Only 20 days left to order the Abunai Sisters dvd. Order now, you could be the 138th person to spend what is quickly looking like 34,000 yen on a dvd and an invitation to an ABUNAI private party! This is the best of Sexy comedy. Let’s gather the power of Kano-sister’s fans, and realize our dream.
This is a bit old, but for any of you movie nerds out there living in Japan, Theatre Shinjuku is doing a bunch of anime film screenings from the 14th until the 27th. Of course, I go back to Tokyo on the 28th, but that’s school for ya. I have to admit, despite the name being pretty lame, these are some very cool animes that they have selected, like Akira, Roujin Z (with a director q+a session afterwards!), Blood the Last Vampire (ditto), Utena: Adolescence (interview here, too!), Tokikake, Jin-Roh, 5cm/sec, Haruwo, Paprika, Perfect Blue, Urusei Yatsura: Beautiful Dreamer, Lupin: Secret of Mamo, and Hell’s Angels. Timetable can be found here, and general info about the event here.
via animeanime
Instant review: Nanoha A’s is one of the best otaku-exploitation shows ever, featuring explosions, Starlight Breaker, German-shouting magical girl weapons, and charming and pleasant plot holes you could drive a truck through. I’m not sure how this happened considering how bad the other two Nanoha series were. The DVD box is $30 and I guess you should buy it, unless you’re tired of every post on here being about buying stuff or something.
That said, I watched the first DVD, and they ended up doing really low quality work. Apart from having a dub, the fansubs are probably better in every way.
Video – Maybe because they stuck 5 episodes on one DVD, the bitrate goes really low at several points and it artifacts really badly. I don’t think you’d notice unless you were me/Defiler/Fluff, though, but I only have two other DVDs (KareKano, which has an excuse, and Haruhi, which doesn’t) that have noticable artifacts this bad.
Audio – is worse; the first episode is in mono, of all things. Apparently they switched mastering studios and the new one loves to randomly hit the wrong checkbox in their encoders or something. This pretty much makes the OP/ED sound terrible but doesn’t really affect the important part (EXPLOSION!). Maybe they’ll release fixed DVDs, but since they have no money I wouldn’t hold my breath. It’s fine after that episode (excellent panning across the forward soundstage etc.), but I think the other two DVDs might have the same problem.
Translation – is really literal; it looks like it was edited, but not by someone who knows what a bad Japanese translation looks like. A bunch of metaphors are translated literally, resulting in lines that only kind of make sense, and a few lines are weirdly overspecific to the point of actually being mistranslated.
Ep 1, DVD on left/fansub on right:
(note: I am bad at matching the same frame, oh well)
Nanoha’s “Listen to me!” before using her Energy Beam of Friendship is subbed as “Listen to what I have to say!”, which usually would be ok but in this scene makes it look like a threat or something. Admittedly it makes the scene better than it actually is, but it’s totally not justified by the real line.
After ep 1 it gets better, but it still seems below good fansub/average retail quality.
Ep 2:
Not a translation problem, and optic yellow is great and all, but can we please not use it in digital animation when characters have the same color hair as the subtitle text?
Ep 3:
“saki” (the “just” in “I just…”) is translated as “moments ago” in another line too.
This is kinda surprising since usually retail DVDs seem pretty well-done to me. Manga is another story.
Also someone gave me a Nendoroid Miku and I can’t figure out how to put the stand together.
I realize I’m quite a bit behind the times on this review, but I have this horrible habit of paying money for my manga, especially anything that I review :(
Anyway, Bakuman。. Yes, the title includes the crazy Japan period 「。〠but I’m not going to use it anymore because I don’t like IME-swapping every 5 seconds. Illustrated by Obata Takeshi and written by Ohba Tsugumi, and first released in tankobon form on the 10th of this month. Now, some of the more perceptive blog readers out there will have read that last sentence and thought, “hey, that’s the talented tag-team behind Death Note!”, and those readers would be absolutely right. I have to admit that I didn’t get very far into the DN manga and didn’t watch anything other than the anime’s OP/EDs, so I won’t be talking much about that. Like DN, Bakuman runs in Shonen Jump. This is important for reasons that I will expound upon in a paragraph or two, but keep this in mind.
