I’m really happy and grateful to you all for giving me the chance of entertaining you with my work. Thank you for making this possible and let’s get to the 100k milestone even faster!

50,000 visits - November 14th 2008

Alas, I had to play with the numbers a bit to get to that figure. I have over 30k visits on this site, slightly over 10k visits on Comic Genesis, 3k visits on a couple other mirrors of these comics, a thousand visits on a different mirror, several mirrors with a few hundreds visits each… but I’m sticking to the 50k figure nevertheless

PS: excuse the rushed entry and rushed drawing, but I have to leave town in about 20′ so I’m in a bit of a hurry. Going to a gaming convention, hehe

I’m pretty happy with how this one turned out. I don’t have much else to add.

Oh, we’re back on schedule, even if only in the same manner that a broken clock eventually gives the correct time

PS: new incentives tomorrow, with any luck.

Child's Play, gamers' charity for sick children

Child’s Play is a charity started by the Penny Arcade guys. Each year, gamers from all around the world donate so that sick children in many hospitals world-wide might better go through their days by playing games (or reading books, or playing with other toys).

I’ve always wanted to participate in this charity. As a gamer and a comic-lover, I feel this is the perfect way to make the world a better place while demonstrating that we are better people than the media makes us to be sometimes.

Since the Agent Dee comic keeps being stumbled upon, I figured it was perfect for this. If you like this comic and were thinking that it would be cool to own a piece of merchandise with Agent Dee’s stupidly smiling face on it, now’s your chance to do that while at the same time helping a worthy cause.

Buy Agent Dee stuff for charity

For every piece of merchandise sold, $3 (100% of the proceedings) will be donated to Child’s Play. In addition I’ll match up all donations (up to $100 because I’m rather poor), so you will actually be donating $6 with your purchase of, say, a $20 T-shirt. And you get a kick-ass T-shirt, of course.

If you would like to donate more, or would rather not waste your money in poor ol’ Agent Dee but wish to donate anyways, head over to the Child’s Play site where you can donate directly, and, additionally, you may select which specific children’s hospital should receive your donation.

PS: this is the first time I create a CafePress store, or any store for that matter. Any feedback on your buying experience will be much appreciated.

As a former grade-school grammar nazi, a bit of advice: CUT IT OUT, IT’S ANNOYING AS ALL HELL.

I’ve been rather sick so everything will be [further] delayed around here. My apologies for that.

Alas, I kinda ruined the surprise with the title of this entry, but after so long, the TV show did go on air, and one of the episodes featured our little work.

I can’t upload it because it doesn’t belong to me, but the owners of the show uploaded a promo on YouTube and you can see a few seconds of out animation there. Check that bit below - full video and further info after the jump.

Our part is the one with the robot. It’s a very amateurish effort, I’m aware. There was only one professional person in our team (our teacher, who edited the video), and the rest of us were students, of which I was one of the oldest, and some of the kids had ages in the single digits. It was a schoolwide effort. So, I’m rather proud of this even if I acknowledge that it’s far from a professional job. It’s also my first animation work even though all I did was character design (the titular robot and another character are mine, and I coordinated the remaining character designers).

Here’s the full promo, not that you’ll be able to gather much from it if you don’t know spanish (actually, this is the same video as the one above, just beginning from, huh, the beginning):

I hope someday I’ll be able to put our full video online. I’m currently hunting for a copy of the episode of the show where our animation aired. They interviewed us and I was very nervous and babbled on about, huh, I dunno what. So that should be entertaining as well! Though I kinda hope they left my interview on the floor of the editing room.

Oh, and if you were wondering what was the meaning of the tiny teapot in a celluloid film that is used as the icon for the animation section of this blog, well, now you know

El Robot Cebamates

"Floating" Wallpaper

320×480 (iPhone)
960×1280

Sorry about the dreadful brushwork, which is totally noticeable at this resolution.

Anyways, this post isn’t about complaining. As a programmer I’m quite aware that sometimes you have to break some eggs to make a shiny new software product… or something like that. No, here’s a solution for you if you’ve been affected by this issue! Just download the archived Flash releases and install the latest ones for your system/browser. It’s quite a big download, weighing some 90 Mb, but that’s just because it contains a lot of older versions. You only need the appropriate one which should be about 2-3 Mb but, huh, Adobe isn’t making it easy for people to get this.

Meh. I’m just glad things are working now. I guess I’ll wait until Adobe settles their little fight with… the Internet… to update to the latest Flash version.

In this final part of my Utena review, let me show you a few little things that might not seem like a lot but make a world of difference.

Let’s begin with the titular phrase. Meaning roughly “Do you know, do you know? Do you really know?”, this phrase is uttered in every episode by the Kashira Shadow Players. “What’s that?”, you might be asking, or perhaps “Bwah?” if you aren’t so articulate, but either way allow me to enlighten you (man, are we feeling pompous tonight or what?). See… they’re a greek chorus!

