Seven Points: One of these weeks I’ll write a good one.

Posted on May 17, 2013 by Milo (blogofthenorthstar.com)

lightbulb Seven Points: One of these weeks Ill write a good one.

The lightbulb in my room burnt out last week and because I’ve been too lazy to buy a new one I haven’t been reading comics as much. Instead I’ve focused on the tons of digital manga on my computer. When you’re the kind of person who easily falls into routines, the teensiest push can be enough to set you off in a refreshing direction. I’ve learned to be more welcoming of everyday inconveniences as a result.

homunculus Seven Points: One of these weeks Ill write a good one.

This would be more than an everyday inconvenience. Trepanation, the ancient practice of drilling holes into the human skull for medical purposes, is the taking off point in Hideo Yamamoto’s Homunculus. It’s a manga title I avoided for a long time because I knew it as semi-plausible supernatural seinen, and semi-plausible supernatural seinen are very often terrible.

Rather than get into all the fine, concrete details of what this story is about, I want to say up front it’s demonstrable in terms of showing you what kind of things mainstream Japan does with the medium that no other country dares. Homunculus is a comic about the unconscious mind, but it’s not about it in a removed intellectual fashion. It deals with the unconscious mind by combining passionate drama with lots of symbolism.

homunculus2 Seven Points: One of these weeks Ill write a good one.

After the protagonist undergoes trepanation treatment he begins to see people differently. Homunculi, the self-images of people projected by their unconscious minds, are visible in the physical world, reacting to the stimuli around them. The main character essentially engages with people while reading these homunculi and using their behavior to learn more about his “opponents” in real time.

As you might expect, very quickly he learns that not only are homunculi difficult to interpret, but his own biases and unconscious thoughts are shaping the way he perceives them, ie he is both having these symbols presented to him while unconsciously imprinting upon them. Someone else’s face, for example, might shift to resemble a friend from his past, even if the two people don’t know each other. This, combined with the fact homunculi may be figments of his imagination in the first place, works to maintain an almost maddening tone of uncertainty throughout the story and where it’s headed.

homunculus31 Seven Points: One of these weeks Ill write a good one.

I guess it’s a psychological thriller? A really unique, thrilling one, brimming with sexual impulse and competing theories about the psychic apparatus.

shigurui Seven Points: One of these weeks Ill write a good one.

I like Tumblr because it often gives me positive feelings without the use of a single word. For example, this random post reminded me how utterly perfect Shigurui: Death Frenzy is, and how glad I am it exists.

Shigurui was a 2007 anime put out by Madhouse Studios when they were still at the top of their game, creating television shows that struck out unique, adult areas of interest, often adapting noteworthy manga with a budget conscious yet keen visual sense.

There aren’t any places on the web that consistently talk about truly exemplative anime, and so much is focused on what’s happening right this very second, making it easy to forget about the great stuff. Using Tumblr I’ve curated a revolving door of anime awe and wonder, without getting tangled up in any of the silliness the social networking site is most often derided for. And let’s be honest, most of that deriding is done by dudebros afraid of digital spaces where females exert just as much influence as males, if not more.

Maybe it clubs you over the head with its imagery, but I like this Nick Cross cartoon short enough to loop it every once in a while. Cross is a talented animator working on his own feature length movie, but he saw fit to release this little bit of somber emptiness in between that long term project and whatever else he has going on.

damon lindelof horizontal Seven Points: One of these weeks Ill write a good one.

If you’re watching something Star Trek-related and it isn’t named Wrath of Khan why are you even bothering?

Wrath of Khan is the only Star Trek thing anyone should subject themselves to, and the new movies know that, so they naively try to ape it with young actors. So just watch Wrath of Khan on Blu-ray, and watch the new movies if you want big dumb emotive spectacle where the villain is a terrorist analogue. (Because that’s all American big budget action movies are anymore: escapist terrorist analogues. Especially the superhero ones.)

I speak as someone who spent their whole childhood watching Next Generation and Voyager. Trust me, I’m not a better person for it.

But hey, at least I always knew Stargate sucked.

Seven Points: I wish I had more free time to do these but maybe I’d waste it scratching my butt.

Posted on April 26, 2013 by Milo (blogofthenorthstar.com)

The King of Pigs Seven Points: I wish I had more free time to do these but maybe I’d waste it scratching my butt.

