- source: ATOMIC CHRONOSCAPH on Tumblr
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Does anyone here have opinions on Witch Hat Atelier? I bought the first few volumes on a whim because the art looks good and I could have sworn someone on here recommended it a few years ago but I can’t find any posts.
It seems pretty good so far, decent worldbuilding and the magic system is very well defined and would have made for a cool 3DS game. So far it’s more concerned with how the characters resolve problems using their ingenuity and creativity rather than resorting to force or violence.
My main gripe with it at the moment is that the translation can be a bit too flowery for it’s own good sometimes (the rhyming blurbs on the back are kinda terrible lol, they stopped doing those from book 5 thankfully).
I also got the first 3 Delicious in Dungeon volumes based on what people have said here. Will delve into that once I’m caught up with the witches
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I keep meaning to pick that one back up, I also was very charmed by the depiction of magic and the art
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Witch Hat has been the other manga I’ve been following alongside Delicious in Dungeon and Gundam Thunderbolt, because it has 2 things I want in a manga:
- Characters who do things.
- incredible art.
I picked up a volume of Dinosaur Sanctuary once it became clear that Delicious in Dungeon was wrapping up, and I hope it picks up a little because it does have good art, and there is some conflict in the story (everyone in the story is obsessing over the one mistake they made in the past, plus the eventual plot kickstarter of “They’re going to shut down the park!”
Manga that had good art, but no characters doing things, were why I dropped Way of the Househusband and a manga about Yakuza cats. Househusband is gorgeous but every volume of that manga is the exact same. Another manga that failed my metric which I did not expect to bounce off of so strongly was Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou. I was fine with that one as an OVA oddity, but actually having to read it made me feel getting older.
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i read the 2nd generation of genshiken when the club gets overtaken by a bunch of fujoshi and this cast is so much more fun than the original one. feel a lot for the crossdressing new member of the club who is either very closeted gay or an uncracked egg. its just very hard to buy the whole “i just like to read and draw gay comics as a hobby, this one guy i crushed on is an exception, i’m definitely just a (straight) man” thing he still tries to convince himself on as the series ends. then we have the part where he disassociates to view himself “objectively” when presenting as a guy while being able to just exist naturally when presenting as a girl and like… I DUNNO MAYBE I DONT BUY THE CONCLUSIONS THE COMIC SEEMS TO GET AT. but i like him a lot. he’s a lot of fun, and keeps being adorable. and like, maybe he is just a crossdresser, and maybe he likes girls too, but fucking hell his worry about gay sex is getting “lost in fantasy” instead of “reality”, just like an admission he’s scared he would like it but has gotten it beaten into him “it’s not real”.
the series is still probably entirely unpalatable to anyone who’d feel uncomfortable (or bored) looking at otaku depicted very plainly and candidly like this while also being either kinda positive or indifferent about the things that includes (you can probably guess, and this being the fujoshi generation means we even get some really unsavoury shipping talk). comic was a lot of fun tho. i don’t know if this a recommendation. if you can overlook ANYTHING for the sake of the troubles of one cross-dressing cutie I GUESS WE ARE THE SAME JUST READ IT I GUESS??
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Bill Watterson and John Kascht discussing their latest book. I’ve never heard Watterson speak before
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I’ve never heard of this but flipped through it and bought it on the spot. It’s a mix of prose and comics in a shared fantasy world? It was one of the first times in ages I saw shit at Powell’s books in Portland that completely blindsided me. This is exactly the kinda old small press furry shit I’ve started trying to track down lately.
It’s got that nerd shit like glossaries of bullshit terms, literally a million year history of the world, fragments of fictional documents. Lots of funny animal drawings.
I’m probably going to post a couple excerpts from it in the https://selectbutton.net/t/sfw-furry-art-and-discussion-thread/ when I sit down and read more of it since it’s got a lot of fun old style art in it.
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Author of Moby-Cock, about an obsessive coal miner chasing a white rooster around the Appalachian holler
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YESSS. Wow so they were like a whole touring performance thing, amazing. ^ _^
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Oh wow. What little of Segar’s stuff I’ve seen
has been amazing, so yeah that seems like something worth getting into. ^ _^ I’m only saved from being sorely temped to spend money I don’t really have on it by what appears to be a current lack of digital collections.
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on our way to kramer’s we stopped by a little comic shop nearby and was really surprised at all the cool stuff there. got to chat with the clerk about sarah horrocks and her old podcast 
don’t know much anything about the non-sarah horrocks stuff but this all looks fun
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pinky and pepper is really really great eddy rocks
it’s like interesting i guess that they had one of the older copies with his dead name, i wonder like how many of those are in circulation still
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It seemed to me that it was Kickstarter. Kickstarter arrived, some “graphic novel” KS campaigns scored some money, and suddenly everyone was stopping their webcomic to run a KS campaign to put their comic out as “graphic novels” so they could actually maybe make some money at it. Everybody switched from “webcomic artist” to “graphic novelist.”
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I started to burn out on webcomics a bit years ago because there was always like a 45% chance the creators would burn out and stop updating. RIP all those stories I got really invested in.
The whole submedium also seemed to shift toward Relatable Content comics that made good social media bait
I wound up scratching the same itch frequently by reading manga scanlations.
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what happened to webcomics was webtoon gentrifying the medium
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I’l also hate Kickstarter for enabling the shift of “zines” to mean glossy fandom anthologies instead of things like my beloved Fizzz, MRR or SneakerFreakers.
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I do think webcomics were a victim less of kickstarter, and more a victim of the need for a kickstarter to make money. That and shit like webtoons both pushing the minimum quality of the art up, but driving the pay per page down.
Everything started getting shit for internet weirdoes making money after the 2008 crash. Internet advertising got bigger and ironically also killed it. Old sidebar ads were a lot better than the google ones, I even clicked on interesting looking ones. Cost of living also meant you couldn’t just survive on that and merch sales.
The crash also ushered in a wave of artists with animation training trying to find something to make money with too so there was a big burst of really incredible looking webcomics that kinda pushed out the older stuff too. Like, Kill Six Billion Demons completely nuked Sluggy Freelance from orbit art quality-wise. And those folks had their own problems even then!
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That said the answer to ‘what happened with webcomics’ is central to my next podcasting project so um…stay tuned for that I guess??
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