I'm not sure if I should be inspired or terrified by how often the idea that happens after I stop trying ends up being a MILLION times funnier than the ones I try really hard at.
Case in point, it's not that I had NO other ideas for episode 5. It's just that the punchlines all involved Social Media in one way or another. That is to say, they were all bad ideas.
2022-02-24 03:05:26 +0000 UTC View Post
The important thing is, either way, I took the high road and refused to make the most obvious joke that episode four offered... because it was also the most tasteless joke possible. (If you must know, recite Lina's opening lines to the Dragon Slave, then think about what the running gang in this episode is. Once you get it, you be glad I didn't try to draw it).
2022-02-16 23:04:58 +0000 UTC View Post
"Now, are there any OTHER bits of exposition I need to recap in order to keep the audience caught up? No? Good."
2022-02-16 18:04:55 +0000 UTC View Post
It's a double-edged sword to pretty much only care about shows that haven't been popular in decades. On the one hand, that SOMETIMES means the show in question has been clogging up shelf space for years, so they can be fairly cheap. But on the other hand, if they've been in TOO low demand, they start getting hard to find, and that's when the prices start getting a bit... unreasonable. A buddy of mine had been looking for R.O.D. for a while now, and the stuff I've he...
2022-02-09 23:42:18 +0000 UTC View Post
I could crop this page down to the bottom of the second panel, and it could be my autobiography.
No, but seriously, I am EXTREMELY susceptible to getting the munchies from watching characters eating on screen. Heck, episode two has a whole gag about how gross it is to eat fish when you just saw the bait that THEY ate, and my only thought was "Man, I sure could go for some fish right about now!"
2022-02-02 08:31:56 +0000 UTC View Post
What’s this? I bet you thought I’d finally run out of Far Out There Character Soundtracks, didn’t you? Surely there couldn’t STILL be more playlists left for obscure secondary characters, right? Well, I’ll have you know… you’re ALMOST right. I mean, there’s still am absurd number of playlists sitting in my iTunes folder right now, but at this point most of the remaining ones are either dedicated to characters who haven’t officially debuted in the comic yet, or are j...
2022-01-30 11:16:09 +0000 UTC View Post
It's just behind "lasers that inexplicably bend mid-shot" on my list of favorite tropes from this era of anime. Nothing says a character is powerful quite like giving them shoulder pads that they could crawl up and live inside.
But yeah, SLAYERS! Sorry I didn't start of this series right away, but I really needed to get both the post-Christmas recovery and the Ichibancon trips out of the way before starting up too many new projects all at once. But here we go!...
2022-01-26 08:46:41 +0000 UTC View Post
Holy crap, FIFTY PAGES? I'm sure I've already remarked on this being the longest non-main storyline Far Out There series outside of The Killer Station of Deadly Doom, but there's jsut something about a big, clean, even number like "50" to really bring things home to a person.
2022-01-23 17:26:38 +0000 UTC View Post
…aaaaand here we are! We made it to ten! Congratulations to everybody who endured me rambling on about songs I like and pretend shows that don’t exist! And wouldn’t you know it, we end this series with a reach waaaaay back to the past, all the way to the late ‘70s, and address a genre we’ve somehow managed to avoid completely so far: City Pop.
City Pop is a weird thing to talk about on several levels, not the least of which being how much its reputation has shifted over the ye...
2022-01-22 16:35:30 +0000 UTC View Post
Another one? Already? Well, yeah, because this is the last of the bunch. I'm only a few days away from Ichibancon 2022, so I really wanted to go ahead and get the last of the QCAC comics already done and out of the way before I started heading BACK down to Charlotte again. And just for the record, Ichi is NOT in actual Charlotte proper the way QCAC was, which will hopefully insure that crap like this doesn't happen again.
...because, seriously, anybody who's ever...
2022-01-11 18:19:33 +0000 UTC View Post
Yeah, yeah, I know that the advent of streaming and the easy availability of everything has taken away one of the main reasons Video Rooms existed, but I still say that it counts as a strike against any convention if it's not actually screening anything. The "problem" with having just about everything immediately accessible is that all the variety can be paralyzing to anyone who doesn't already know what they're looking for. There's still very much a place for curated anime showca...
