pilot_star

I've been a big fan of Akimi Yoshida lately. I can't really say that her comics are the best I've ever read, but the stories she draws are always pretty engrossing, the storytelling is good, the characters are more or less likable. Although I must say: the lady isn't capable of drawing any story where less than 75% of the cast doesn't die.

As for the art, I actually liked the style in the beginning of Banana Fish the most. It was tighter and more detailed, and the flow was clearer, if that makes any sense. Schumie says I'm partial to the old-school style, but I really thought that the artwork had aged better than say, Yasha, which was drawn a few years afterwards. By the time Yasha rolled around, it seemed to have gone back to the style of Lover's Kiss, and her artwork had gotten looser, although not necessarily in a good way. The paneling had also become a bit more typical shoujo, being a bit less structured, more freeform and to a certain degree, more expressive. However, I liked the artwork in BF right from the get-go, and Yasha... well, I wouldn't have picked it up if it wasn't drawn by Akimi Yoshida.

I'm glad I did though, because the story's pretty good (the project was being scanlated by Shoujo Magic, but unfortunately they've dropped it due to "lack of interest"). But the scans that I'm reading lets me experience in full the woes of the language barrier (I can understand the 50% of the plot that's not in Simplified Chinese) and horrible typesetting (the page on the left: how the fuck did that sentence miss its intended target by 2 inches?).

After finishing Banana Fish and Kisso Tenyo, I had more or less stopped expecting any real slash in the stories, so imagine my surprise when there were prominent characters who were a canon gay couple! The story itself also hits pretty much every fetish in the book (except for the naked apron), including but not limited to:

1. Twincest. They have a love/hate/love/hate?/love/hate/love/?/are-you-me-or-am-I-you relationship.
2. Subservience. Twice. One's a bodyguard, one's a servant/best friend/lover.
3. Bromance. The bodyguards.
4. Childhood friends. The type who can tell if the protagonist is thinking about sacrificing himself and tell him to "snap out of it".

Overall it's pretty fun to read, but as it's written by Akimi Yoshida, I'm expecting at least one of the twins, one of the bodyguards, and two of the three childhood friends to die before the series is over.

*shakes fist, Colbert-style* YOSHIIIIDDAAAAAAA..!!

I conclude my rant with Rin/Takeru fanart, because I liked them the most.

( The first time I saw you, you were, like, sittin around. )

My sister started to read Steel Ball Run after seeing some rather pretty covers, (and exclaiming her surprised that this is the same person who drew Jojo's Bizarre Adventure. I guess his style really has evolved, huh.) not to mention some of the more fabulous (LOLWUT?) ones.

Anyway, so I really did like the cover of Vol 10, it's very nice no matter how you look at it, so I started to read it too. Might as well.

....It's fabulous.
Actually, it's a lot less fabulous than the covers suggest, but hey, we have impossible physics and ridiculous costumes and overly dramatic shocked expressions, rubbery people who get tossed around, all in a world that generally works in a very strange way, and when you put all those things together you get an awesome comic that you can't help but love.

And because those costumes are so ridiculous (I honestly don't think any other mangaka can get away with them) I just had to draw fanart. I just haaadd to.

So, Johnny and Gyro, from Steel Ball Run:


( WELL IF HE HAS TO GET SOMEWHERE QUICKLY. )

I used to call it Phoenix Wright, until it stopped being about Phoenix.

Then I called it Ace Attorney, but now it's not about attorneys anymore.

GIVE US A CONSISTENT NAME, CAPCOM.

But aside from that, FANGASM.

Easter weekend was well spent -- lying around, eating chocolate, drawing fanart... Ah.

In any case, I was trying to force heart_mint and hiphopelephant into helping me fill one of the kinks at the kink meme, (if anon sees this I guess I won't be so anonymous anymore...) and it started to go completely off rail into the realm of The-40-Chapter-Fanfiction-Complete-With-Concept-Art-And-Illustrations.
Not that I'm really complaining, but it's gotten to the point where if you switch the names of the main characters (*coughcoughphoenixandedgeworthcough*) it can be another story.

It could be interesting if we ever actually do it.

But I digress.

So I was thinking that, despite being my favorite pairing in Tales of Abyss, I've never actually drawn any fanart of Jade/Peony. I've drawn plenty of Jade back in the day (I feel old now) but Peony was hard enough to find concept art of as is, and I just never got around to drawing him.

Which is something I must rectify.

I was working on the lineart of this over the weekend, I'm done now and I've started to fill in the flat colours, but when I took a screencap I was only done their faces, so.


( Jade + Peony = Awesome )


And then, of course, I asked hiphopelephant what I should draw, and she said: "MAAACHIIIIIII".
I told her I'd draw her some steamy Daryan/Machi.
In which she replied "MAAAACHIIIIIII".

Which made no sense to me, but I assumed that was a yes, so I went ahead and drew steamy Daryan/Machi.

( Steamy Daryan/Machi )

School is catching up to me. I really should stop procrastinating... I say while typing a journal entry instead of doing homework.
In any case, mostly I'm worried about the thumbnails for a particular assignment, because they have to be done in three methods, and I'm coming up completely blank for the third method... It's awful! I feel uncreative. :(

Anyway, I really gotta say that I'm glad that my webcomic is coming to a close. I don't know how much more of it I can manage, not while trying to juggle school, drawing another comic and a commission on my mind all the time. I really need to just get off my ass and finish the commission already, but I just haven't seem to be able to force myself to work lately. School blues is really getting to me, I s'pose.

But I digress.

In my typography class, my assignment was to create a portrait out of type. We could do it in any way we wanted, I opted for overlapping lots of letters until I got the shape I wanted, because I'm uncreative and I didn't want to keep fiddling around with letters until they matched the shape I wanted.

I did a portrait of Twiggy, cause I think she's pretty.


( Type portrait )

It seems altogether rather stupid of me to want to do this, but there is seriously nothing I want to do more than draw comics.

Honestly. Some people think they want to draw comics when they actually want to do pinups and covers, but I actually want to draw comics. Like, sequentially.

Anyway, here are two pages of comic I drew randomly.

( Pages of comic. Of doom! )

For some reason, Windows has decided to block all my mp3 files, rendering me musicless.
It goes something like this:

( Windows tries to save the world )

On a side note, I watched the Departed last night. Not as good as Infernal Affairs, in my opinion, probably for the following reasons:

( Why I think The Departed is inferior to Infernal Affairs. That was poetic. )
Conclusion: It's mostly because Tony Leung isn't in it, and I'm a huge Tony fangirl. :/
Oh well!