I’ve heard a lot of buzz, both positive and negative, about this title both from Actual Japanese People as well as some folks on the internet. My first reaction was that this buzz was simply because it was “FROM THE CREATORS OF DEATH NOTE“, but after actually bothering to listen to people and decode moonblog posts, I realized that before “FROM THE CREATORS OF…” there was an equally important “A MANGA ABOUT WRITING FOR JUMP” present.
The basic plot of Bakuman so far is pretty straightforward: disaffected highschooler Mashiro Moritaka (真城最高) doesn’t know what he wants to do in life, until brainy stud Takagi Akito (高木秋人) convinces him to partner up and draw manga together. Now, Bakuman isn’t published in some lame serial for boring people, so they set their eyes on the highest prize out there: a series serialized in Shonen Jump and a tv anime to boot.
Woah, meta.
We also read about Moritaka’s (called Saikou by Akito for reasons clear to anyone who would bother caring) uncle who had his own fairly successful manga with its own anime adaptation until he died, presumably from overwork, and his continued influence over Saikou’s life. There’s also a romance plot for each main character to round things out, including Saikou’s hilarious agreement with his girlfriend that they won’t talk to each other until he gets an anime adaptation and she becomes a famous seiyuu. Then they’ll get married.
Other than the obligatory romance subplot, Saikou and Akito, (called Shuujin by Saikou,) work their butts off until, by the end of the first volume (chapter 7, for those of you who for one reason or another read chapter by chapter) they’re ready to show a manuscript to an editor at Shueisha. Some of you might be thinking that this is yet another ridiculous part of the plot, but this is where, as far as I know, you are at least somewhat mistaken!
You see, a lot of Bakuman is spent in one way or another talking about how absolutely awesome the cultural institution of Shonen Jump is, and one of the many absolutely awesome parts of Shonen Jump is how open they are to submissions from total unknowns, to the point where it is considered one of the “easier” majors to get published at for folks looking to get their foot in the door. One of the big reasons for this is because above all else, Jump is a populist magazine, sometimes ruthlessly so. As pointed out in the first chapter, if the reader surveys come back saying that folks like you, you stay on, but otherwise you can find yourself back on the street in 10 weeks or even fewer, and with Shueisha’s contracts, it can be very hard to find work elsewhere. By the way, folks, this is the same survey that cancelled Barefoot Gen in 14 weeks. On a side note, I’m counting 13 new series that started in Jump in 2008, 7 of which have already been ended. 6 of the cancelled manga were drawn by manga-ka whose only other work has been similarly minor one-shots and the like in one Jump or another.
I imagine that this populism plays into the characteristics of the twin protagonists: so painfully teenaged that similarly-aged boys will nod their heads in agreement with everything that they say, younger boys will look upon them as way-cool heroes, and adult boys will look at, see younger versions of themselves, and let out a deep sigh. I’m not sure what girls will do with them other than be offended and possibly draw slash fiction.
Honestly, the amazingly shonen attitudes towards women in Bakuman harken back to the glory days of 80s-90s Jump, before the proliferation of what Daryl Surat would call “Neo-Shonen” took place. I mean, Saikou’s mom is against the idea of him doing this manga business, but his father intervenes, stating that women can’t understand the manly dreams of men. That’s like taking a page right out of Captain Harlock’s book or something! I’m half-expecting Rei (Nanto Seiken Rei, not that other one) to bust in on a scene and rip off some girl’s shirt just for the hell of it! Even the way the women, especially Saikou’s love interest and her mother are drawn also remind me of Katsura Masakazu‘s girls. It’s like its grabbing you by the neck and screaming “Remember when boys used to act like boys in Shonen Jump, and how, on occasion they still do? Isn’t that awesome!??!”
The relationship between the two protagonists is basically a Jump take on the pair in Fujiko Fujio â’¶’s Manga Michi (somewhat referenced on the back of the first tankobon), which is to say that both the nature of their relationship as well as their characteristics if you take the Death Note-style Chuunibyou out of it is based on the famous “Hard Work, Friendship, and Victory” (努力ã€å‹æƒ…ã€å‹åˆ©ï¼‰ combination that Jump takes to be the driving force behind their editorial policy. Words that were, yes, decided by reader survey. Honestly, it’s refreshing to see something so exceptionally and transparently Shonen Jump, especially by the guys behind Death Note, which didn’t seem very SJ at all.