The opportunity to watch The King of Pigs interrupted my plans to watch some Japanese cartoon, as if to say sorry to break it to you anime: junior high school isn’t a quaint milieu for selling escapist fantasy to manchilds. It’s a prison sentence you try your best to survive. In South Korean cinematic fashion The King of Pigs slathers on tragic melodrama upon itself in painting its picture of three middle school students, two of which grow up into losers and reminisce about their time together.

The question isn’t “does it work?” The characters and scenarios are believable even if they’re over-wrought, and anyone with a heart will respond on some level to the trauma these kids experience, as their hope is whittled down by the negligent cultural forces surrounding them. It centrally works with a metaphor, with the idea some people are born dogs and some people are pigs, and the pigs exist only for the subservience to their hungry jackal masters. Class is the primary, resounding factor of this social hierarchy, and the movie hits on that point repeatedly.

Made for $150,000 and looking every bit as if that were the case, with stiff CG character models here and there to shave off expenses, there are visual deficiencies in The King of Pigs you’ll have to overlook to take in the sad, grisly currents flowing through it. I would relate the experience very much to the Ichi the Killer OAV. Remember that thing? Though a completely sincere, visceral story, it gives you every opportunity to relate to it in a ironic self-distancing kind of way by looking cheap and possessing an intensity that outweighs its complexity.

Expect The King of Pigs to hit UK DVD next month with more grammatically correct subtitles than it has now but if you’re feeling adventurous the SK version is intelligible. No idea if we’ll ever see this in Americaland.

buckaroo banzai group end credits Seven Points: I wish I had more free time to do these but maybe I’d waste it scratching my butt.

You know that twilight moment when you first hear about something you know very little about and optimistically augment your lack of information with the most positive attributes possible?

I know, in our current age of ceaseless pop culture consumption that sort of thing doesn’t happen as often as it used to, but I remember seeing the very beginning of the 2005 Doctor Who relaunch and expecting it to be a better kind of science fiction. Less hammy and trite, more ramped up strangeness. Not about people running around while they hold hands, you know?

I was basically expecting it to be the 1984 movie The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension. But I’m glad it wasn’t. Because instead I have The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension.

Your favorite Doctor might be the Jelly Babies guy with the googly eyes or the latest one with no eyebrows. Mine is Peter Weller with jet black hair and a Pee-wee Herman outfit. Mine’s the lead vocalist for a rock band while also being a theoretical physicist who helps his friend, Jeff Goldblum in a cowboy outfit, perform brain surgery in his off time.

I don’t want to let that paragraph sit there. I hate when people do that sort of thing and let the words hang in the air as if they automatically equate to genuine value or insight or not-wasting-your-time. You know, when they say things like “it’s about ninjas and dinosaurs, enough said!” Shut up nerd, enough has not been said.

But I ain’t got the time to go into more detail, a thousand apologies, I play this thing fast and loose.

skull man Seven Points: I wish I had more free time to do these but maybe I’d waste it scratching my butt.

One of the few Tokyopop manga titles I’ve read to completion is Skull Man. Originally created by the “King of Manga” Shotaro Ishinomori to sell TV studios in the seventies, the concept was rejected for being too dark for kids and got scrapped in favor of Kamen Rider, that tokusatsu franchise that’s been running forever alongside Super Sentai (known as Power Rangers in the US).

Shortly before his 1998 death, Ishinomori met up with manga artist and Ishinomori superfan Kazuhiko Shimamoto and invited him to reinvent the story as he saw fit. The result is the seven-volume Skull Man, a story filled with mutant beasts, doomed heroes, and a macabre transcendence of death.

It was a terrible idea to release this manga without including the fifty-page Skull Man oneshot Shotaro Ishinomori first drew in 1970. I don’t know why Tokyopop would choose to do that other than to alienate and confuse the daring few who’d give this a go without knowing much of anything about it. It can be difficult to decipher what’s a flashback and what isn’t if you aren’t familiar with the pilot story, as the fanboys who were reading this in Japan undoubtedly were. But good news! In recent months the Ishinomori Skull Man oneshot became available digitally on the Comixology website.

