harbor, which was impossible. Thank god for California Tortilla, the only damn fast food place in the area brave enough to remain open past 10 or so. The food was okay, but the important thing was that they were open. We saw some drunk guys, not con-goers, throw water bottles at each other in the line. I also crushed wah's Japanese girlfriend t-shirt dream somewhere in there.

After dinner it was off to drink a bathtub full of Yuengling's at Dave and Joel's party. I believe I'm in Erin's audio of the event for about a few minutes making fun of Ageha magazine with Clarissa and Gerald from AWO. This was very relaxed, despite a physically packed room. It was great to chat up all these people I've been having so many online conversations with in person and, of course, over a couple drinks. That's when the best conversation comes, don't you think?

Dave asked me what my Otakon Dream was and I'd had enough to drink that my answer was obviously "even more to drink!". So I got more to drink, except I just passed out (in an orderly fashion, okay!) in the hotel room when I got there. In the end we just left the extra booze as part of our tip (I actually gave the mousepad to Vertical later) to the wait staff on Sunday morning. Hope you guys enjoyed the Black and Tan!

Sunday is pretty much Out Out Out day: I hit up the dealer's room, scoring a Giant Robo cel and a Megazone 23 Part II poster. I hadn't bought anything all weekend, but the seller that always comes by with cels and 80s/90s posters just broke me. If I'd been weaker I'd have bought one MORE of each, especially that cel from-- NO IF I SAY YOU'LL BUY IT

I dropped my stuff off with Ed at the Vertical table and headed off to the Home Made Kazoku concert. The first thing they played was Shonen Heart, and the press people I was with immediately ran up to the front to snap pictures. Mine all suck, unfortunately, but man, I was up there, and I love that song! It was great! The HMKU guys were a lot of fun, and I regret not being able to stay the whole show (they did Thank You at the end, a song my VF bros got me hooked on back then), but that's how Sunday is. Everybody's really got to get the hell out.

(Anyway, if you're gonna get people who did Naruto theme songs, I would love to see Sambomaster do a con show. You know they'd say yes, Otakon. You know they'd pack the house, and their show is guaranteed to kill.)

We loaded up the Komobile and were on our way. Before actually leaving Baltimore we went and got BBQ at Chaps, which is next to a strip joint, across from a porn warehouse, a few buildings from a cheap motel, and absolutely delicious. The platter is a spectacular combination of the meat of your choice, fries, bread, and enough gravy to make everything melt together into a delicious semi-solid. It was the only thing I ate that day and I still couldn't make it through all those fries. Just be careful what trash can you use: here there be flies.

Despite doing quite a bit of sleeping in the car, I just put down everything and passed out in bed once I got home like I always do. Being so busy and getting so little sleep (I'd say four or five hours a night) for a full weekend really beats you up, not to mention all the drinking I did on Saturday night. A few days later I was sick, and I heard all my roomies got sick too. This is another sacrifice of living well at an anime con. If you get sick, that just means you maxed out. Just like I'm hung over on this fine Sunday!

So yeah, Otakon went great this year. Not Jam Project great, but great. You can tell I only participated in a few of the events, and not a lot of the big ones, but I still had an awesome time. The con's so big that it's hard not to figure something out you're going to enjoy. It's also so big that half my Internet friends on the east coast were present, and I got to hang out with people I hadn't seen in a really long time. There are a lot of reasons to go, even if the con still doesn't announce anything until it's way too late. I'm already in the process of booking a room for next time.

Otakon 2010: Thursday and Friday - DOIN' THANGS

This year at Otakon was different from any other time I've been to the convention, in many ways. The things I went around doing, how I got there, who I was hanging with was different. Everything, really. It feels funny.

First I should mention the commute: I got a ride in the Vertical car, in case you guys want to throw my objectivity into question. Ko (who just left NYC, we all miss him!) drove me, Vertical marketing man Ed Chavez, the Ninja Consultants, and Vertical's Otakon stock five hours both ways, the poor bastard. I guess that's the life of an intern. Anyway, I've got to thank these guys for being good company over a long trip: only my legs felt the time pass.

We made a little stop at Waffle House for some hash browns n' biscuits on the way in. Waffle House food is just okay, but it's a pretty big deal for a Yank like me. We just don't have those places up here at all, and I still get all excited like a tourist if I see one. It's kind of stupid, but oh man hash browns and biscuits. I make no apologies.

