Fortress of Perpetual Midnight

As was the case with Spanish back when I thought I knew it, I'm planning also to publish official Japanese versions of my projects. (Of course, as I've noted here, my first one might be a bit heavy on the English even in the Japanese version.) I'm far from fluent, of course, but this way I can provide translations that are much truer to the author's intent than most. The expanded exposure this should provide would also give me a chance to come into contact with people who are fluent, which means I could have a chance to actually learn the language, and perhaps impose on someone to correct my work. (I think I'd have more trouble bothering to make the rest of the appropriate site bilingual to cater to these people.)

Another thing that I've pondered at times is that, since I'm going to have to learn to draw anyway, it would be really nifty if someday I could get one of my works published in my belovèd YuriHime S (not the main Comic YuriHime, as I don't imagine I'll ever manage to write works appropriately feminine or comedic for there—with Ms.? Natsuneko's work there, I might have hope, but it's nothing compared to Picard's, as I'll note later). If I did manage to achieve widespread popularity as noted above, they might let me do it cold turkey, but the more likely way is through the Ichijinsha Comic Taishō （「大正」ではなくて「大賞」） or other yomi-kiri (the comic equivalent of a pilot episode). The problem with that is that, as I've no doubt mentioned before, I don't think of many good one-shot ideas lately, as I'm so absorbed in crafting intricate webs of full-sized projects. (Even Project Cow Level, which was pre-planned to be a short, simple "practice" project, is expected to run to about one graphic novel's worth.)

And yet, oddly enough, I happened to think of an interesting one-shot idea yesterday. Although it relies on a lot of tropes, it has a major setting element that I haven't seen used for this before, and unlike some, the premise is distinctly yuri, not just a romance that happens to be between two ladies. (Oddly enough, the unusual setting for a yuri story may have caused me to have a dream last night about sleeping with a man (don't remember for sure). If so, at least I was the seme. . . .) Of course, as a short story, it doesn't have much to reveal without actually writing it, and I'd rather keep the good parts to myself just to avoid anyone else stealing them. (Yes, that's my delusions of grandeur talking again.)

If this somehow did come to pass, there's the problem that the format only allows 400 characters of commentary, much less than I'd normally use. I'd probably put most of it (and the official English translation) on the Web as a supplement to the published part, as Ms. Miyahara does. For the actual printed version, I'm thinking the essentials are along the lines of 「男で申し訳御座いません。いつか必ずレディーにもよろこんで頂けるまんがを描ける様になりますから、今は違った味でがまんして下さいませな。」 (although I haven't bothered to boot up Word to get a character count).

The "chigatta aji" bit overlaps with the question of how predisposed these Japanese folks will be to publishing stuff by some American git. I can't do much about that, but I might consider working in a more Japanese style than my own. For some reason, it seems to be coming out with a larger-than-usual proportion of pseudo-comical elements despite the fact that I don't have a sense of humor (perhaps to make up for the fact that romance is an alien concept to me), so it'll be an outlier in my portfolio in more ways than one (hey, more dovetailing with the post subject).

By the way, in the excessively megalomaniacal mōsō situation that I actually got to do a serial, Project AnthraXX seems at this point as if it would actually be palatable. Of course, it would be helluva Webcomic time in a quarterly mook. . . .

Unusually enough for me, Project Cow Level has no sex in it, as I didn't have any interest in having such content in a story about tauren and dwarves. While I'm at it, I'm considering keeping the violence to (MPAA) PG as well. That may be difficult for one of my adventure-based (type B) projects, but we'll see.

Meanwhile, as I've mentioned before, Projects Umbra and Homuncupunk are coming to have more and more sex, while Project AnthraXX is coming to have more and more story, thus blurring the gap between A and B. Consequently, AnthraXX is probably the most ready of my original projects, owing primarily to the fact that its setting is heavily based on the real world, thus preventing me from needing to create mecha designs from scratch. Of course, it's still quite controversial, but at least there's plot to thin out the sex and I don't portray YHWH in quite such a bad light. I also think that the witches' and demons' subplot doesn't overpower the main story about the protagonist and heroine, but it's still tangential enough that I haven't completely thrown out the idea of making it a separate project.