With it’s darker subject matter and more cinematic presentation Skull Man contrasts with the kind of manga Kazuhiko Shimamoto is most known for. Shimamoto is the living embodiment of intensely hotblooded manga heroes from the sixties and the seventies, as he channels their ceaseless verve into a bunch of rad manga that has only thus far been scanlated into English. But you can see his aesthetic come to life in this nineties Gainax OVA the company pretends they never created, Blazing Transfer Student:

It’s Shimamoto all the way: big sideburns, passionate yelling, giant explosions, and fire. Lots of fire. The sort of thing people rush to label a parody/satire when it’s absolutely not. Shimamoto is having fun with this degree of stylized intensity, but he means every second of it. He’s meant it his whole career.

Like I said, in Skull Man Shimamoto restrains those tendencies to pay solemn tribute to his hero. The result is that the only manga Shimamoto has published in North America is the least Shimamoto-like one he’s ever made. The sample page up there has eleven panels in it, which is a lot for any standard page of manga, but especially for Shimamoto’s rapid-fire style. I think the overall effect puts a greater emphasis on mood and atmosphere, as you may get from the sixteen panels that make up these two pages:

skull man1 Seven Points: I wish I had more free time to do these but maybe I’d waste it scratching my butt.

It looks like a lot of effort, but if you read the comic panel by panel the slinky dark intrigue of this urban tokusatsu story works quite well, and you’re “awarded” with more than a few impressive splash pages along the way.

Seven Points: Stupid cartoons, excellent drawings, and a comic book anime not endorsed by Marvel.

Posted on April 5, 2013 by Milo (blogofthenorthstar.com)

1. This cartoon is stuck in my head.

awkward Seven Points: Stupid cartoons, excellent drawings, and a comic book anime not endorsed by Marvel.

The way its shapes are lined, presumably using some kind of “simplify path” tool in Adobe Flash, is reminiscent of what amateur Flash animation looked like in the late 90s, except back then line simplification was less intended as a style decision and more to reduce the amount of precious bandwidth your cartoons took to stream on a world wide web dominated by 56k modems.

Amateur Flash animation in that period was rarely so fast and effective, though. Even with a scarcity of bandwidth, animators never delivered jokes in such a snappy fashion, or stuffed so many movements into a scene at once. This type of rapid comedic animation, which can almost entirely be attributed to the rise of YouTube and jumpcut-style video editing, is a contemporary phenomenon.

You add in the creative yet familiar depiction of a futuristic, distraction-addled populace and you’ve got a concise cartoon representation of what I imagine using Facebook is like. A YouTube commenter sagely whispered “this isn’t the future. its the present.”

I can’t think of a better way to begin this hodgepodge-ass post.

2. I wrote about the year 1984 in anime television over at The Golden Ani-Versary of Anime, you should go read it, I didn’t make any George Orwell jokes, I promise. Golden Ani-Versary is an ambitious blog organized by a Mr. Geoff Tebbets which seeks to cover every year of anime beginning with 1963.

3. I’m not sure I’m supposed to be reading Michael Fiffe’s Copra.

copra Seven Points: Stupid cartoons, excellent drawings, and a comic book anime not endorsed by Marvel.

On the one hand, I love nearly everything about it: Fiffe’s delicate framing of varying line qualities, the high-quality way in which the book is printed, its cream-colored pages. I even enjoy his unique style of hand-lettering which gets a lot of words into a small geographical area without becoming difficult to read.

On the other hand, I’m out of the loop when it comes to all of the superhero comics evocations he’s performing. I wonder at times how closely these characters hem to Marvel/DC analogues, and how much I’m supposed to assume they do. To what degree is Copra superhero dojinshi, to what degree is it its own thing? I don’t properly know, and I didn’t feel stumped like this when I was reading Zegas.

4. Katsuya Terada has an artbook coming out in Japan next week, based on an exhibition of his work. For my money he’s probably the finest Japanese illustrator no one really talks about over here, so I was going to import the book while snidely inquiring if I was better off waiting for the “inevitable” English-language edition.

But then Dark Horse announced that they were releasing The Art of Katsuya Terada early next year. The title doesn’t seem to correspond directly to any of the Terada art books I’m aware of, so I don’t know if it’s going to be a straight up translation of his latest, or something else. Still very much surprised to hear about it.

Good ol’ Dark Horse, you release things like that and Monkey King and I’m left to just hope there are other people out there enjoying them.

5. Speaking of which, Deva Zan.

Deva Zan Seven Points: Stupid cartoons, excellent drawings, and a comic book anime not endorsed by Marvel.