Of course, Bakuman also references other Jump titles explicitly, again in what seems to be a (successful, for me) bid to extol the greatness of Shonen Jump throughout the years. The creators very cheaply reference themselves at first (“I heard the creators of Death Note once say…”) and also pay some equally cheap but sincere lip service to other greats (“We’ll never be the #1 manga-ka in the country, there’s already One Piece and Dragonball out there!”), but later move on to some shout-outs to some older greats, and a basically unknown manga by the tag-team behind Kyojin no Hoshi plays a fairly central role in a later chapter. Of course, all Shonen Jump titles.
One last thing before I wrap this ridiculously long post up: Takekuma-san noted in a great post that Jump’s presence is present even down to the way that the two produce their manga, in that the author of the manga draws the rough manuscript (Name/ãƒãƒ¼ãƒ ) and then has the artist draw from there. Apparently, until the mid-90s this was exceedingly rare, as the artist would normally handle the Name unless the author was an experienced manga illustrator, but who lead the way in this new division of labor?
…Take a guess.
Of course, as he mentions, this is much more common these days, but to have the artist say “I liked your Name so let me do the drawing” seems very strange, as normally there’d be some sort of deliberation. In fact, as you can see in between each chapter in the volume, Obata makes a fair number of changes to Ohba’s Name, not to mention that Ohba might be a veteran Jump illustrator himself, depending on who you believe.　Either way, it’s an amusing note to see what might be an extra little bit of Jump propaganda snuck in there.
While I’m sure most of the folks out there who would want to check this out because of the two authors’ previous work had their minds made up before they even read this review, but I’d suggest taking a look at Bakuman。 even if you’re not a fan of the duo, especially if you have feel any sort of connection to Shonen Jump or if you’re interested in manga about manga in general. I’m looking forward to volume 2, which I assume will be out fairly soon, if it’s only 7 issues a volume.
Edit: oh, holy crap! Bakuman for free! In English! Legally!!
In my futile attempts to get myself to post blog entries more often, I tend to leave manga sitting on my computer desk or on the floor below my desk until I either do one of my massive twice-a-semester room cleanings or one of my twice-a-semester manga reviews. Okay, maybe more like once a semester.
Boku no Shoukibo na Seikatsu (僕ã®å°è¦æ¨¡ãªç”Ÿæ´»ï¼‰, by Fukumitsu Shigeyuki (ç¦æº€ã—ã’ゆã). Vol 1 published 12/21/2007. Kodansha/Morning.
Boku no… is a semi-autobiographical story of a man struggling to break into the manga industry. It was also one of the most depressing things I read last semester. The story starts with the main character trying to balance making enough money through part-time jobs to supplement his wife’s pay in order to survive with his hopes of becoming a professional manga-ka. Throughout the course of the volume’s 25 chapters, he somehow manages to work his way from being rejected by eromanga publishers to getting serialized in a major (guess which one it is!). This, of course does not stop him from losing sleep in chapter after chapter over his various arguments with his wife (who gradually gains weight over the course of the volume–she seems to be a fan of the idea of comfort food) over small things which generally end with her getting violent, his social slip-ups, his thin finances, his fragile position as a professional manga-ka, and life in general being rough. We follow the main character around to his various meetings with editors and industry folks, his attempts to start a band with a friend, and basically every part of his often-miserable, but slowly proceeding life.
This is actually somewhat of a continuation of Boku no Shokibo na Shippai, which ran in AX (ps buy this when it comes out), and we actually see some of the process behind Shippai being created in this volume. What struck me most about this manga is how much I actually cared about the main character’s life. I felt miserable when he felt miserable, and I shared in his (often small) successes, but always carefully. The look at the interaction between him and his editors was also great to read from the position of someone interested in how the industry works, and I’m definitely going to pick up volume 2 whenever I get around to going to a real bookstore.
Yumewatari no Pulcinella (夢渡りã®ãƒ—ルãƒãƒãƒƒãƒ©), by Oiwa Kendi （大岩ケンヂ). Vol 1 published 8/26/2008. Kadokawa/Shonen Ace
You know, I need to study for a quiz tomorrow so all I’m going to say about this is that if Oiwa Kendi illustrating NHK and Goth made you think he was unable to whip up a boilerplate school romance/fantasy story (boy in boring school life goes into mystery inner-soul dream world and meets cute girl and sexy girl who vie for his attention while with their help he goes into other peoples inner-soul dream worlds and fixes their problems, etc etc etc) when he’s all on his own, you are sorely mistaken. I am one of these sorely mistaken individuals, especially sore since I had the exact same reaction after buying both 99 Happy Soul AND Mahiru no Yojimbo. Maybe this time I’ll learn?