2022-01-08 19:18:45 +0000 UTC View Post
That's right, folks! The second time around, Slayers takes home the win! We have our next Weekly Anime Comic! Now, once again, I'll remind everyone that I'm not committing to the whole Slayers franchise here, just the first TV series. As with Cardcaptor Sakura, I'll give the $5 + up patrons a chance to vote on whether I do more Slayers once the first season is finished up.
In the meantime, I'm not going to jump into the comics JUST yet,...
2022-01-01 05:56:18 +0000 UTC View Post
To anybody who though that the end of the Christmas blogs would mean that I was done rambling about music I like, YOU’RE ALL FOOLS! But seriously, the same time I swapped out my computer and wrote down my old Christmas music song stats, I also wrote down my top 25 overall most-played songs. And if I was gonna do a sequel to the Christmas song list this year, you’d better BELIEVE I was going to do a sequel to the other one as well! The world must know which Pink Floyd songs I’ve listened...
2021-12-29 06:10:23 +0000 UTC View Post
What, you thought that just because Christmas is over, I’d stop writing Christmas blogs? I WILL NEVER STOP WRITING CHRISTMAS BLOGS. Heck, if we stick to certain church traditions, Christmas won’t even be over until January 5th! I’ve still got nearly two weeks! No, but seriously, this is the last one. I’ll still take any opportunity to rant about music, though.
Last year, when I was shifting computers and my iTunes stats got reset, I had a rare opportunity to keep track of my own...
2021-12-26 08:55:01 +0000 UTC View Post
IT'S A CHRISTMAS MIRACLE! That's right, folks reading this years after the fact, this comic originally went up on Christmas Morning. My gift to everybody is restarting a series that had stalled YET AGAIN. Let's see how long I can go before having to take another break!
2021-12-25 10:31:27 +0000 UTC View Post
Every year when I unload around four month’s worth of Christmas content all at once in December, at least one person comes along and tells me I really ought to relax and take it easy over holiday break. You know, just chill and go to Christmas parties and eat junk food and play around like we did when we were kids. We have to work enough as it is now that we’re adults, let’s use the holidays as an excuse to be kids again, just for a little bit. I inevitably laugh at this, mostly at the ...
2021-12-24 01:13:00 +0000 UTC View Post
YES. I’M WRITING ANOTHER ONE OF THESE, I’LL NEVER STOP AND YOU CAN’T MAKE ME.
As I’ve said on numerous occasions, Christmas songs may be one of my greatest joys in life, but I can still totally sympathize with anyone who gets sick of the same three versions of the same two dozen songs over and over again for two months straight. Or maybe not so much "sympathize" as "pity," because unlike you saps, I'VE got an ever expanding catalogue of additional songs to keep things from getti...
2021-12-10 06:24:32 +0000 UTC View Post
...and remember, I still had to drive BACK the next morning. Truly, THAT was the dumbest part. But yeah, I'm not sure what worried me more, the fear that the car wasn't smart enough to turn its own lights off while the door was sitting open or the fear that a racoon had crawled in and gone to sleep under one of the seats. Neither one turned out to be a problem, but it should be clearly established that my head wasn't quite in the right place by this point.
On a more po...
2021-12-07 04:15:34 +0000 UTC View Post
Yep, it's December! Time for me to bludgeon you over the head with more Christmas blogs! HO HO HO!
If there’s one thing Western Society seems to agree on, it’s that boring old Baby Jesus is waaaay too lame to build a whole holiday around. For centuries now, an ongoing quest has strove to hijack the Christmas fanfic by inserting a bunch of new OCs. The numerous physical forms in which the Santa/Father Christmas/St. Nick entity manifests are the most obvious example, of course. ...
2021-12-03 04:40:40 +0000 UTC View Post
THAT'S RIGHT FOLKS! After spending about a billion years on Cardcaptor Sakura, we're FINALLY picking a new series for Weekly Anime Comics! And yes, by "we," I in fact mean "I've already picked several, and now you get to pick from the limited options I have provided." That's democracy for ya! But seriously, the very fact that I was able to get so much material out of ...
2021-11-30 02:49:48 +0000 UTC View Post
I really like Whitby’s mask. That’s about all I have to say about Whitby as a character. He’s another one of those Nitpickers introduced during the Christmas 2020 comics, and thus hasn’t had many chances to appear afterwards. And even if we DID have the usual number of pages in 2021, and Whitby did manage to appear in more of them, he’s still just the mute, trouble-causing sidekick of Chelsea-Lambda. There’s not really all that much else to say about the dude. It’s both sad and ...
