the first part of my cool friend’s good new comic is out and you should pay $5.00 USD or more for it
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oh yeah cate rules, you’re friends with all the cool seattle people arent you
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B)
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that’s pretty rude! it’s an 00s period piece about sisters who get phone charms that let them see and control killer angels
mangas
H2 - how much baseball comic can you read without knowing anything about baseball, except that a home run is a good thing (or, contextually, a bad thing)? as it turns out: 340+ chapters, because i liked the expressive cartooniness of the style, the slow pace of the sports and romance stuff, and also incidentally trying to figure out how a story like this could possibly be stretched out for that many pages. there are some fun melodramatic parts - an evil pitcher who looks like the batter from Off and secretly throws balls at people to injure them! - but a lot of it is just enjoying the back and forth of seeing an upcoming cliche on the horizon, having it be just postponed or hedged about enough that it starts to lose some of its inevitable quality, and then having it pay off again at just the right time. YES there are some evil, saboteur non-baseballers on the team planning to ruin it for everyone and YES they eventually regain their self respect by means of the epic highs and lows of high school baseball. there’s also a funny approach to occasional fanservice where, apparently starved of opportunities to get more of it into all-male highschool baseball matches, the author eventually just starts throwing in random panels of asses into the establishing shots of skies, deserted streets etc. i still can’t follow any of the games but i’ve now read approximately 5000 panels of people talking passionately about “the Koshien” while staring into the distance with the stern resolve of youth and now i want to, too. next year, in the Koshien…!
Tomo-Chan wa Onna no ko! - 4-panel romantic comedy manga about a girl trying to seduce her oblivious male buddy and also they’re both jocks and karate champions. It’s played much straighter but this does a similar thing to what I like about Monthly Girl’s Nozaki-Kun - just a cast of people completely stuck in their own heads and pulled into weird half-conflicts as they all try to triangulate around their unintelligible desires. i like the supporting cast incl the overtly evil girl as well as the terrifying representative westerner “carol olsten”. the romance part inevitably starts to feel like one of those old comedies where two people looking for each other each walk back into the room at the exact moment when the other person has just left, but it got points from me for the finale - after the two leads finally get on the same page about wanting to date, there’s a surprise action climax about first needing to defeat the heroine’s even more powerful karate champ boss in single combat! why aren’t there meg ryan movies that do this?
Dousei Sensei wa Renai ga Wakaranai - I liked this one, kind of a lowkey romcom about an ambiguously asexual lady who is the artist behind a popular and dreadful harem manga and decides to start dating for the sake of cartoonist integrity. kind of wish they stuck with that premise a little more, as aside from the workplace scenes and nature of the two romance possibilities (a younger artist, an older animation studio guy) it doesn’t really come up again. a lot of the ongoing story involves the lead trying to figure out if she actually is pretty much asexual or if there’s some crazy, Tower Of Druaga esque set of conditions she just has to hit before the act in question would start to sound appealing, which i can sort of confirm is how it feels to figure that stuff out. unfortunately it does kind of mean the two other leads gradually start seeming less and less impressive as they’re continually left on “waiting and available” status. also for a comic where the protagonist butts heads with anime industry types over the depiction of what are referred to as sexual minorities the translators sure seem uninterested in reflecting that with their language choices !!
??? - can’t remember the title to this one and also can’t find it in my search history. was it a dream, a wonderful dream about a kind of middling but pleasantly lowkey slice of life comic about a girl with a stutter who works in a cafe and talks to the customers who all have their own problems etc…? i liked it on the whole, it was one of those things that veered seemingly at random between charmingly undramatic and crazily melodramatic from chapter to chapter. one chapter might be about an immensely strong waitress who beats everybody at arm wrestling and befriends a shy boy who comes to cheer her on. another might involve the heroine being choked out by murderous thugs straight out of one of the death wish films. you just never know and although the author’s decision to constantly throw in fairly lurid scenes of sexual threat every other chapter does a lot to undermine your goodwill towards things i did like that the heroine remains kind of vague and directionless all the way through. her mildly pleasant temporary part time waitress job is shown as the one bright spot in a wholly unappealing world of school, further school or grinding career life; they do not give her any special powers or talents by the end that would make the future look much better.
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R.I.P. Neal Adams
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I look at these in the back of my five star stories books more than I actually read the manga itself. just wanna hear nagano talk about military uniforms and sigils forever
the english translation books are HUGE so shit like the last picture is especially beautiful
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Is that an audio equalizer on the last robot’s forehead??
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I found Taiyō Matsumoto’s “Sunny” on the Internet Archive and read the entire thing yesterday. I need a hug or something damn.
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thought this was so goofy it might as well be a michael kupperman comic only to find out that marvel literally hired him to do a follow up
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OH man! I missed this. Neal could still draw the heck out of stuff, and his style directly influenced generations of artists.
Well, may as well use up the Adams stuff I had hidden away in my gmail archives–the first two are from World’s Finest Comics 176, although from Batman Illustrated by Neal Adams Volume 1, with redone color (the third, the cover, is the recolored version from BIbNA Vol 2):
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I worked with Paul Chadwick, he is a cool guy. He has some free comics for people to read on his web site–Concrete comics, even : ): Paul Chadwick . Net - Comics by Chadwick
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look at those swoosh lines
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