Fushigi no Kuni no Ringo-hime (è…ã—ãŽã®å›½ã®ãƒªãƒ³ã‚´å§«), Katoh Mayumi (åŠ è—¤ãƒžãƒ¦ãƒŸï¼‰. Vol 1 published 4/20/2008. Akita Shoten/Young Champion.
Rin is the top OL (office lady) at her company, jealously looked up to by the other women at the company on the track to marrying the soon to be rich alpha-male salaryman at her company. She also happens to be a fujoshi crazy about “Salaryman Ojisama”, and succeeds in keeping the two worlds separate from each other until a new girl shows up at the office, amusingly enough nicknamed “Moemoe”. Moemoe knows Rin from her junior high days of being a fat Salapri-obsessed fujoshi, and leverages this blackmail into a number of amusing yet now-stock situations like making her dress up like a street idol and have dudes wotagei to her songs, and of course going to a doujin event. If you had to know, there are also jokes about her only knowing about sex through extensive knowledge of yaoi and apparently Chobits.
I’m kind of conflicted about this manga – on one hand it did keep me reading for the most part, and got a few good laughs out of me. On the other hand, if you didn’t particularly like Mouou Shoujo Otaku-kei because it was a little too geared towards guys (I mean it ran in High and they run Kojika), you will probably have an aneurysm if you read this. I mean, it runs in a magazine with “Young” in its title. In other words, lots of breasts, and enough fujoshi stereotyping and borderline misogyny to even give me pause. I mean hell, at one point there is what is very close to one of those “girl gets raped, but you know she was asking for it” kinds of scenes. I might end up buying volume 2 hoping that it’ll manage to turn around, as it certainly could play off what’s been established in volume 1 to create a story that would allow the liberal arts major inside of me to recommend this, but until then approach with caution, I guess, especially if you haven’t bothered reading 801-chan or Mousou Shoujo yet or something.
JC.COM (Serial, Shueisha, 12/19/2008).
I saw a little of hype over this one here and there, and figured that I’d pick it up since I assumed that Range Murata cover and niche-sized anthology would mean that it’d be up my alley. Again, Japan has fooled me. This is mostly my fault, as I didn’t bother to actually read most of the hype beyond headlines, and so I didn’t notice the “From the artist of Highschool of the Dead” and the “From the creator of Chocotto Sister” and the “boobs from some guy who did a few series for CoroCoro”. So yeah, mostly girls or women in various states of undress and lots of fightin’ action. Not that there’s anything particularly wrong with that, and these all seem like perfectly competent series, it’s just that I had something a little more…pretentious in mind when I dropped over 800y on under 200 tankobon-sized pages with Murata drawing his signature young girls for the cover (amusingly titled The Muses of Range Murata). Oh well, there’s always Gelatin coming out next month, I’ll be prepared for the absolutely exquisite filth in that one.
Mito city, 3/21/2010. Let’s reviving city with comic and good spirit!
In other news, Kodansha needs to stop pricing light novels in the BOX line at 1600 yen if they expect their customers to buy their books and still manage to eat on a daily basis.
also, while this post is still (relatively) fresh, Nichijo vol 4 is coming out on the 26th! Hopefully it’ll be more like volume 3 than volume 2!
…is a really long name, so let’s just call it Munto TV. This is the first time in a while KyoAni has produced more than one thing at once, and although there’s a severe quality drop from everything else it might be alright if the plot isn’t too stupid.
A poorly defined moe schoolgirl has daydreams where she’s in another world, where a bunch of shirtless elves live in the sky. One of them, Munto, talks to her saying she’s the only hope for the – you know where this is going. The girl, Yumemi, looks like she belongs in Someday’s Dreamers or some other recent boring show; Munto himself has a heroic cape, stands on towers for no reason, and altogether looks like a shounen hero version of Magus. The girl does ordinary boring show stuff, while all the shirtless elves ride personal flying machines (like the ones in Fantastic Children) and have psychic laser fights (complete with an attack that sweeps out the entire sky and has delayed pink explosions). As you can see, one half of the show is kind of better than the other.
Whoever wrote it is pretty clearly not as good as they think they are. The high school girl characters have above average names – the girl is Yumemi, and her friends are Suzume, Ichiko, and Kazeya – and early on they manage to stick the show’s name into someone monologuing, but the episode ends with a few minutes of old elves talking about nothing really interesting.