Our ride arrived in Baltimore at midnight on Thurdsay after a brief tour of gas stations, liquor stores, and stoops with 30 guys (and also, frequently, babies) sitting out front. By the time I got into the hotel room everybody was asleep, and I plopped out on the floor right away. This was a blogger hotel room, by the way: the Reverse Thieves, Carl from Ogi Maniax, Patz from Insert-Disc, and Evan from Ani-Gamers were on our side of the room. Greetings would have to wait until morning.

We all woke early, and Carl and I had work to do in the form of our mahjong panel. (Carl had picked up my badge Thursday evening, as I wouldn't have been able to myself.) I'm not even really used to the idea of having work to do in the first place at one of these things: much as I enjoy doing a million panels at I-Con, for example, my panels there are only about 50% prepared-for (and in the case of the many "let's fill up time with Dave" panels, no prep at all).

Carl and I dropped by the panel room about a half hour early to make sure our AV setup would be alright. (I should note that our AV guy was extremely helpful. Thanks a lot.) We later found out that this was the smallest panel room in the place, but it felt intimidatingly large. We were a little worried that not nearly enough people would care about our little panel to fill the seats, especially given what I had previously described as a "death slot" in the schedule.

Well, as it turned out Otakon was completely correct to put us where we were. We packed the room with standing room on the sides, and the crowd seemed to really enjoy the panel. My heartfelt thanks to everybody who was interested enough to come by. I have a post in the can that discusses the mahjong panel at greater length, but it's supposed to go somewhere, you get me?

After our panel I swung by the remainder of the Vertical industry panel (just Ed readin' off the release schedule) and the first fifteen minutes or so of Madhouse's presentation. Unfortunately, as you know, the juicy stuff is always at the end of those, and I had to break out to cover something (the piece never ran; no comment).

Anyway, three or so wasted hours later I tried to make it to veteran voice actor Yuji Mitsuya's Q&A, but by the time I arrived, he'd already left early. My biggest regret of the whole con was not getting to hear from this guy: I heard that he was a lot of fun and that very few people were around. This is understandable, considering even really hardcore anime fans in the West likely don't know his name. I joined up with everybody in the aftermath of the Mitsuya panel and then broke off and walked freely about the con, bumping into friends as I went.

Along the way I found myself in the game room. I really like how Otakon does game rooms. Rather than a million setups of the same damn games everybody is already playing at home (though if you really must play Super SF4 and DDR at the anime con they are there), Otakon gives a lot of space to more unusual, lesser-loved, and unknown titles that many people at the con have never seen before. It is kind of an exhibit, if you love 90s Japanese videogames like I do. I wish I'd been around the room a little more: I only played X-Men vs. Street Fighter for two minutes on a Saturn, thinking "I'll come back later!" I never made the time.

The dealer's room was pretty dull, but that's how anime con dealer's rooms are these days. Same stuff, on account of everybody buying from the same distributors. It's either the same ten Revoltech/Figmas, annoying nerd slogan t-shirts, or swords. Also I heard some of them sell anime/manga, but there's not a lot of money in that these days.

There aren't any deals, and when I do see "sales" it's from places that bought HLJ's sale items in bulk and are passing on the shipping costs and markup to you. Speaking of which, where was HLJ? I always make a beeline for them at cons: now those guys will cut you a deal on your magical girl Arcueid figures, I tell ya what.

Who wasn't in the dealer's room for Otakon painted a pretty grim picture, actually. Vertical was the sole manga publisher, for example, and manga's not even their whole business!

Erin organized a kinda-picnic in a nice spot overlooking the Harbor, and though I told myself I was just going to stick around for a little and then go see the Yoshida Brothers concert, I felt lazy and I just stayed there enjoying everyone's company. And also apples. By "everyone" I mean a lot of other people with websites: the AWO crew, Mike Toole, Dave and Joel.

Afterwards it was off to Mike's "cult anime" panel, which was actually about anime produced by cults. Hits  like Laws of Eternity really got the crowd going. Mike had his pick from material that is mostly dull but has amazing moments here and there, especially the Happy Science stuff. This particular cult makes liberal use of figures from history in their movies and ultimately puts forth the idea that Christ and Moses and everybody in every religious tradition is a previous incarnation of the cult leader. Compression does this material good, because actually sitting through these movies is excruciating.

After that was through I dropped in on the latter part of Carl's panel about (guess) Ogiue, and troubled him greatly with the eternal Genshiken question: if Sasahara is the author in his early otaku phase and Ogiue is the author as a frustrated artist, isn't Kio Shimoku just in love with himself? I expect that this will be the subject of Carl's eventual dissertation.

Once that panel was over, I realized that by not picking up an 18+ wristband when I had the chance, I couldn't, uh, go to panels anymore. So I just went to bed. Lame, right? I guess I was saving my party for Saturday.

