mello hates you

Hello! If you've come here looking for essays on manga layout and art and links to other sites that talk about it, you're in the right place. I've written some articles for Tokyopop, and these are the essays that started me out in this strange business of being a Web pundit.

Feel free to add me to your friendslist without asking - I don't get offended by that. :D Please excuse me if I don't add you back - it's not because of you, it's because I've got too many journals on my friendslist to keep up with right now and adding more would completely overwhelm me (I do try to at least go and look at your LJ occasionally). You're perfectly welcome to come in, hang out, read, and comment as you choose.

One request: if you comment and you're not a Livejournal member and don't have an OpenID to identify yourself with, please leave a name. I get lots of anonymice making comments on these, and some sort of name or nickname separates your anonymous comment from all the other anonymous comments and makes all of us take you a bit more seriously. ETA: Anonymous commenting is now off, thanks to anonymous commenters who never leave any way for someone to reply to them. It's easy enough to create an LJ for commenting purposes, and if you don't want to, my email address is posted on my LJ profile page.

I, and the other people who comment here, do tend to reply to comments because we're interested in talking about manga with other people, and presumably you are also. Leaving a way for us to discuss with you is common courtesy.

( Click here for the manga analyses and other links )


I'm willing to listen to suggestions for future essay topics, but you'll have a better chance if you ask a question about the process or techniques involved instead of asking for a particular series, since I tend to pick a series that serves as a good example for the subject and not the other way around.


 

Honestly, how could you tell?

( Read more... )

Now that I've got the four Death Note characters chibified, I need to think of other characters to chibify for keychains and such. XD

Off to Jo-Anns to buy a larger circle punch, because I think I can get some stickers or something out of these if I make them bigger than the 1 1/8" keychain size.

IS IT WINGS AGAIN? IS IT? IS IT?

( Read more... )

...will I ever recover my self-respect?

( Read more... )

Just to show you the keychain sizes, with my hand and a cat for scale.

( Read more... )

...of my SELLING OUT AGAINST EVERYTHING I STAND FOR...

( Read more... )

I take it that people kind of like the Grimmjow keychain...

( Read more... )

...I HAVE JOINED THE DARK SIDE.

( Read more... )

This is taking way too long. AGH

( art )

This is an incredibly long reply I wrote to someone on the forums at Manga Revolution, who asked for tips on selling prints in artist alleys. About halfway through I realized it needed to be written up as a tutorial, with better organization and design, and plan on doing so but thought I'd solicit other people's advice and experiences with selling art at anime cons, so am posting it here first.

I didn't even get into the mechanics of selling: change, keeping track of sales, whether to store prints on the table or behind it, etc. Advice and stories on that appreciated. :)

Naturally, this advice is geared towards anime conventions, not regular SF or comic cons, as that's what I sell at.

ETA: I didn't edit the BBcode into HTML, so the links look a bit funny. :)

( Cut for FRICKIN' LONG )

I've been listening to the audiobook version of Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions, an engaging book about behavioral economics that seeks to explain that humans are, at heart, irrational creatures,* albeit irrational in a set of predictable ways (which can be manipulated by people like, say, real-estate agents and marketers).

So far I've liked it a lot. But there's something quite odd about it: the narrator is Simon Jones, who played Arthur Dent in the radio and TV versions of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which means that I really can't shake the feeling that Arthur Dent is explaining behavioral economics to me.






* This is news? Well yes, according to much of economic theory, apparently. Or at least to the economic theory that the most virulent of the Amazon reviewers espouse. Most of the reviews are good, though.

I posted the Drum Beat Heart Beat picture on Manga Revolution. If you could go to its page and click "Major Style!" to the lower right, I'd be glad of it. :D (And then just visit my main page there because with 30 more visits another site scheme opens up for me and I'm curious to see what it is. XD)

Thanks!

Was in a planning meeting all morning, so just now really getting to the intartubes.

Via Cute Overload: nudibranchs!

More fun with Google ads. Notice what popped up in the LJ notification thread talking about the Grimmjow chibi.

( Read more... )

I mostly suck at drawing chibis, so I spent the entire evening practicing them, just copying them from various Bleach sketches in the tankoubons, and from one of the how-to-draw-manga type books that wasn't actually a How To Draw Manga book.

After all that, I finally did one on my own - not refined or anything, still in quick sketch form. Interesting fact: having previously drawn Grimmjow Jaggerjack before is not actually any help whatsoever in rendering his mullet in chibi format.

( Awww, who's a cute widdle Awwancaw? )

What were they thinking? (Blog of the author of Rapture Ready!: Adventures in the Parallel Universe of Christian Pop Culture, which I found via its Amazon link.)

In the tradition of freerice.com, carbongeeks.com - answer trivia questions and raise money for carbon-offset programs and the like.

sylvar tracked down the full version of the 1939 marital test I blogged about yesterday on a Flickr account. It includes a husband test, too!

I shall note that my Wife Score has increased to a positively glowing +2. I have not yet taken the Husband Test, as I'm going to sit here and kill my hands by typing in all the statements so I can make an internet quiz out of it.

ETA: I just took the Husband Test and I have to say I make an awesome husband. At least compared to the wife score: a +40! Which lifts me up to Poor, right on the border of Average!

Via vito_excalibur: Wow, that's ... sparkly. Clicking on it will take you to brown_betty's LJ, where I think the commenter who posits that it's obviously a portrait of Herald Barack from Lackey's Valdemar series is correct.