Also the first half of the show (including the OP) looks like this and the second half (including the ED) looks like this.
<> soramiage switches randomly between dimensions, one of which is someday’s dreamers and the other of which is a 90s psychic elf fantasy with 1/10 of gurren-lagann-level fighting scenes
<> i guess if it goes somewhere it’ll be ok but its strangely not good for kyoani
<> also the first half of the episode has no shading and then the second looks like a cheap clannad
< &garamir> I tried to watch the raw but gave up a few minutes in when a girl saw the world being crushed by a thing and then there were more things
UPDATE: Apparently the first two episodes were just clip shows of the OVAs, which explains why it looked like good direction filtered through really bad direction.
Also why is this post so popular when it’s so bad???
Day 3 was pretty tame, all things considered: got up early but not too early, stood in line behind East hall, got in at around 10:10 and bought things until I couldn’t buy no more. I spent a good chunk of money, but somehow didn’t purchase any pornography for dudes on what is normally known as the pornography for dudes day. I did get hit some bigger-name circles (ABe, KEI, etc), but they’re not terribly interesting and I’m sure those are all on share or PD or the bittorrent or whatever. Here are some of the mildly interesting and less common things I bought!
Akiba ni Sumu
Akibakurashi wo Tanoshimu Hon
A couple of circles were selling books about Akiba, which I could not help but buy.
Akiba ni Sumu is a very data-driven book, with detailed information on Akiba’s bus stops, zoning laws, history, when the last train you can take from basically anywhere in Tokyo to get back to Akiba is, you name it. Haven’t gotten around to fully reading it yet, but it looks to be a treasure trove of information. Samples of issues are available on the site here.
Akibakurashi wo Tanoshimu takes a different approach, with a lot more pictures and fewer obsessive details. The booth was being run by a middle-aged couple, if I recall correctly, and this reads more like a nice neighborhood guide more than anything, with reviews of restaurants in the area, a small diary of goings-on around the area (festivals, notable store openings), and a small section with floor plans and prices of apartments in the district. A boy can dream, right? They were selling their back issues (1-5, they had a new issue 6 out as well) as a set for I believe 1500 yen, which was quite a deal considering these are 50 pages and well-printed.
Temjin-14, Te-vap 15
Tsurukawa Bunko - Osama-san 6 (nida), Holy Warriors Taliban 3
Apparently this guy’s books are kind of famous if you’ve been around the internet long enough, but this is like the third time I’ve bought from him and every time it feels like he’s giving me one of those Japanese death glares even though I’m 99% sure it’s all in my head. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that Holy Warriors Taliban is about Osama and Saddam fighting off the US trying to steal all their oil, with the cover blurb of “Martyrs for Independence, Defeat America!” Also, Condolezza Rice is a Planet of the Apes figure. Also, Osama is Optimus prime, complete with transforming action. Also, DBZ parodies such as Obama playing Vegeta to Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Christopher Hill’s Napa. (“Maybe you won’t be such a disappointment… IN THE NEXT DIMENSION!!!”)
I hope I don’t get arrested for these at customs.
Doriyasu Koujou - Shikaban Kannagi, Hidamari Sketch
it's a catchphrase
C2 ARCHITECTURE - Index of BAKERY
I have to admit, I’m a total sucker for glossy, well laid-out full-color doujins, even if they’re about girls sitting on Nordic furniture (not my fetish, i swear), or in this case, girls eating bread. This is C2 ARCHITECTURE‘s first Comiket offering, and it’s all reviews of smaller Tokyo, particularly Shibuya-based bakeries, and illustrations of girls eating bread from these bakeries. Simple, unique, effective, they manage to actually use the “lets sell everything with moe” boom for good, not evil. Looking forward to their “Diorama Novel” this year.
Inside samples here, aniblogs are OFP-unfriendly enough as-is
OTAKU_BOOKS's OTA-PICTO Project, Otaku to Design's Otaku x Design 3
More things found in the criticism/information block of day 3. The OTA-PICTO book, by OTAKU_BOOKS starts with a brief discussion of the usage of pictograms and signs in otaku culture, then goes on to propose its own set of pictograms with which to label goods sold. I really wish I made it in time to get some of his other books, it looks like he had one on SHAFTxShinbo shows!
