Anime!

When I got back into comics, I never had much of an urge to check out the manga, though I was eventually convinced by then-APA-mate Kyle to check out Galaxion. I liked it and it was probably the first bit of American manga I read. It wasn't for another couple years that I picked up my first manga volume. I was trying to learn more about shounen-ai comics and ran across Matt Thorn's website. From there I learned about Banana Fish and decided to check it out when my old comic shop had one of it's big sales.

I liked Banana Fish, but there was nothing else that looked like it on manga shelves so it was the only manga I read until a rep at a Viz comic con booth recommended Adolf. In seeking more shounen-ai, I checked out Kizuna OAVs (I didn't care for them and later had a Kizuna fan express disappointment in the video) and debated if I would be disappointed if I spent money on the Fake OAV (I am so glad that I didn't).

All three have plots centring around schoolgirls playing volleyball on the school team. Pretty standard sports-genre anime fare… the protagonists develop their skills over ridiculously long story arcs. Since they’re girls, there’s plenty of romance to go along with rivalries and game-related special skills and techniques.

Tis series take all the conventions that are associated with a harem anime series and adds a magical element to it. This would be pretty original if it wasn’t for the fact that they did the same thing back in the 80’s with Kimagure Orange Road, or more recently with Aki Katsu’s Psychic Academy. But that might not be bad thing. Being unoriginal doesn’t get you points from an intelligent point of view, but they sure can be fun to watch. And that’s exactly what this title is. Fun.

Now Mr Taylor, who has retired as a priest, now looks set to make another fortune. He is stepping into the story himself as narrator and main villain of Shadowmancer: The Comic. The middle-aged cleric has been given a dark new look by artists who design the graphically violent manga comics which in Japan are better read than many newspapers.

It had a pretty sad ending and…if I’m not mistaken, there’s also a lolita complex present there. I don’t really know, I just think the guy and the girl love each other when their ages are quite far apart. Almost all the anime I’ve been downloading so far has similar themes. o_o; Or maybe it’s just me thinking so.

Well, I finally got a chance to watch He is My Master. For those of you who have been following my blog, you’ll know that I’ve been bitching about how no one’s been fansubbing it. Well, three weeks later, someone finally did. So now I finally get to see the latest work from my homies over there at Gainax. I liked it, but I still have some very mixed feelings that need to be worked on.

Speaking of the actual art; the style I was going to use was a loose form of anime. I’d want to keep things fairly simple, yet have expressive faces to capture emotions and whatnot. Also, since the detail is simple (I don’t want to say lacking, because it really is beautiful in its own right), I can spend a hypothetical (at this point) four hours on a strip and have it look stunning. However, I decided to hold off on picking a style until I got some feedback. With that said, I pose a question: What style do you think would work best...

It gets even better. Aya, Manaka and Nishino together! Anyway, they try to setup a study group but two of Manaka’s classmates butt in and try to enjoy the fun, hence the nosebleed. How come Aya goes takes the exam with the same school as Manaka? Wasn’t she supposed to be taking exams in an all girls school? Is she following Manaka around.

We woke up Sunday hoping to see Travis Willingham, the voice of Col. Mustang from Fullmetal Alchemist. I had some merchandise for him to sign, but he was nowhere to be found. I later found out that he had a plane to catch earlier in the day, so I’ll just hopefully catch him another time. After this we got to see Rob Paulsen and George Lowe again. Mitch got Mr. Paulsen to record a phone message for him in the voice of Pinky. After Lowe, was the cosplay contest, which was O.K., but some of the acts were just boring. Anime Family Feud was next. Stay tuned to read about it…

Tsubasa's anime adaptation is still kind of dull a lot of the time - my attention really wandered a lot, and the flashbacks to the previous episodes were really quite unnecessary given how it's only the third one! I suspect most of this would be negated if I wasn't just letting most of the dialogue flow over my head. There were more plus points, though, this time round than last in my opinion - the animation was better (Kurogane's fight with the crappy green spikey blob looked good, even if it WAS a crappy green spikey blob) and I'm definitely...

I noted previously that the iTunes Music Store at first only had the German version of the Yu-Gi-Oh movie soundtrack. I just noticed that last week they finally added the American version. I still think there’s gotta be some wacky story behind that. I mean, first, why German? And then, with the American version, what the heck took them so long?

