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I've posted about fan fiction before, but never about its equally-compelling companion: fan art.
My financial situation, as someone who's self-employed, goes up and down; but when I go to anime conventions I always make sure to spend at least some money on fan art.
Fan fiction requires sitting down and taking the time to read and absorb - but fan art is a delight that surrounds you (provided you hang it up in some fashion) and nurtures you whenever you look on it.
The beautiful illustration of Sasuke above was scanned from an 8-1/2" by 11" print, but fan art comes in all sizes and functions. Here are some bookmarks of Toshiro from Bleach and Gaara from Naruto:
One of my favorite pieces of fan art early on when I first became a fan was the following cute chibi rendering of Roy Mustang from Fullmetal Alchemist:
When I bought the above print, I'd never even heard of "chibis" before (lol).
Another cute one was a postcard of Edward Elric:
I like how Ed raging is how he expresses his love (note the heart in the upper left) - and that his mouth actually extends past the boundary of his face (at the chin)!
The best fan art, like the best fan fiction, expresses emotion and/or causes an emotional response in the reader or viewer. The following illustration featuring characters from Naruto falls into this category:
Not only Naruto's expression, but the look on Sakura's face and the body posture of all three remaining members of Team 7 reflects how they miss Sasuke, shown walking away in the background.
The emotions raised don't always have to be melancholy ones. Here's an image that never fails to make me smile:
In case you don't watch Bleach, the in-joke involves the fact that Ishida uses a spirit-infused set of bow and arrows as his weapon in the series. Here, in this fan rendering as Cupid, we might expect he's using his arrows for a much more benign purpose. ;)
Like fan fiction, fan art is mostly an enormous labor of love and I love the fans for making it. :) I'll always admire what these artists do for love.
Viz has announced the details of its new yaoi manga imprint.
The name of the imprint is "Sublime" (spelled "SuBLime" - the emphasized "BL" in the middle is for "boys love") and the editor of the imprint is Jennifer LeBlanc, author of The Yaoi Review blog.
The second news item is that Yaoi Con itself will be moving to Los Angeles starting in 2012. This change in location is taking place in conjunction with a change in ownership of the convention. The convention will be transitioning from its present ownership to Digital Manga, Inc. (aka Digital Manga Publishing). As many of you know, DMI is located in the Los Angeles area. The exact time and place for Yaoi Con 2012 is yet to be determined.
"Hybrid" meaning a mixture of fried and non-fried noodles...
I can't seem to resist these Nissin commercials. =D
Viz Media has just announced that they will be ending the print version of Shonen Jump, and going to an all-digital version next spring:
http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2011-10-14/viz-shonen-jump-print-magazine-to-end-next-march
We're all moving - know it or not, like it or not - to digital from print, and faster than many of us can process regardless of our age or background. For someone who remembers life before the Internet - and who just today saw selected Tokyopop manga volumes being sold at 75 percent off at Barnes & Noble - this is a sea change of enormous proportions.
Part of me wants this headlong rush to digital and the abandonment of print to slow down, give everyone a chance to think this over and breathe a little. But another part of me knows that the effective end of print as the standard medium for what we've always known as "books" is drawing near. And as to magazines and periodicals like Shonen Jump, with their shorter shelf life, even more so.
It's no less than the passing of an era.
Said contest for 10,000 free airplane tickets to Japan will be held (if at all) next April.
You would think they'd have thought this through a little better...
Apparently, the Japan National Tourism Organization is sponsoring 10,000 free round-trip airplane tickets to Japan!
Good luck trying to access the site to sign up (takes forever to load):
http://www.jnto.go.jp/eng/
Season 2 of Sekai-ichi Hatsukoi begins airing on Crunchyroll TOMORROW.
Ao no Exorcist or Blue Exorcist has finished its first season, and I have a few thoughts.
Blue Exorcist at first seems like a well-made but mostly derivative pastiche of Shonen Jump-ness. There's the hero, Rin Okumura, and his younger twin brother Yukio, both raised by a priest whom they consider their father. One night their father kills himself. He does this to thwart Satan, who has taken over his body. Satan isn't done, however. Because, actually, Satan's two sons are Rin and Yukio, and the devil wants to come out into the world to play.
Blue Exorcist is representative of a unique strain of Japanese manga and anime: stories that involve Christian figures and imagery, but in very unexpected and somewhat (to us) shocking ways.
Fifteen years ago, a curious young woman was attracted to Satan. Knowing who he was, she nonetheless became his lover and died shortly after giving birth to twin sons. Shiro Fujimoto, a priest in the True Cross Order, adopted the boys.
Rin, the first twin to emerge, is strong but Yukio, the second twin, is weak and sickly, so Satan's powers are absorbed solely into Rin's body.
After their priest/father's death, Rin and Yukio enter True Cross Academy, a school for exorcists run by "Mephisto Pheles," a "Knight" of the Vatican(!). It's implied throughout the series that Mephisto is Rin and Yukio's older brother.
Rin discovers that Yukio has secretly trained all his life to be an exorcist. Despite the fact that he is the inheritor of Satan's powers, Rin wants to become an exorcist and defeat Satan.
Blue Exorcist works as your standard shonen anime, but obviously the religious aspects give it a certain something else. Just the concept of the Son of Satan as an otherwise ordinary teenager and the hero of an adventure story is a little out there to us westerners. When Rin activates his powers - his "Satan" powers, I guess - a kind of blue electricity crackles around him, he grows horns, and a forked tail emerges.
Like in Fullmetal Alchemist, one of Blue Exorcist's strengths is its development of the relationship between brothers Rin and Yukio.
Yukio actually seems a little cold at first. He initially blames Rin for their father's death, as the priest had been defending Rin and their monastery when Satan attacked, but as the series goes on we see that Rin and Yukio are closer than they first appear. Rin is a screw-up, a near-juvenile delinquent when we're introduced to him. Yukio is the quiet honor student, the "good" son. But each is willing to sacrifice himself for the other and by the end of the series, we believe in their bond.
It's hard to know what to say about the Christian images and references. I think in general that such things are absorbed by the Japanese through their own cultural filter in ways that we non-Japanese can't really understand. Some might find it bizarre, even offensive. I choose to see it as another case of the Japanese doing their own interpretation of the symbology of other cultures, which they're perfectly entitled to do, and in their own way. If westerners can do their own interpretation (more projection I would say than interpretation - but who's quibbling) of samurais, geishas, Buddhist monks, etc., then the Japanese surely can offer up their own fantasies of our iconic symbols.
Blue Exorcist is a successful franchise in Japan and the manga is ongoing, so at least a second season seems in the cards. I'll look forward to watching more of this shonen anime - with a twist.