Otaku x Design is much longer and much more wordy, and again I haven’t gotten through the whole thing. It looks very interesting though, and the main article basically asks “when did otaku start paying attention to design?” from the jumping-off point of Toranoana. Smaller articles like interviews included as well. Overall, another very slick production.
Well, I had some words here about one last thing, Comic Mavo, but wordpress apparently hates long posts and makes the entire post go away if I type that many words. Maybe some other time! I’m going to sleep.
This will hopefully be a shorter post than my day 1 report, since fewer interesting things happened. It was still kind of a trainwreck though.
I didn’t have very many clear goals for the day, since most of the Touhou stuff I like is either by guys that didn’t show up or the official games, and everything else is roughly a neat distraction. I did want to get the Maikaze set though, since their supply plans are still fairly unknown. I headed out to get on the first monorail from Toyosu, but wasn’t enough of an expert to know exactly which train car to be on, which meant that I got to the platform right as the first monorail filled up, which meant that I’d be delayed by about 10 minutes. (in other words, like 7500 people.)
The line was the same as always, I ate some convenience store bread while crouching in my 4 sqft of ground space from about 5 until we were herded into the event at around 10:15. Well, they tried to herd us into the event but the line to get down the escalators into west hall was already to the door by the time I got to the event entrance. Went straight to Maikaze to discover that they had been moved to a corner booth, with a very large line outside. Then I noticed that they had an even larger line a few meters away that fed into that line. I stood in this sub-line for about an hour, until they announced that they had sold out, and the line dispersed. I almost left at this point, since it was almost noon and basically anything that would be hard to find/expensive after the event sells out at noon, but decided to grab some stuff here and there before setting out. Here is what I managed:
most of the day 2 haul
notable purchases from here:
I also picked up something very terrifying on the advice of a friend:
WM's set
I also picked up the Blasterhead vs Hardcore TANO*C vinyl, but I’d rather not post an image of it here.
I went back to Akiba to mess around with friends more, but didn’t go in any of the doujin stores since they were all ridiculously crowded. After getting home at around dusk, I checked Maikaze’s site on a whim, only to discover that they had distributed limited edition boxsets of their anime to various doujin stores, causing me to run back to Akiba and grab a copy. All that lining up for naught.
comiket :argh:
Did Comiket really end just a week ago? It all seems so far away and dreamlike, except it’s one of those bad horror story dreams where you wake up and you’re out like 700 bucks and there’s a pile of doujin right next to your pillow. Also, a crystal skull.
I decided to take day 1 of Comiket relatively easy, since all I really wanted was the Type-Moon set from industry (really long line), things here and there from Toranoana (how long could it be??), and some stuff from schatzkiste, who managed to grab a small booth, and then stuff from some smaller booths down in the pits of the lower floors, like the booth that was selling the Daicon 7 opening movie, a guy that was purporting to sell a book with viewership numbers for tv anime from 1990-2004, a guy with a book about “politics within 00’s japanese otaku culture”, and some genre circles as well as a fair bit of stuff for friends such as my co-author on this here blog. In this case, “taking it easy” meant taking the 6:00 monorail from Shimbashi, which means arriving at the event at 6:30ish.
Unfortunately, I am incapable of not having something go wrong at a day of comiket. For those who haven’t been before, you can save your place in the line to get in the event (the event starts at 10am) once you get there and sit down, until 8:45, when they lock the line down and make everyone stand up. Normally I spend the whole time from whenever I arrive until 8:45 sitting down, listening to podcasts, and wondering what the hell I’m doing in Odaiba, but this time I made the very unwise choice to use the bathroom without a friend in the line. I left to the bathroom at 7:50, thinking that I’d have plenty of time to make it back. I left the bathroom at 8:40, after a line that rivaled a lot of shutter circle lines, only to find that basically everyone had already stood up, rendering me totally unable to find my spot, which I had tried to mark with my bag with my lunch and my hall maps inside. I tried to grab a spot in line roughly 30-50 feet behind where I thought I was, hoping to find my bag as everyone marched in, but I had no such luck, and I probably made a bunch of people think I was cutting in line in the process. oops.