2021-11-30 02:13:01 +0000 UTC View Post
(First off, the only non-region-locked posts of this song I could find on YouTube were live videos that felt totally different than the studio version, so I -GAH I MEAN A TOTALLY SEPARATE MYSTERIOUS YOUTUBE ACCOUNT- had to go and post a copy. Amazingly, the Japanese Recording Industry hasn't totally taken the video down yet, but we can't rely on that being the case forever. Listen to this while you can!)
Believe it or not, there was once a time when I really did try to keep ...
2021-11-30 01:04:33 +0000 UTC View Post
So, I used the same wig for the Dr. F costume a lot longer than I really should have, largely because it seems like they just don't make that particular wig anymore. I finally gave in and tried to replace it for got around 2018, but each new wig I've picked up since has been worse than the last. The one I tried to wear this weekend really was the bottom of the barrel, arguably worse than the one I physically couldn't wear 'cos it was made for a smaller head than my own. At l...
2021-11-18 03:11:13 +0000 UTC View Post
THAT’S RIGHT FOLKS! The people (well, the $5 and up patrons, at least) have spoken! Now that I’ve covered all of Cardcaptor Sakura’s first season, it’s time for SOMETHING ELSE! And once again, I shall turn the choice of what that new Weekly Anime Comic show will be over to all of you! …provided you’re a patron, of course. And also, provided you like one of the options on the list of nominees I'll provide for everybody. Yup, I'm still controlling THAT part of the proces...
2021-11-10 19:32:09 +0000 UTC View Post
MERRY CHRISTMAS!
Yeah, you KNOW something's going on when I totally pass up a chance to do a Christmas comic, especially when the time of year almost lines up like this. But no, I can't let this slide. Cardcaptor hasn't pulled this trick as often as some shows, but the whole "everybody passes out so they don't see the magic at work" gimmick happen a lot across anime as a whole... and it bugs me every single time. Like, not ONE person ever gets...
2021-11-10 19:12:59 +0000 UTC View Post
Blah blah blah African or European blah blah blah your mother was a hamster. MONTY PYTHON QUOTES!
But seriously, these were some really weird questions for a "scavenger hunt." Also, I kept trying to remember how on earth Nelvana tried to work around all the Japanese puns for their English translation... only to realize this was one of teh episodes they just skipped completely. Yeah, that's probably for the best, even if that IS a gutsy thing to do with the next to last episo...
2021-11-04 07:08:27 +0000 UTC View Post
YES! Actual convention-related Conventional Wisdom comics are finally back on Patreon! I'm not certain how many more pages will come after this, though. I originally set aside five more ideas, though looking back at the notes now, I'm not quite sure about a few of 'em. I dunno, we'll see what happens.
But yeah, even after giving stuff away, I still finished the weekend with MORE stuff left than I I thought I'd started the weekend with. The moral: I DO NOT N...
2021-11-03 13:59:49 +0000 UTC View Post
Every year, I spend hundred upon hundreds of words gushing over Christmas songs, and you’d better believe I’ll do so again this year. But let’s face it, these days a sizable chunk of The Internet goes every bit as gaga over Halloween as I do Christmas, and I’d be a fool not to try and cash in on that as well. It’s a bit of a challenge, though, since… well, quite frankly, I’ve never really cared all that much about Halloween. At least, I didn’t when I was a kid, which is ...
2021-10-29 07:37:02 +0000 UTC View Post
Awwwwww. Well, that concludes the fourth Far Out There madlib, in which THIS bit of heartwarming fluff somehow came out of:
"Tabitha discovers a portal to a Colander dimension, which only Tabitha and Dr. Caligari can travel to due to their elevated Taco levels. After extensive exploration in a collapsible Tandem Bicycle, all they ... 2021-10-29 05:01:01 +0000 UTC View Post
Well that was convenient, wasn't it? It does feel a LITTLE bit like the show hits a bit of a holding pattern around here. Like, I dunno if they'd actually already gotten the order for more episodes by this point, but it kinda does FEEL like they're suddenly putting the breaks some some plot lines so that there's stuff left to resolve later on.
But speaking of "later on," the vote for the future of Weekly Anime Comics continues! The "something else" option is running aw...
2021-10-28 00:54:12 +0000 UTC View Post