In other previews, I've thought about vague subtitles for the three story arcs of Project Homuncupunk:

Part One: The Bounty Hunter
Part Two: The Prodigal Son
Part Three: The Emissary

I chopped the first two down to one word each for better parallelism. The subtitles reflect Jūzaburō's role in the story. ("So, what's with the second one if he turns coat at the beginning?" you might ask. Now that would be telling, wouldn't it?) Riku's backstory relates mostly to the first story arc, but the second half of it has a spoiler for something in the middle of "The Hunter," so where I include that will depend on how long each volume runs. I'm also not quite sure about the wording for the third part (and can't explain without spoiling it), but there's plenty of time to think about that.

I'm thinking of also making Project AnthraXX in three parts, corresponding with the three trimesters of Ms. Brown's freshman year. These would likely be short enough that one volume of the hard copies could be devoted to each, with one extra story as an extra for each. I don't have subtitles for the trimesters, as I don't know quite where the breaks will be, but the first two extras are currently known as "Time-Gilded Paradise Lost" and "The Dark of Gomorrah"; I'm not so sure about the third, as it doesn't really seem to add anything to the series.

Now that I've finished with the comics for the time being, it's time to get back to Project Cow Level. Currently, the main problem there is that no one has expressed interest in doing the coloring for me, so I'm probably having to learn to do that myself. In particular, a story about dwarven prospectors tends to have a lot of underground scenes, so I'm going to have to worry about lighting whenever they're dealing with those who don't have darkvision. (The darkvision is taken from the SRD, so it's in monochro; to make it consistent with the rest, I'm going to have to color those parts and then grayscale them. More interesting will be the parts where dwarves are looking at places that are partially lit. . . .)

Just as I was about ready to start on Project Cow Level, Ms. mizuno_youko happened to be getting rid of an old (but still functional for the moment) scanner, and you know how I feel about free stuff. Just for fun, I tried it out before opening it. As you can see, it's perfectly good quality for a fan-comic—to the point that I should be able to draw each page on an 8½×11 sheet and still have the content of a reasonably sized page. (I may upgrade if I ever get to the point that I can make my own projects.) Since I won't be allowed to publish this one in hard copy, I don't think there's any particular reason to keep consistent whether it's portrait or landscape orientation. Actually, I really have no idea how the Comic Genesis engine works, but it's not a big deal. I'll get to that after my proposal is accepted. (Optimism? Who am I and what have I done with archlords?)

Also, as I noted here, I did a very small number of sketches before getting distracted by new comics. (I just got a bunch more after I finished them, so there won't be any more for quite a while.) They're test designs for a couple of main characters, as well as stock tauren. Some notes: *The mask idea came from my belovèd Poisoned Wind Globadiers. However, I was thinking that dwarves don't use warp-technology like Skaven or chaos energy like gnomes and goblins, so I came up with the lower-tech idea of just using some sort of gauze as a filter. Of course, gauze porosity is rather difficult to represent in comic illustrations. More mechanically importantly, the kerchief doesn't fit well over his muzzle (and makes him look a bit too much like a bandit), so I'll probably use a more direct copy of the Globadiers'. As you can see from the sketch in the middle, I wasn't sure about the framework for the cylinder, but upon closer inspection, there's a metal ring around the end. *Dwarven goggle straps don't fit well on races that have heads extending parallel to their lines of sight. I'll probably have them integrated into a cap (again, like the Globadiers) that buckles below the chin. I like the Globadiers' slightly convex lenses, but these are supposed to be based on a standard design (only altered to fit the tauren), so I'm keeping to the original schematics, excepting logistical changes. *I don't know how to properly draw braids, which are an integral part of the character designs for the project. For Aonghus, at least, they'll be solid black, so no one will notice. (Unlike in AnthraXX, he wears colors, so I don't have to go to the trouble of adding non-black lines to delineate him.) For the others, I'll probably use the primitive method seen here. *Speaking of braids, I considered giving Aonghus eartails but nixed that so you could see the chin-strap. *I don't really like cattle's noses with their big open nostrils, so I squished them. *I'm not sure about whether I should leave Aonghus's horn stump bare or use a cap (a couple of test designs on the middle right). I suppose a metal cap would help to emphasize his cosmopolitan appearance.