I am thrilled that I have finally found a few blogs that aren't boring and I actually don't mind reading all of. One of them was a Journal of a 13 year old that was completely nuts, I loved it, because that was totally me.. 7 years ago.. dear God! It made me miss the old times; going into the pokemon chats and talking nonsense to other people my age. It made me want to create a new handle and go into some random chat to talk about, nothing basically, just for a chance to be nutty again. And the other one surprisingly enough was about a guy who's...

At the local grocery store I saw a Pokemon game titled 'Ruby Edition'. Being the stupid geek that I am, I thoguht it might have something to do with Ruby the programming language.

Do u remember about eight years ago when POGS were the big craze? I know I definitely remember. I remember going to the flea market on the weekends with my mom and brother and searching all around for the coolest looking POGS. Now when I think back on it, it really doesn’t take much to entertain or excite a child. A lot of people believe that this craze was almost bigger than even pokemon. POGS was almost like a gambling game for kids, it was like an addiction. The game consisted of many large cardboard circles with designs on the front. To...

Interesting new twist on the Futakoi series. I’ve only seen the first episode of the original Futakoi series. From my impressions it seemed like a love story type anime. But this second installment is awesome. Where can you find cute girls with guns and all the action? Of course the characters still compose of twins. This was the first episode but it was already so action packed. The twins seemed the opposite of each other.

My favorite anime… I watch this every monday through wednesday on adult swim.

Long ago, in Japan’s era of the “Warring States,” a legendary doglike halfdemon called Inuyasha attempted to steal the Shikon Jewel, or the Jewel of Four Souls from a village. However he was stopped by the dying priestess Kikyo, who shot his with a magic arrow, putting him into a deep sleep.

The investigators have named the gene POKEMON (for POK Erythroid Myeloid Ontogenic factor).

Pokemon works by controlling the pathways that are required to transform normal cells to cancerous ones. The researchers found that when they “knocked out” the Pokemon gene in mice, that transformation was blocked and cells do not become cancerous.

“Pokemon is a main switch in the molecular network that leads toward cancer,” Dr. Pandolfi added. “If we could turn Pokemon off, it may block this oncogenic circuitry and stall the malignant process.”

Bleh, I’m so overheated. Damn this cruelly warm weather. >.< I want it to be 60s, 70s. Not 80s. If I do dress as Sanzo, the heat will kill me. Thank goodness I'm not going to Baltimore.

Yes, the next two weeks will be entirely cosplay and con babble. I am so insanely excited.

Continuing in my effort to catch up on some of the classics of anime, my next review is for Ghost In the Shell.

I'd actually seen this one years ago, my first exposure to anime beyond a few of the cartoons on Nickelodeon, but at the time, I don't think I was quite ready for it. I found it interesting even then, but it was a little bit overwhelming.

See, it's good anime, and good science-fiction, and good action, but it's not, (and isn't intended to be,) Anime 101.

In an interesting story out of the Japanese market and posted by GameIndustry.biz, Anime media giant Bandai will ship titles in both DVD and UMD in the same package. This way, you can buy a movie and play it either on your favorite DVD player or on your PSP.

Brand new anime series Eureka 7, which has been created by the team behind the hugely successful RahXephon, will be the first to get the treatment - with a single box housing both UMD and DVD, for slightly more than the price of buying both separately.

I've been musing how Captain Euro compares with another genre containing sci-fi mixed with political content, which tends to promote an alternative viewpoint. I think it is fair to say that everything Captain Euro is, Japanese animation [anime] and printed cartoons [manga] are not.

Take this good-guy headquarters in Captain Euro - in a typical sci-fi anime, by virtue of style, instinct would tell me, yeah, that's the bad-guy motel... bad guys being (pro)government agencies. The most sympathetic depiction of government I have seen in an anime was ambivalent/neutral - and that was unusual.

Anime tend to eschew a squeaky-clean sterile crypto-fascist vision of the future like in, umm, perhaps a Captain Euro, for the dirt and mess and vital creativity of a living culture.

Good-guys in anime fight to kill. Captain Euro fights with "culture, intellect, and logic."

Okay, so I’ve ranted before about how VIZ edited one panel in the first volume of I”s., but I went out and bought it anyway. I still think I’m going to really like the series. But I was very surprised when I got the latest issue of Shounen Jump in the mail today. It turns out that they have a little I”s preview in this month’s issue. Now one of the biggest gripes I have about US Jump is that it only serializes action manga. Okay, maybe they snuck Hikaru...