A Saturday/Sunday post is forthcoming but probably not for a couple of days.

Let's BUY SIGIKKI PRODUCTS

I have already noted that I'm enjoying Viz's Sigikki experiment. They run comics on the site now, they sell them in sweet deluxe volumes later. Yes, this means that a deliciously ironic prestige edition of future camp classic Afterschool Charisma is on shelves right now. The books have been coming out and I'm starting to buy them as my limited resources will allow. This system is the compromise between the readers and the publishers that everybody says the publishers need to undertake to stay alive in the future, and to their credit Viz is doing it 100% right.

So you can imagine how awesome it must feel to load up the Ikki website and see this comment on the page for Q Hayashida's Dorohedoro, a smart, vicious, and very funny fantasy action manga:

"Honestly, this manga not very good. I got hooked and marathoned all 85 "Curse[s]" I could find fan-subbed and this story really goes nowhere fast. By curse 85 the series seems to have way overshot a natural feeling ending and still there is no real ending to the story in sight. It feels as if the author is writing the story as she goes and doesn't know how she wants it to end."

You can do everything right, and not only will people screw you, they'll tell you they did and say it sucked anyway. Stay classy, fandom.

(At this rate I'm probably going to end up finishing Eden scanlated, huh...)

I-Con 29 report: Stony Brook now understands THE TRUE MEANING OF DANGER

I can say with authority that two roomfuls of attendees at I-Con 29 experienced Danger, radiated directly from Japanese animation into their skulls. We're talking about mortal danger here. It was serious. I am serious.

I don't remember a ton of I-Con weekend, which is perhaps why this con report is so long in coming. After a couple of full days running around Stony Brook on four hours of sleep and too much caffiene, I was pretty wasted. Most of this just entailed running around with staff friends (I was technically staff myself this year) and taking care of things: for a time I checked ID outside a showing of Masami Obari's prided Viper GTS. I can't say I really hit any events, and the dealer's room was the same as it was last time I was there.

Actually, we had a talk at the Media Blasters table about how boring anime con dealer's rooms were these days: while currently deluged with anime fans, I-Con is an all-purpose SF con that covers many areas of geekery. As such, there are a lot of long-time dealers who don't necessarily sell anime stuff: tabletop gaming, discount SF novels, vintage toys and lots of other stuff were on offer. It leads to a variety that we don't see in anime con dealer's rooms anymore, which look terribly boring on account of everybody getting the same merchandise from the same two distributors. Still, money talks and from the amount of anime/manga vendors, it was pretty clear that the stuff was a serious force in this place.

(And the games were all really badly priced, and it's completely ridiculous what you people will pay for PS1 RPGs. Maybe a few years down the line I'll empty the collection of my teenage years and make a couple grand.)

Of course, a lot of my job over at I-Con is to fill in the space and help accommodate those big Wapanese crowds. To this end, I found myself sitting at more than one (okay, three) panels that, honest to God, exist to fill up space. I tell people this, of course: I'm about as pleased to be wasting their time as they are to be wasting it. But staff is overworked, there aren't enough presenters or panels, and we end up with these shoot-the-shit panels where we just have winding, nonsense conversations about whatever the vague title of the panel is. Before the 18+ panel on Saturday night I ran two of these in a row. NOT the Cosplay Panel! Life After Anime! It ends up like Fast Karate Live, I guess. The weird thing is our audiences always enjoy it and nobody ever walks out. I dunno.

Speaking of panels, the people who ran the Anime Jeopardy panel actually ran into a showing of Eva 1.11 that I was present at and loudly urged the audience to leave the showing and go to their panel, which was running concurrently, instead. Even among con kids-- for whom the standard of class is "ask permission before squealing at the top of your lungs, running headlong down a hallway, and dive attacking a stranger"-- this qualifies as a classless move. For shame. Eva 1.11 was fine, but I'm not sure there's a point to Eva the super robot anime with the feel-good ending, no matter how badly everybody wanted it.

The Most Dangerous Anime panels were both huge successes: I think the audience already knows what they're getting with these panels-- a little context, a lot of laughs-- and I'm very happy to deliver. The titles for the general audience panel were episode four of Lost Universe (the famous Yashigani incident), School City Valanoir, a snippet of Gundress to complete the Yashigani set, and an hour-long digest of all the parts of Angel Cop with swearing and killing in them. Yes, Angel Cop is general-audience viewing by my standards. There aren't any kids in the room anyway.