I pretty much have the first few chapters laid out, so I can get to that whenever I'm less distracted. I was originally going to start with the origin story, but I think it'd be more entertaining if I jumped right into the action. I'm thinking about it putting the flashback in Chapter 2 instead (as Chapter 1 is just an introduction to the team), but I'm afraid of doing that too crudely, like in HELLSING. I at least have an idea to link it to what the characters are doing right after Chapter 1, so hopefully it'll work a bit better.

It was brought to my attention that problem #1 here could actually be a good thing. It's a cop-out, but it might make things easier.

Typing of starting out, I noticed a while back that my introductory story (pretty much all I've thought up) for Project Necropunk would stand alone reasonably well. The problems here are:

1. I don't know how to draw, and drawing a bunch of anatomically correct human and dragon bones would be hell.

2. As probably the most controversial of my projects, I don't want it to be my debut for image reasons.

One of the suggestions I've had for where to go with my projects early on was to make something in a setting that my readers know, instead of Project Abdiel, about which none of you give a damn. As it happens, one of my ideas, which I hadn't posted yet, turned out to have an interesting story in him. Of course, we've got a couple of problems:

1. Like Abdiel, the project contains very little in the way of human-looking beings, which is what I need to practice drawing the most. In particular, there are almost no female-looking humans/elves/Eldar, which are in the spotlight* in most of my projects.

2. The premise of a retrograde global amnesiac hero taken in by the opposite faction turns out to be the same as the big comic, which turns out to be titled World of Warcraft itself, so I imagine pretty much everyone's going to catch me on that. True, I'd plan to use it in a very different way (including reversing the factions), but I had read that part before, so I can't claim I'm not copying (if only subconsciously, because I didn't remember that part until later).

Anyway, I've added it to the database, which no longer has a lucky number of records. Of course, what's on the list is pretty arbitrary; some of them are unlikely to ever see the light of day*, such as .slice, which is even more derivative.

Speaking of the comic, apparently he lets the slaves out of the cages and chains for funerals, so they must get along reasonably well or have some back-up measure.

*These aren't really directly "good" things, so I haven't altered them.

These days, I have so many Japanese books to buy that by the time I get one, I don't remember what I'd read about it that prompted me to put it on the shopping list. This means, for one thing, that I generally go into each one with a clean slate, no spoilers, preconceptions, or particular expectations. This is especially true in the case of Aka×Pink, which I put off from a previous order because it was another novel that I'd bought accidentally. (For all I can remember, this one may predate "Yuri na Hibi.") Now that I've finally read it, I have enough kansō to fill an entire post.

Of course, in the interim, this one spent a lot of time sitting around the room, so I'm well acquainted with the cover illustration. I thought it just reminded me of Sai-Kano because of the content, but upon closer inspection, it's by the same guy. (I didn't remember the name because I didn't give a damn about that innovative-but-borderline-harem series in the first place.) Since I don't pay attention to prose, I hadn't heard of a major comics guy doing illustrations for novels before. Then again, there are only two real illustrations in the entire book. . . .

Anyway, from the blurb on the back, you'd get a certain idea of what sort of book it's going to be. But despite the fact that most of the characters are very unusual people, it's written pretty straight. (It isn't often that you read a book where the most normal guy in the cast is also the chief comic relief. He's the source of the quote in the subject line—yes, in Roman letters.) I suppose a human might have trouble taking such eccentricities seriously (although not so much as in Sai-Kano), but I like the way it explores these innovative personalities in a respectful manner.