From what I can piece together from some buried press and YouTube video, Deva Zan appears to be an abandoned film/multimedia project by Yoshitaka Amano, a Japanese illustrator people DO know and appreciate over here, because of his unmistakable work on things like Final Fantasy and Vampire Hunter D.

But Deva Zan is Amano’s own thing. His own concepts, his own characters, his own story. And I think this book Dark Horse put out for it, though it contains artwork and narration on alternate pages, is less a finished product and more a collection of concept art, character designs, and other production with some wispy narration thrown in to hold it all together and give the illusion of being a final product.

Thing is, even a speedy sketch becomes a beautiful vortex of striking colors and whimsical pencil marks when rendered by Amano’s hand. In reading the story the words and pictures do not coalesce into anything particularly striking or original, though the pictures on their own easily succeed at forming a compelling vision of the fantastic, as you would expect.

(I strongly suspect) this is the “making of” book to a thing that was never made, luxuriously presented in a 9×12 hardcover format so you can closely inspect the more astounding pages of art, of which there are many. Dark Horse, it took real balls to release this the week after your big Legend of Zelda: Hyrule Historia art book/encyclopedia, and even though one of these items currently has 842 Amazon.com reviews and the other has 2 (guess which is which), I’m still happy to have the beautiful thing from the mind of Yoshitaka Amano.

6. My post about Gundam: The Origin is less a critique of the manga and more a critique of the realities oriented around it, but it made the rounds on Tumblr and, wow, Gundam people on Tumblr are far more sane than the ones I ran into The Year I Surfed 4chan, a dark part of my life I refer to with capital letters because it was really that much of a strange, traumatizing phase of existence.

7. And finally, a comic book anime of consequence.

That Marvel Anime Rise of the Technovore cartoon is coming out soon, and even though Marvel Anime has sucked like a vacuum cleaner, it has me thinking about an earlier, aborted attempt to produce a comic book anime by Madhouse Studios: Satanika.

NSFW warning because I know some of you are silly.

To a half-focused eye, Satanika might look like some kind of Darkstalkers OVA gone demonically sexual and insane. But knowing this is based on a comic from Verotik, Glenn Danzig’s vanity imprint from the nineties, I can only see it as not-so-original fanfiction for Devilman Lady, Go Nagai’s genderswapping sequel to his magnum opus, Devilman.

This preview trailer will probably make your eyes roll, and maybe it should, but man, it’s at least daring/visually stunning on some level. I didn’t forget about it five minutes after I saw it at least.

Seven Points: Robots, Ukiyo-e, Alien Penises, JManga, and more!

Posted on March 22, 2013 by Milo (blogofthenorthstar.com)

1. Being a “fan” isn’t worth it.

My behavior here and in various social networks in the past year can be considered a sort of retreat. Not a retreat from blogging (you wish… I hope this post makes it clear this isn’t happening), but a retreat from my own ill-formed conception of what it is to be a blogger, a self-appointed aesthete, a whatever I am, etc. The word fan used to be one of those labels I applied to myself, and to it I considered implicit certain obligations, including paying attention to boring things and sad people.

I am now liberated! In the spirit of freedom, this was my week:

2. I’ve got a good art book about ukiyo-e.

I’ve been seeking to level up on my education of Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints, most specifically the work of Utagawa Kuniyoshi, one of the last and most famed traditional artists to work in the medium. Unfortunately, informative well-illustrated books on the subject are rare.

Of Brigands and Bravery: Kuniyoshi’s Heroes of the Suikoden, commonly accepted as perhaps the best publication in this area, is out of print and fetches absurd prices upwards of $500. Since resigning myself to the impossibility of ever reading that one, I’ve been on the hunt for quality alternatives. Most have been disappointments, either printing low quality images, or printing at sizes that are too small, but I’ve finally found a book I can comfortably recommend.

Samurai: Stars of the Stage and Beautiful Women concerns the work of Kuniyoshi as well as Utagawa Kunisada, another titan in the field of ukiyo-e woodblocks. I’ve been tracking this book’s sliding publication date for well over a year now, but now that it’s out I’m happy to say it delivers striking, high resolution reproductions of woodblock prints as well as essays about not only the art, but on Japanese popular culture in the 19th century in general.