Games segment revenue was $99 million for the quarter, down from $127.6 million a year earlier. The unit was hurt by a drop in its trading-card business, which has a higher profit margin than board games. Trading card games include Magic: The Gathering, Pokemon and Duel Masters, and players are usually 10- to 12-year-old boys, who collect the cards, trade with friends and participate in tournaments.

According to IGN.com, "For fans of the manga and anime, Inuyasha is a no-brainer. It's an action-filled romp that treats the source material with great respect."

Monster card battling does not have to take place in person anymore. As of today, Konami has officially launched full-scale service of its online Yu-Go-Oh! video game simultaneously in the US, Europe and Japan.

Yu-Gi-Oh! Online introduces Konami's new pay-for-play DUELPASS system. A 16-letter code is printed on each DUELPASS card, and by entering the card into Yu-Gi-Oh! Online, a player can download the character featured on the card. Each DUELPASS comes with 30 loaded points, one point per duel.

I just went through the collection of manga lying here.

I really have no time to get bored … not at all.

First of all, we have Chonchu…

When I saw this picture (underneath), I just knew I would love the following series … :)

What a man, what man, what a mighty good man …

Yeah, I’m so not going to be able to cosplay this year either. Screw it. If I had a machine… *sigh* I might as well get started on next year’s cosplay now.

It's got dismemberment sequences, a live octopus-eating scene, stupendous fights and flashy cinematography. So it's not surprising that Quentin Tarantino pushed hard for "Oldboy" in May when he headed the judging panel at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival.

After South Korean filmmaker Chan-wook Park took home the Grand Jury Prize for "Oldboy," the marketing challenge boiled down to how best to promote a movie without stars. "Oldboy" lead player Min-sik Choi is hardly a household name, and even though MJ Peckos, chief executive of Tartan Films USA, has followed Asian cinema for years, she was unfamiliar with Park's pre-"Oldboy" oeuvre. But Peckos says that marquee names are not particularly important to "Oldboy's" target audience. "A lot of these films are appealing to the same group that discovered anime and manga, and they don't need to be hit over the head with well-known actors. There's an appreciation for the filmmaking."

You never know what our readers will pass along to us next. This week, a slow Friday news day brought a link to software engineer Martin Pittenauer's WWDC trading cards. Working off an Apple Web site feature about the senior leaders of the Mac OS X v10.4 "Tiger" engineering team, he created 11 tongue-in-cheek trading cards meant to evoke Magic the Gathering or Yu-Gi-Oh, complete with such stats as "Kernel Wizardry +20" and "Dashboard Script Hacking +10."

Hopefully, those same fans are ready for yet another rendition of the same Dragon Ball Z stories, starting with Raditz and ending with the Cell Games. These stories have been done to death, but this particular retelling is especially limp, relying on 30-second montages cut together from the DBZ cartoon to relay a whole season's worth of story. The last episode of Dragon Ball Z was aired in Japan almost a decade ago, and even most American Dragon Ball fans have moved on to Dragon Ball GT. It's time that Atari did the same.

Yaoi-Con, the only Western fan convention dedicated solely to the yaoi genre of Japanese anime and manga, is pleased to announce its annual event, to be held the weekend of October 28-30, 2005 at the Westin San Francisco Airport hotel in California. 2005 marks Yaoi-Con's fifth anniversary and the organizers are looking forward to the biggest and best event yet.

Currently on the program are the basics that one would usually find at an anime convention: anime-music-video contest, “artist alley,” fan panels and cosplay gatherings — all with a Naruto emphasis, of course. Some interesting tentative events that are not so common are the Ramen Eating Contest, Narutimate Hero Game Tournament, Ninja Auction and The Unofficial Naruto on Ice. Also on the agenda is the convention’s official band, The Random Ninjas, who will be performing Naruto music to fans’ head-banging delight. Supporting this all-out bash before the actual convention, from July 29 to July 31, were some fundraising events such as a White Day Celebration on March 12.

his is probably the episode receiving only a (o) rating from me which left me with the best feeling so far. Why? Because it's becoming more and more evident that Speed Grapher is about telling a story first and foremost, and not just a show counting on cheap shock thrills. Yes, those also have a prominent role, but I'm increasingly convinced by now that the series has some real meat and bones.