In a similar way, despite the fact that the participants in the central fight/hostess club have to have cheesy/fetishy stage personae and outfits, and the matches are partially just for show rather than competitive, it's compared to MMA (with an octagon cage, despite the fact that PRIDE takes place in a square ring with ropes) rather than pro wrestling. I never had much interest in MMA, where the main MA (particularly among Brazilians and Japanese) is jūjutsu, because I don't much like seeing men rolling on the floor and grappling. (I guess that's in focus because it's effective in bare-handed combat. You don't need to choke someone out if you can stab or shoot him.) This one, however, focuses more on (somewhat) more dignified striking and stand-up. (I find it amusing that the one who admires "Mirko-san" is known as "Mīko-san.")

The story focuses on three main heroines, with each narrating one chapter. They are three very different individuals, but their common ground (other than occupation) is their seeking to understand what they want in life and reconcile it with what others want of them. (Incidentally, they also all use "watashi" in hira-gana, including the tough one who sees herself as a man and uses according speech patterns otherwise.) Although the different narratives overlap a lot in the same scenes, it's rather interesting to see which heroines feel it significant to describe which parts in full, and which they didn't seem to perceive at all.

Of course, yuri was still my main incentive behind this one. It's hard to say much without spoiling some of the interesting psychological elements, but suffice it to say that many of the most significant relationships in the story are between the heroines, and the line between friendship and romance, like much of the tale, is rather ambiguous. I quite liked it, with the exception of the fact that one of the relationships ends with a rather loose end.

All in all, I quite enjoyed this one and recommend it highly. Besides that, my ability to get through it led me to think that I might be willing to actually try some more novels on purpose—but, then again, I hardly have any shortage of reading material. It would be more useful to get back into reading prose in English, in case I might become able to write novels of my own, which would circumvent the problem of drawing that's currently my only real obstacle.

By the way, I was interested to see that the author is a lady who has a "my boom" about a particular color of lipstick, and who pumps iron at least once a week. The elements about practicing kara-te (she's a black belt who made it to the national championship in '02) and receiving a love letter from a younger lady are apparently autobiographical. I guess that like me, being an unusual person gives her a viewpoint that allows her to portray things differently from normal people.

One of the main things I'd forgotten earlier also relates to the too much sex stuff. The problem I was seeing was that, in Project AnthraXX, the main storyline is the relationship between Ms. Brown and Ms. Canina. Although I plan for this one to be rather short (less than one year's in-story time), I want to include appropriate pacing. I don't want them to get to home plate right off the bat. (An important part of Ms. Canina's character is that she moves quickly, but I decided that one of Ms. Brown's few unique qualities* is her ability to resist this, mostly because of her beliefs.) However, again, I have no sense of subtlety, so I make sure to start off with quite a bit of obvious chemistry. I just happened to think of an appropriately kinky way to extend this. Ironically enough, while my mind wandered at work later, I thought of an expansion to that idea that actually serves to illustrate the relationship on an emotional rather than physical level, which is hard for me to do without such gimmicks.

*She does seem to be a bit of an "everywoman" character, which makes it unusual of me to be putting this one from her point of view (although I've seen that premise countless times in Japanese stories), when I thought of the more iconic characters of Ms. Faust and Ms. Canina earlier in the design process. At least she personally takes part in the main story, unlike Ishmael, Caraway, and their ilk.

I also thought up another idea for a cheesy fan-pic. That list is getting longer and longer; one of these days, I may actually get around to trying to draw again. For individual illustrations, I may be able to get them right just by trial and error.

For some reason, in the middle of this month, I coincidentally encountered a number of references to the German troops of the World Wars:

1. As noted earlier, I reread HELLSING. In case you've been living under a rock for the last couple of years, the main conflict in the series is with a bunch of SS vampires and werewolves who have hidden away in South America until now, when they come back to wage eternal war.

2. The latest free issue of GTM that I happened to pick up that week at the Game Preserve featured an article on the release of TANNHÄUSER, a game that I had noted earlier as having a damn nifty setting and miniatures (although not enough to warrant buying a board game for them). The concept is that the Germans have prolonged the Great War until the '40s using their arcane knowledge.

3. On the same stop at the Wabash Landing, I happened to notice a special mook? featuring our old friend Erwin Rommel on the cover.