Ukiyo-e woodblock prints are most recognizable in a contemporary context for inspiring lots of tattoo art, and woodblock prints’ original appeal was similarly populist, the low cost of reproduction allowing middle-class people to bring art into their own homes, if not necessarily all over their own bodies. Soon the ukiyo-e style, which began as an expression of everyday metropolitan life, exploded to encompass all sorts of subject matter.

That’s when it gets interesting to me. Giant animals, shambling skeletons, bloody samurai, boobies… I’ll take crass “mass-entertainment” over wealthy people mutely admiring their own way of life any day of the week. EVERY day of the week in fact.

Samurai: Stars of the Stage doesn’t go full tilt in its presentation of that sort of content, in fact it catalogs a collection of prints housed at Kunstmuseum Düsseldorf, an art museum in Germany. The accompanying essays however are sprawling with a diverse selection of content, not solely focusing on craft or the visual qualities of the artwork, but also thoroughly examining the circumstances that birthed them.

3. Ultramarines: A Warhammer 40,000 Movie is ugly and cheap and enjoyable.

The 2010 Ultramarines animated movie, released on Blu-ray for the first time this month, was never given much of a budget, and that makes it a doomed project from its outset: the Warhammer 40K franchise, though it befuddles me now as much as it did when as when I saw it envelop the majority of my friends’ lives as a teenager, is one of premium associations.

Fans pay exorbitant sums for tiny, careful lumps of molded plastic and die-cast metal, painstakingly assembling and painting them into figures which are then placed on flocked tables where soul-crushingly complex battle campaigns take place, campaigns which are rarely seen to their end as a dwindling supply of pizza and soda set the pace for the game more than anything else. I appreciated the fun inherent to the fascist, grotesque and insane sci-fi universe, but never got the appeal of playing its tabletop namesake.

The storytelling of the Ultramarines movie is as lean as its look. A small squad of space warriors are dispatched to a routine distress beacon. The movie follows the squad claustrophobically on a slow and deliberate investigation which delivers them directly into the hands of powerful demonic forces of Chaos.

As sprawling as the Warhammer 40K mythology is, this movie pulls into a very tiny part of it, and the result is a subdued experience that is far more Ridley Scott’s Alien than it is James Cameron’s Aliens. While the movie is well-conceived and well-acted, its CG animation dates it more harshly than its actual age. I can’t imagine it working for the majority of the videogame-addled public, but it worked for me.

4. Forming is the finest cartooning I’ve read this month.

It’s also a pretty pink book.

Forming‘s combination of puerile adolescent energy and ambitious alien creation myth is the sort of thing you imagine going all loosy goosy, camouflaging itself in either heightened self-importance or overly-deprecating senselessness.

Instead, Forming is a complex story spanning millions of years, handling multiple plot points as expertly as it handles its madcap imagery, laid out in the language of a funny children’s book but filled with too much genitalia and fuck jokes to be for anyone except the child-at-heart.

I enjoyed Forming as a hardcover collection of short chapter installments though you can also read it as a webcomic. It didn’t click for me until I read it in print, as is often the case with serialized webcomics.

5. JManga is as dead as my interest in bloviating about it.

Is it possible to not be enthusiastic about how JManga was structured as a digital manga service, while also not indulging the sanctimonious righteousness with which people critiqued it? I want to disapprove of the greatest percentage of things possible, you see.

Part of the reason why piracy and piracy “solution” conversations are so tired, boring, played out, and unproductive is because at the end of the day, people are just going to DO what they want to do. So are businesses. The explanations always come afterward and are seldom 100% honest.

I don’t want to yammer on to you about why having a culture where manga creators are compensated for their work is a good thing. The reasons are pretty obvious. The reasons also wouldn’t have mattered to me when I didn’t have a dollar to my name.

In conclusion, PRINTSCREEN PASTE SAVE PRINTSCREEN PASTE SAVE PRINTSCREEN PASTE SAVE…

6. Shin Getter Robo vs Neo Getter Robo has a long confusing title, but it’s short and to the point, and the point is “AWESOME.”

Cast off your preconceived notions of what mecha anime is all about: selling toys to children, thinly-veiled military fetishism, dumb Gundam references only virgins understand, robots, etc.

This shiz is based upon Ken Ishikawa’s Getter Robo manga, and as I’ve said before, that stuff is about human action. And sociopathy. Lovecraftian monsters. Dinosaurs. Punching God in the face. Interesting things.