Mapless, hungry, and frustrated, I sat in front of the Big Sight, watched the sun rise from behind the Washington Hotel, and tried not to lose too much body heat until the line finally started moving at around 10:25. This was actually the first time I’ve gone to a big industry line, since I normally either skip out on day 1, or just go at around 10 and browse kooky genre booths (A-Team x Night Rider yaoi, etc), so I was fairly surprised to see a special sign telling me that in order to line up for Type-Moon, I needed to leave the big crowd going into the event hall and follow the smaller trickle moving in the direction of the sign. This trickle lead me from the fourth floor of the Big Sight back down the opposite side of the building, away from the Big Sight by about 100 meters, through a parking lot, and then back into another queue that was vaguely near the building. I was fairly surprised to find that the line moved relatively quickly, and I managed to climb back up the Big Sight and finally get into the building to buy my 11,500 yen set of goodies by around 11:30.
Now, when I was browsing the Type-Moon website during pre-event planning, I wasn’t planning on buying everything that was on sale, specifically the Shiki “moe-moe bathtowel”, for reasons that I hopefully do not have to explain. However, after having a pretty miserable day so far (my ipod had also run out of batteries while in the T-M line, so no more AWO, no more Marxy vs Patrick Macias, no more Ira Glass, just the sound of a hundred thousand nerds buying porn), once I got shoved inside and suddenly found myself in front of a cash register, I just said “one of everything” and threw a ton of money at the lady behind the booth. So that’s why I have this “moe-moe bathtowel”.
The set: Bag, Neck Warmer, Concept, Clear Poster Set, Moe-Moe Bathtowel. Humping Dog not included.
Concept is an illustration book full of concept and promo art used throughout T-M’s years as an industry vendor, starting from C65, Winter 2003. 130 pages of color illustrations that act as a tribute to T-M’s own successes as well as the holiest of nerd battlegrounds, Comiket.
Concept front cover
Concept back cover
poor quality sample page
part the second
The other goodies are pretty self explanatory, the neck warmer is a neck warmer bearing the AATM2 logo seen here, and the moe-moe bathtowel is a moe-moe bathtowel with a moe-moe picture of Shiki that you can see on the same page. There’s also a clear poster collection of tall, thin clear posters, all packaged in a neat box. There are 22 posters in all, illustrated by a bunch of different artists. Some I would not mind putting up somewhere, others, well,
Clear Poster Set box
HELLO, LADIES
To tell you the truth, I’m still wondering how Naasu, Takeuchi, and co. managed to extract that much money from me, but it probably has something to do with the fact that I still haven’t played Tsukihime or F/SN. At least I didn’t pay the 20,000 that second-hand retailers are charging!
I then proceeded to Toranoana’s booth, as it was the second of the three booths that I knew how to find, since it was directly down the hall from T-M. As an industry hall virgin, I was going by the advice of 西-4 vets and they said that Toranoana wouldn’t have that bad of a line.
Turns out they were wrong, since I ended up spending about a half hour longer in the Tora line than I spent in the T-M line, since they happened to be doing a Touhou New Year’s set and a Touhou calendar, and anything Touhou sells infinite copies. I was there for the Fate/Zero Tribute Arts limited edition box, so I wasn’t terribly heartbroken when they announced that all the Touhou stuff had sold out, especially since it meant that over half of the line cleared out. Fate/Zero Tribute Arts, as the name suggests, is a collection of outside artists doing Fate/Zero art. I mostly decided to buy this book when I found out that huke was contributing, and because I’m one of those people who will go from “considering a purchase, i guess” to “will line up for 2 hours to buy” if you dangle the word “limited edition” in front of me. The LE came with a slipcase and a 40-page black and white sketchbook (Rough Material), if you were wondering.
front view of set
back
LE sketchbook pages
2
Akibablog has a bunch of good pictures of the book, for those interested. On an amusing side note, Toranoana apparently sold out of their entire stock of Touhou and Fate/Zero goods on day 1, which seems kind of unusual (and possibly fan-enraging) for a large booth to do, but what do i know.
Dead tired, I shoved my way to Schatzkiste’s little industry booth and bought their cd-roms and 4-koma collection. For those not in the know, Schatzkiste is the best maid cafe. They’re also closing in 2 months. ;_;
schatzkiste cds, 4koma
Meido-cho smiled and let out a little laugh when she saw me at the booth, basically making my day.
After that, I got the hell out of the Big Sight, and like any sensible person would do, went to Akiba for reasons I don’t quite remember and ended up going to Go Go Curry and Try Amusement Tower with a friend and not buying anything while in Akiba. Went to sleep at 8, since the fight starts for real on day 2.