4. That evening, I noted that orbix's IM icon resembled Gleemax. I also checked here to make sure that Hitler's brain was not green. I also realized that there was another Nazi soldier named Erwin. I can only assume that it's not the same guy, as the Desert Fox was teaching at the academy in the '30s, not acting as some stereotypical villain's lackey. Also, one of history's most legendary tacticians deserves a less generic face.

I was struck by the idea of having some crossover featuring the SS from HELLSING hanging out with Haken and Erwin. Unfortunately, I don't happen to have any context for that. Maybe I'll just make a fanart—once I actually bother to learn to draw.

5. I also happened to notice that these guys are an unusually cheap way to get a 40K army. They're actually from another planet almost 39,000 years in the future, but they fit thematically.

6. I ate out with arifyn's parents for Mother's birthday. I don't remember the context, but someone mentioned the fact that some Nazis had fled to South America.

Meanwhile, remember the distinction that, while I may make Nazi jokes, I do not make Holocaust jokes. I can't imagine that HELLSING sells very well in Germany, where you can get three years just for saying the words "Sieg Heil."

Speculation on Ms. Mikado's and Ms. Inori's past and future and the festival that I mentioned earlier have come together today. (Unfortunately, the illustration doesn't seem to be up to Ms.? Maitake's usual standards. Then again, I never liked Ms. Mikado because of her looks in the first place.) Personally, I think that they'll at least get a chance at the top, as they really didn't need to show their stuff in the current fight. I don't think they'll be able to win, as that would be quite a shake-up to the character relationship structure of the series. Of course, I don't see that either Ms. Kurogane or Ms. Mudō has any reason to go that far anyway, so the "last boss" element seems a bit separated from the main storyline so far. Possible future #3 also seems unfortunately unlikely, as the yuri elements in this series are not terribly direct, and in this case they seem to be mostly pointing in the opposite direction (Inori → Mikado).

Meanwhile, I still have the other 10 books from the latest order to report. I'm breaking them down into similarly themed blocks [some here and here] for convenience.

Well, I'm not allowed to leave the computer on unless I'm using it (to make sure I counter-hack anyone who tries to break in), so here's another post for today while I wait for my files to download:

The term "love triangle" seems a bit of a misnomer to me, because in normal ("straight") relationships, there are only two faces that are actually "love," because there's an odd number. Fortunately, I've had the opportunity to peruse quite a variety of less stale materials—but sadly, neither of the examples I've manage to catch is anything that I can call "recommended reading."

The well known Ramma ¹/₂ covers this without being too iconoclastic (even the one apparent yuri coupling late in the series turns out to include a man who was raised as a girl) by having one of the characters change into a female form. The arrow pointing to him comes from someone who doesn't know he's a man. This is something of an isosceles or bilaterally symmetric triangle, as there are two arrows coming from the fellow at the bottom, and the other two both point to one another.

HEN does things a little better, actually having two real female characters. In this case, the triangle is an infinite loop appearing similar to an American recycling symbol (or perhaps three dogs chasing each other's tails . . . ?). Unfortunately, the illustration style and content are less than appealing.

I really ought to be able to think of something better than these. Can anyone else point out something I've missed? Perhaps I'll have to make my own. . . .

Comic YuriHime has been successful enough to try some interesting things lately. I haven't yet posted on the last three mooks I've received, so here we go:

Comic YuriHime VOL.8: Following from the first one to have characters not from Hatsu-Koi Shimai and the first one to not have two characters, this cover is not even by Ms. Hibiki! To tell the truth, I'm not a big fan of her style or that of Ms. Zaō, but they don't bother me for the most part. In any case, everything seems to be going as usual. (They even brought back Ms. Sudō (who hasn't been seen since the previous series's VOL.5), along with her hormones (which haven't been seen since VOL.4), if only for one page.) Coincidentally, this is the first time I've heard the term "se(x)frie(nd)," and in two stories in the same issue. . . . Strawberry Shake Sweet continues to up the story, introducing a mysterious villain who looks like she might be related to Ms. Asakawa (whose origins are still unknown)—but, then again, so does one of ZLAY's members. There's also some information on Aoi Shiro, and the new serials look really pretty (including yet another series where the main character's best friend addresses her with "-chan"-zuke ". . . desu wa"). Meanwhile, the cover story is interviews with the cast of the Haru Natsu Aki Fuyu drama CDs, including our beloved Ms. Kawakami: 「GLは初体験・・・」? Perhaps the big one doesn't count because it's not "only."