(And it all happened long before Gainax wrapped it in a bow and called it Gurenn Lagann, without even taking the time to reinvent it in some way.)

Even with Discotek’s enormously unpredictable track record of anime releases, I wouldn’t have expected to see this OAV available in North America. I’m very happy to have been proven wrong.

7. I’ll probably do this next week.

This method of posting content isn’t exactly SEO-friendly, but who cares? I haven’t looked at this blog’s web traffic stats in at least six months and I’m not going to start now.

2011′s best anime that’s actually from Singapore and animated by Indonesians: TATSUMI

Posted on February 21, 2013 by Milo (blogofthenorthstar.com)

Tatsumi, the animated movie based upon the life of gekiga pioneer Yoshihiro Tatsumi, communicates his vitality as a comics creator better than that incredibly lauded phonebook autobio comic he wrote: A Drifting Life.

This may be an odd way to begin a post, to decry a comic prior to discussing a movie based upon it, a movie I went out of my way to import because it’s not yet been released in North America, but my heart is in the right place. I’m a big admirer of Yoshihiro Tatsumi. I enjoy his biting pulp stories, often told in the harsh working class milieu of post-WWII Japan. I respect the dissatisfaction they communicate, their desperation turned to savagery.

The problem I have with A Drifting Life is its superficiality. I get the feeling reading it that Tatsumi is withholding the more emotive dimensions of his own life, that he’s presenting the details too plainly to be doing much more than laying out a sequence of dispassionate events. He has too featureless a personality, his manga with such grisly content as dead babies floating through gutters and the like seems to emanate from nothingness, belying what must have been a thoroughly lived life.

By dividing the running time of Tatsumi in half, alternately adapting excerpts of A Drifting Life and presenting a “greatest hits” collection of Yoshihiro short stories, you’re reminded why his oeuvre is of sufficient historical importance to beg the autobiographical question in the first place. That’s something A Drifting Life was never able to accomplish. Sure, I could have approximated the effect by thumbing through his other comics in between reading it, but Tatsumi gets it right intrinsically.

The part of Tatsumi I found most ripe with passionate raw emotion about creating manga is a fictitious one, but with enough biographical elements that I desperately wish all of it were true. You may remember it as Occupied, from the Abandon the Old in Tokyo collection Drawn and Quarterly put out.

In this story a struggling mangaka whose preference for drawing realistic content is being stifled by an editor forcing him to make his material more child-friendly, his dissatisfaction driving him to sickness. At one point the sight of two fat kids laughing seizes him with an anger so intense it makes him vomit, and during his visit to the stall he takes delight in the sight of crude, sexually charged scribbles on the wall. He returns to the stall the next day, seeing new drawings in place of the washed off old ones. They excite him, far more fascinating than the manga he’s churning out to make a living for himself. One day the desperate mangaka works up the courage to draw a naked woman in the bathroom, but he gets caught by a cleaning lady. His marker falls into the toilet and bobs there silently as he’s arrested.

This story distills the allure of a darker side that compelled Tatsumi to lay out a manifesto for a new kind of manga in the first place, a manifesto summed up by the word he coined for it: gekiga.

So this movie gives you both the airy, perfunctory tone of A Drifting Life and the grittier feel of Tatsumi’s actual gekiga fiction, and I’m obviously partial to the latter. It’s in the final moments of the film, when it temporarily switches to live action and we see a real, tired, seventy-three year-old Tatsumi laboring over pages of manga, that the autobiographical stuff becomes weighed with a sense of reality. This is a person, not a cartoon character. In place of the aloof expressions of his animated namesake we see wrinkles, beady eyes, and a hint of playfulness without any trace of a smile.

With triple the framerate and less offbeat subject matter, this animated film might have went down in history. As it is, I find it to be a mostly fitting tribute to a working manga artist wholly deserving of his newfound swell of international recognition.

Blog of the North Star

For Pop Culture Thrillseekers

Category Archives: Animation

Seven Points: One of these weeks I’ll write a good one.

Seven Points: I wish I had more free time to do these but maybe I’d waste it scratching my butt.

Seven Points: Stupid cartoons, excellent drawings, and a comic book anime not endorsed by Marvel.

Seven Points: Robots, Ukiyo-e, Alien Penises, JManga, and more!

2011′s best anime that’s actually from Singapore and animated by Indonesians: TATSUMI