The episode tells the background story of the descending "goddess" from the first episode, Kagura Tennouzo, who is also the sole daughter of the current zaibatsu leader Shinsen Tennouzo. It's a tale devoid of any traces of warmth, happiness or comedic relief, therefore don't expect receive any enjoyment from episode 2 (hence the low rating) - other than the insight that any anime who is willing to take this risk so early in the series must be confident in its own values.

I am going to be judging a cosplay contest! You cannot possibly have the slightest idea how exciting this is for me.

This category rewards the costume wearer for their live performance. Judges will be focusing on the skill levels of the participants. What can you do to perform? Singing, dancing, drama, skits, improvisation (as long as you know what you are doing of course), poetry, public speaking, music......Nearly everything is an option. Please check with the cosplay director if what you are planning to do is not on the list above.

For some reason I was the only person excited to see the Pokemon plane while in the Chitose Airport (Sapporo). I actually ran to the window and took a couple pictures of it, and I’m sure people were giving the strange (ahem, 26 year old) gaijin weird looks for being so excited to see what’s basically a giant advertisement on a plane. As a side note, Chitose Airport is actually called NEW Chitose Airport. So, um, what happens when it becomes old?!

The Pokemon plane beat us to Tokyo. Man. I was sooooo close to riding it. Bummer.

Muy pronto en Loading-games tambien tendremos los mejores comics:

- Naruto
- Inuyasha
- Kare Kano
- Captain Tsubasa (Oliver y Benji)
- Ranma 1/2
- Saint Seiya (Los Caballeros del Zodiaco)
- La Espada del Inmortal

Estos son algunos de los títulos que tendremos disponibles desde un principio y seguiremos ampliando nuestro catálogo.

ICE agents executed a search warrant March 2 at a Los Angeles area warehouse and seized what industry representatives say is the largest cache of counterfeit Yu-Gi-Oh! trading cards ever recovered.

What if Opra invited Harry Potter and Pokemon on to her show to explain how to use a Macintosh, an iPod, Voice Over IP, Bluetooth, Skype, and Vonage? SURELY it would be a hit episode?

Based on the original manga of the same name, by Masakazu Katsura, directors Hiroshi Watanabe and Mizuho Nishikubo have certainly outdone themselves to bring together this classic to life.

Inane is one of the best manga ‘scanlation’ groups, but I keep reading its name as ‘I-na-ne’, as though it were formed from three different hiragana or katakana characters.

How are you, cosplay geek ! Now, six nine cosplay photos gallery again.

Tell the truth,m this time I picked up 57 photos from my cosplay photo album. not 69.

but i decide I call this series as 69 cosplay gallery.

Click the picture to see 69 cosplay pictures.

good pictures masa.cosplay always seems weird.

What is the reason cosplay is so popular in Japan?

Japanese cosplay is very different from other lands' cosplay. Around the world we get very ugly cosplayers in shabby outfits, but in Japan they at least pay attention to the quality of their suit. Also, Japanese seem more self-conscious: they don't dress up if they know they are ugly.

Another great set of cosplay pictures !

Great pictures masa :-) love those cosplay costumes, they are great. i don´t know much of all character animes... could you put the name of the animes that characters are from? arigatoo ;-)

Cosplay always amazes me. I really wish someday I can fly to Japan and see them with my own eyes. I went to couple of cosplays in America, but they.. how do I put it? Hmmmm.. not as good as the one in Japan. I think cosplay is a common thing in Japan, while in America, only certain group of people like them. And they are usually geeks/weirdos who never take shower and sit in front of their computer all day downloading anime; and they never take too much time to actually make the costume so it looks bad. No fun for me, no fun for you, no fun for everybody!!! MASA ROCKS!!!

By the way, I dunno why but it seems to me quite scary to see japanese people with blue eyes (contact lenses, I guess). Anyway, good work and keep on truth (and on cosplay photos too, of course XD).

Does mature people also make cosplay in Japan?

Great Pictures, these cosplay pictures are better than the ones from before. They are better because the costumes are better and they have more variety. This time you took pictures of guys.

Masa-sama, your photo (like this) makes me happy! I love cosplay photos. ^___^

Posted by: CosplayOtaku at April 11, 2005 11:24 AM

The project is moving along pretty steadily. Hopefully we can have them ready by Anime Expo.

The initial materials have been sent over to Production I.G USA.

GAINAX loves the idea. Probably because the folks there love this kinda stuff.

Hmm… a secret project that the guys at Gainax like, huh?