Now the 18+ panel was really serious. I had a packed room on my hands before we even started-- this shocked and overwhelmed me-- and in a situation that would repeat itself, I didn't have a projector for the first twenty minutes of the panel. The audience really helped me out by running out and grabbing desks from the opposite room, and we squeezed everybody we could into the place as tight as possible until there was only sitting room up front.

The titles were Wounded Man and Butt Attack Punisher Girl, with handy clips from MD Geist and Angel Cop serving as intermissions between the main courses. Wounded Man was pretty much the first ep run through with breaks to explain Koike's madness, and with BAPG I just ran every interesting scene, which took the remaining hour. I had no intention of going out into the pornographic, even the crazy, nauseating shock value stuff-- the rest of the 18+ panels, from what I hear, had that covered-- but this stuff is obviously way too far gone to run during the day. The goal's not to gross you out, it's to blow your mind. My staffer buddy tells me I outdid actual porn showings, so I'm pretty happy.

It's nice doing these: people came up to me a couple of times to ask about where to get the anime, or about what my website was again, or to tell me that the panels were the best stuff they saw all weekend, and I'm obviously really glad to hear all that. Thanks to everybody who came by, and I hope to see you all again. Next year will be a challenge considering that on a bare production level, Valanoir is perhaps the shoddiest Japanese cartoon ever produced. You don't top that, you have to take a new direction altogether. Look forward to it!

The Sunday Game Center CX panel was a disaster on account of my AV setup not appearing until 30 minutes into an hour-long panel. I filled up the time talking about GCCX and was able to run late (I went with the Mystery of Atlantis episode), but still, the few people who came for this mostly left and overall I'd call it a failure.

I would have liked to play the game tourneys, but my panels were scheduled against all of them. Judging by a couple hours in the game room late Friday night, I'm pretty sure I would have won Blazblue. Signs and glomping and stuff were out in force: like the guys at Poly, I-Con needs some good excuse to formally get rid of them. I was starting to see the people who just park in the hall with the signs all weekend, and that's not just pathetic, it's a roadblock. So maybe next year!

Probably the most tragicomic thing I saw all weekend was when a pair of teen girls begged the used games dealer to pay them a dollar to make out. The guy replied that he wasn't interested in going to jail.

I remember little else: even though I was mostly just nerding around, we were really back and forth all day and all night with hardly a break in between. By the end of the weekend I was sleep-deprived, overdosed on caffeine and exhausted. I nearly fell asleep at Five Guys, you know, and those burgers are really good!

Mahjong anime and manga THAT YOU CAN GET IN ENGLISH

Want manga/anime about mahjong? What the hell, I can do that. Here's a list post. I just posted about Mudazumo: mahjong isn't really the point here, this is just hilarious. There's the Akagi anime, obviously, which all people should watch. The manga is being scanned, but be warned that Akagi has been stuck on the mahjong equivalent of Planet Namek for years, and because the comic keeps Kindai Mahjong magazine alive, it literally cannot end.

The title that introduced and popularized the character of Akagi, Fukumoto's Ten, has been scanslated in its entirety. This should keep you busy for a long time. I would not recommend reading this unless you know mahjong: it's very much the same situation as the shonen fight manga tournament arc. After the first few books, these characters simply sit down and play mahjong against each other until the comic becomes The Akagi Show for a fantastic final arc and then just ends flat. It's very dry, lacks much of Akagi's atmosphere and tension, and is only really interesting if you already care about the game. People who want to see Ten animated probably just mean "the end of Ten," which starts around chapter 137.

I have watched all of Legendary Gambler Tetsuya and I really didn't like it much. You know that shonen manga trope where they cut away to a spectator talking about how the hero is the most amazing person ever to live? They're constantly doing this with Tetsuya, but he never really impresses. He's got no character whatsoever: Tetsuya just wins as blandly as possible. This show is about cheating at mahjong, and he's still somehow boring. There's an episode where he waits for a single tile, draws the tile on the very last draw, and then is hailed as the greatest gambler of all time. It's not that uncommon, guys!

There's also Saki, which I ran through pretty fast recently, skipping the filler, the first five episodes, and other bullshit. Saki's about 80 percent moe/fanservice, 15 percent mahjong, and 5 percent Yu-Gi-Oh, so keep that in mind coming in. It's not incredibly sleazy, but "not incredibly sleazy" on the moe scale still means a bunch of closeups on a blushing girl's quivering thighs as she appears visibly aroused by another girl's mahjong power level.

This is a tiny enough niche in manga to begin with and even more so in anime. There's obviously still less material available in English. I'm pretty sure that I've actually listed everything here. You are now equipped to complete a genre. Kind of.