YuriHime Selection: The first half of this is a compilation of many one-shots that weren't big enough to warrant their own compilations, so you can get them now even though their original mooks are out of print. This is of course less useful to someone who has the entire set, like myself. Fortunately, the other half is other one-shots and bangaihen of stuff serialized in the main mook. We also see the cover debut of Ms. Eiki, who stated way back in her first appearance that she was collaborating with Ms. Zaō because she hadn't yet achieved "the power to draw cute girls." Her partner's influence is rather evident in the illustration style. Speaking of covers, a one-shot mook is apparently cheap enough to produce that they didn't need a CM on the back, instead covering it with the reversed names of the author/illustrators.

Comic YuriHime S VOL.1: According to a guide way back when, "S" (short for "Sisters") was something of a prototype for yuri (which still has strong sisterly overtones in many cases). It bills itself as a 「PURE★コミック誌」, but it still has a fair amount of sex and violence (including a series with combat elements, which is something that hasn't been seen before in this family of mooks), so I'm not sure what is supposed to differentiate this from the other serial and justify making another one in parallel instead of just releasing issues of the main one more often. (I never was clear about target audiences. In one of Ms. Morishima's one-shots, the heroine's "non-ke" friends were mooning over guys in Shōnen Chump.) In fact, it appears that Nanami to Misuzu is serialized in both. (Fortunately, it's rather episodic anyway, so continuity shouldn't be too big of a deal.) I like a lot of the new serials, of course, including two in particular. The first one is drawn with incredible technical proficiency—and who can resist a diminutive purple-haired aristocrat who uses the copula verb "ja" (no "warawa" this time, though)?

The second one is by Ms. Iwami, whom I know from Suzunari! I had a bit of a problem with the character designs in that (not sure why—something about looking a bit flat, perhaps), but her serial here looks flawless. It's set in another of those small fictional states that are never named (see Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Roman Holiday, Iono the fanatics, etc.). Unlike the others this one is apparently in East Asia (judging by the names of their royalty, which are based on the four guardian gods of ancient China and written in Chinese characters), yet very liberal—there appears to be no problem with the fact that the crown prince is a cross-dresser, or that (not much of a spoiler, given where it's serialized) the second princess (apparently she has an elder sister around here somewhere) gets married to another princess. It also appears to be ruled by dark-skinned people with funny-shaped marks on their foreheads*, despite the fact that the commoners are white. The more boyish of the two princesses also has a bit of a 「フェミニスト」／「王子様」 thing going on.

*Does anyone know what the thing in Hinduism is called? In Japanese media, I often see it replaced by birthmarks on the foreheads of (often dark-skinned) people of both sexes.

The aforementioned combat series is somewhat unpolished in its illustration style and has a lot of "service," but looks fairly entertaining. It looks like, as often seems to happen, the main tough young lady is going to be relegated to comic relief status. There are at least two obvious couplings visible even from the introduction—and a dark-skinned, pale-haired sub-chara with a birthmark on her forehead.

Fujieda and Takagi, two of the luminaries of shōnen yuri, only have four- to five-page introductions to their serials so far (the latter continuing his usual trend of maid uniforms and three-syllable names), but I'm sure they'll be entertaining.

Excerpts from two of the mook's unrelated serials include . . .
「松平さー・・・　んっ！？」
「ナギ・・・さ　んん！！」 (can't figure out how to type a small "n")

Addendum to the voice-actor comments earlier: Ms. Mamiya is back as another young lady who talks funny. Also, the heroine has quite a feminine name, but that appears to be a holdover from a previous life, where she had a very different personality.