(no subject)

reading_genji

You know you wanna.

Accomplishments so far this weekend

Got three five pages of pencils done on Project Blue Rose.
Paid my car registration (online! I love living in the future!)
Watched epsiodes 1-5 of Princess Tutu and 1-8 of Fullmetal Alchemist*
Figured out a bit more about how ComicWorks works, so that I can now do better shoujo paneling.** Am still unsure what advantage panel group layers have, but o well.

Have not:

Paid my power bill.
Done more pages.
Gone grocery shopping.

Have planned:
Do two pages while watching one of the DVDs I've got checked out.
Go to Borders over near work, because the online inventory thingybobber says they've got Qwan 3 and Fruits Basket 12 in stock though, alas, no Saiyuki Reload 2 yet.
Go to Central Market next to that Borders, to try round steak from their butcher area to see if it has flavor or not, since the grocery stores near here don't carry meat with flavor (if this fails, it'll be down to finding a butcher shop somewhere).



* Which apparently got into my brain more than I expected, since I was drawing on the computer at the same time it was on the TV - Hughes' wife gave birth in my dreams last night as Hughes ran around squawking like a chicken with its head cut off. (that metaphor doesn't seem to make much sense now, does it?)

** although PBR's sticking with teh shounen paneling, since I've done almost half of it already with that.

Congratulations!

Congratulations to _ri, who just won the MAK manga competition of Vienna - she gets a trip to Tokyo!





now how to convince her to do something for the PandaBuddha anthology, so I can say that there's an award-winning artist in there? XD

Qwan 3

The reason I'm going to be behind rachelmanija and kate_nepveu in reading Genji for a bit - I got my hands on a copy of Qwan 3.

If you haven't heard me squee over it before, it's a manga by Aki Shimizu set in ancient China. Qwan is a mysterious boy who eats demons who doens't know who he is or what his purpose is, although he knows he has one, and who has a cute little headless flying dog-pig-thing. He hooks up with the scruffy Chieki - or more accurately, Chieki gloms onto Qwan as a way to get some quick cash by going into the demon-busting business - and sets off to find his purpose. On the way they meet the prostitute Shaga, who knows a lot more than she's letting on, a young girl who communes with insects and her villainous father, and learn that the scrolls of the Essential Arts of Peace may help Qwan remember his purpose.

The art is wonderful - detailed and quirky, with great character touches - and the story is delightful and quirky. Sorry, not going to try to rewrite that to take the second 'quirky' out - you'll just have to deal with it. Anyway, book 3 takes us out of the world we know and into a demon-type world out of Chinese myth, with all sorts of bizarre creatures. With mustaches. And beards. And we get to see Shaga sporting a cute little mustache along with her normal flowing hair, for reason that make perfect sense once you get to that point in the book.

Anyway, this is the sort of myth-based fantasy I love, where you get ... er, well, I can't describe it. Basically where the creatures just flat aren't human. (It's one of the reasons I love Spirited Away.) It's also got so much of a feel of an ancient China that never was that I keep expecting Master Li and Number Ten Ox to wander by. It's a worldbuilding that relies on an emotional, fairy-tale kind of logic, not a scientific one, if that makes sense. Kazuya Minekura, much as I love her, fails in this sort of worldbuilding (luckily she knows it and concentrates her efforts on the bits she excels at, which are character and relationships) - her demonic, magical world lacks the quality of the numinous* and her youkai, while loosely based on Japanese mythology, are mostly humans with pointy ears, funky tattoos, and a talent for magic.

I sort of lost track of where I was going, so I'll just wind up with: READ QWAN. NOW.


* WOO-HOO! Grad school word! Let's see if I can work in "paradigm" and "vis-a-vis" next!

(no subject)

And one more thing to say - I love going to the HEB Central Market, the upscale grocery store, because while it's got a lot of oofy, gourmet, overpriced stuff and not a lot of the generic crap I usually get, it smells right. You don't ever smell anything in a modern grocery store unless they've just taken the loaves of French bread out of the oven or the fried chicken out of the deep fryer and have placed them on racks next to the checkout stands at 5:15 PM in order to lure hungry shoppers into buying them.

In the Central Market closest to me, you walk directly into this enormous produce section, and you can smell the produce. And then you go through the meat and seafood section, and you can smell the fish and the meat. I get sense-memories of when I lived in Africa, with the markets there.

And that is why it's sometimes worth spending too much money.