Fortress of Perpetual Midnight

I found some more stuff I wanted available at jpqueen, so I decided on a whim to try yet another order. If you want anything, you just need to tell me by 2008.06.07 (in a time zone close to the International Date Line), and we can share the shipping. As ever, there's a chance that the items will be bought by someone else if you don't tell me quickly enough, but there's not enough turnaround for it to be terribly important (or for their recommendations to be useful—currently AZUMANGA is associated with yaoi and "Hentai").

AZUMANGA is torrented. I'd download it myself while I had the chance, but I don't have enough disk space or a DVD-ROM burner. (There is, on the other hand, a DV-R, which we unsurprisingly never use.) Obviously, the category is incorrect, so it may not even be actual raws either, but whatever.

Japan has almost no devoutly religious people, but they love ceremonies, so they take the best holidays from wherever they can get them (mostly Shintō, Zen, and Catholicism). One example that I find amusing is that they go to Shintō shrines to celebrate the Chinese zodiac's changing of the guard on the Gregorian New Year. Of course, I don't follow any of those, so I'm more interested in entertaining traditions such as the hatsu-yume. For those of you who didn't watch AZUMANGA, there's apparently something significant about a dream that you remember on the night of the new year, often something to do with hawks and eggplants.

I was reminded of this by the extra booklet included with the January issue (despite amazon's numbering scheme) of Comic YuriHime, which included a lot of supernumerary stories with new-year themes. (The previous issues of it and S haven't arrived yet, so I decided to save those for later, but I'm not buying Wildrose, so I read the ones related to that. Only one of them had sex in it.) Unfortunately, I hadn't remembered at the actual time, so I've missed it this year as well. The night after Chinese New Year, I just had something about a bunch of humans traveling to an arboreal land of monsters.

Meanwhile, another benefit of this, as well as the fact that they don't have this weird Western idea that comics are supposed to be commentary on real life, is that they can write stories were organized religion is the bad guys without getting in trouble. Oddly, I don't seem to remember many that would be well known on this side of the pond, just FINAL FANTASY TACTICS and ~X, but my bookcase alone has a good half-dozen or so.

As part of my research for Project AnthraXX, I was looking through this. (You can probably guess why if you look carefully enough at my notes, but I know you won't, so you'll have to wait until it's hypothetically drawn so it'll be obvious.) Sadly, one of the problems with Wikipedia, just like its English counterpart, is that for fiction, almost the entire article is under the "spoiler alert" tag, so you can never be sure not to learn something you weren't supposed to learn yet unless you've already read the entire thing. It's especially difficult with Japanese comics, where the writers can get information from the serials, while I have to wait for the compilations. Naturally, I did happen to run into one.

Meanwhile, I was actually motivated to go back and read the seven volumes that I have. I stopped following the series a couple years back due to the refocus of my priorities, but it's still an entertaining series. I was particularly surprised at how much of the Millennium stuff I didn't remember after reading once (particularly the part about Walter and the tall, stoic, nameless Werwolf captain), as compared to the parts up to the HELLSING/Iscariote meeting, which I had read in two languages and seen in the TV series. Now that I'm more experienced and had already read through it, I was able to catch more of the design elements.

I remember one of the first impressions I had of the series was Arucard's crazy eyes. Now that I look at it more carefully, the same trait is displayed by pretty much every adult male character (and Ms. Blitz). Even the unaltered humans like Maxwell look positively abnormal. Of course, that is not terribly surprising, as a good proportion of the principal characters is made up of bloodthirsty megalomaniacs. The series also has possibly the highest eyewear quotient of any I've seen, between the spectacles (apparently vampirism can cure aging, but not astigmatism), sunglasses, Walter's monocle, and Doc's goggles. The illustrator particularly likes to show people with their faces shrouded in darkness (even when standing in places where the rest of their bodies are illuminated) and glare off their lenses. I also noted that people seem to have really long arms (reaching about to their knees), but I don't have anything in particular to say about that.

Another thing that struck me when coming back to the comics was the gags. I've said before that I don't believe in the concept of the "smart joke" (although there are certainly some more intellectual than others), but I find it hard to call these ones even jokes. I liked the fact that they removed them from the TV series, but I hear that they have been retained in the OVAs.

Also, another unusual thing for an action series is that we never have to worry about the hero. The introductory stories (the village of Cheddars, the Northern Ireland mission, and the Valentine Bros. siege) serve mostly to introduce us and Ms. Victoria to the fact that Arucard is ridiculously powerful. In fact, among all the weird monsters, the chief protagonist is often the one who seems the most hideously inhuman. He also uses my favorite speech patterns (after a brief attempt at "ore" in the first chapter, later retconned), but so does half of the rest of the cast.

Incidentally, it appears that, officially, the TV series is now known as Hellsing Rescript, while the OVAs are just HELLSING. This is because this was another one where the TV series got ahead of the original comics, so they had to make up their own ending. This has happened with all three of the animations of Young King Ours series I've seen; no surprise, as they say that HELLSING only runs every other month, which means about one volume a year. In the meantime, I see that Koyasu plays Luke Valentine in both versions. It's different from my image of him for him to get such a zako role, but at least unlike his brother, he was supposed to seem like a tough guy. After all, he plays the part that shows us to the full degree that Arucard is so ridiculously powerful. Many of the other parts have been recast for the OVAs, resulting in Andersen being played by Wakamoto. I would be quite amused if it turned out that his true form is an unidentifiable round yellow creature.

Speaking of rereading, I also flipped through the first two books of tricolo (which, after looking through the back posts, I don't appear to have discussed here before). Said volumes are the collections of its run in Manga Time Kirara, but, in 2006, it was revived in Comic Dengeki Daiō, which means it's spanned my two chief publishers of yuri comics (other than Ichijinsha, of course), and is of course subject to the usual problem that monthly periodicals take forever to put out compilations (although not as long as quarterly ones, of course). I picked this one out way back when I first started trying out all the ones outed in Yuri Shimai, and this is at least the fourth time I've read through it. The main impression I got this time was wondering why I like it so much. Ms. Niwatazumi, the one yuri character, ranks fourth in terms of importance (she's the only one of the five main players who doesn't appear in the first chapter, to say nothing of the second and third), and it's another four-panel strip, which means that I don't get most of the jokes (and the one about using explosives in Hiroshima was in rather bad taste, if you ask me). Nonetheless, the "big eyes, big hair" style (which is best illustrated here) is plenty cute, so it's worth the trip.

Meanwhile, it's always good to have a high-school co-ed with glasses and long hair who's assiduous, intelligent, worried about her weight, and usually acting as tsukkomi-yaku, right?

All right, for those of you who have read HELLSING and read/watched AZUMANGA DAIOH (which means arifyn, I suppose):

No, I did not make it myself.