*crickets*

I’d forgotten about this as well. It’s not something you see often nowadays. Which is just as well, since we’ve had two and a half millenia to come up with new means of fulfilling the job of a greek choir. Let’s try this:

Bazil Exposition

That’s Austin Powers’ Basil Exposition, a character that appears on the films to deliver, well, exposition needed to understand what’s going on. A one-man greek chorus. In truth a greek chorus was more complex, but this site ain’t Wikipedia. So let’s return to the Kashira Shadow Players:

Kashira Shadow Players

The Kashira Shadow Players appear in every episode to deliver exposition. You should be ever thankful to them for shedding some light over what’s sometimes a deeply impenetrable plot. They are bizarre, both in their behaviour and as a storytelling resource. Dumping exposition in the audience is usually frowned upon, and with reason. Here’s handled beautifully. I know I wanted to give a little cheer every time they came up on the screen.

As the story moves forwards, the Kashira Shadow Players become, if possible, weirder, but also funnier. They’re gold. And then, it turns out that they know… well, wouldn’t want to spoil that for you

Here’s something else that made me live this series even more. There’s a Student Council in the Ohtori Academy (of course!). And they hold meetings in an impossibly high place (of course!), a sort of observation platform overlooking the academy grounds that nobody but them can access (of course!). And though the meetings are somewhat normal at the beginning (except for Miki and his inane cronometrization habit, if that’s even a word), things turn… interesting later on.

A meeting held with unique chairs. Nanami gets the massage one.

A meeting held amongst fans, so to speak.

A meeting held amongst balloons. Nice.

A meeting held... inside a baseball field.

A meeting held as the train passes by. Yeah.

All of this serves no purpose whatsoever… except for entertaining us. I appreciate it very much.

Speaking of efforts made just to entertain us… I didn’t notice this one until the final bit, as it kept cutting back and forth between the images you’re about to see and other stuff. When I noticed, I had to go back and watch the scene all over again just to be sure:

A statue in the foreground as the action goes on in the background. Nothing weird with that, right?

Wait a second...

What the...!

...!

To put this in context, anime series tend to be done in tight budgets, and, I guess, even more so back in the 90’s. That means that you draw as few frames of animation as possible and reuse backgrounds, pieces of movements and even entire animated sequences as often as possible (that’s the real reason you saw all those “transformation scenes” in Sailor Moon and “Goku standing still and looking constipated as the wind blows his hair a bit” in DragonBall Z). And here we have another budget series, which reutilizes entire animated sequences frequently (”Zettai Unmei Mokushiroku”; the tale of the prince and the princess; Utena and Anthy going to bed; and so on), where the animators just drew four times as many pieces of this background as they needed to, only because they wanted to give us a little gag that probably went unnoticed by the people who saw it in TV back then without the benefit of a VCR.

These are the little things that make you realize that this was made by people who loved their job.

Because I’ve ranted on a on long enough about this series, I’ll end this review here with just two more points. The first is: you might have noticed that I have so far avoided discussing the plot in much detail. That is because it’s a really great story that deserves to be experienced firsthand rather than being told about it. You will enjoy the little twists, and the big ones as well.

The second is: if you are reading this, chances are it is because you came to this site to read Imaginary Daughter, enjoyed it, and decided to stick around. If so, you should know that the brand of weirdness shown in Utena is right up the alley of Imaginary Daughter, and I think you will enjoy this series as well.

And hey, if that’s not enough for you, there’s always the LESBIAN SEX to keep you hooked through to the end!

[Utena review: Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4]

Possessive Daughter

The other drawing for that week was also taken from an ad for children’s clothing. It featured a mother and her two daughters. Well, this version features just three different daughters. It’s really cute

3 Daughters Again

This is so late that I don’t even know how late it is. For reals!

Anyways… the plot… thickens? Or something? You would do well, perhaps, to go back and check the previous strip, just in case you missed something *wink*

Note: I’m really late to a lot of things. Check back tomorrow for new incentives. Sorry about that

Edit: new incentives are up. Check them out! They’re really cute, if I may say so myself Buzz Comics is Halloween-themed, featuring a witchy Daughter and a scary Frankenfather. Meanwhile, Top Web Comics features Daughter cosplaying as Utena from Revolutionary Girl Utena (go read those entries if you haven’t already, and discover a jewel of an anime that probably slipped by you!) As always, these pictures will be available on this site in a week or so in case you don’t wish to vote for Imaginary Daughter. But come one, why wouldn’t you want to vote for this comic?

I’m not sure if the uppercase is mandatory there, but it certainly feels like it should be. Anyways, the title refers to the signature theme of Revolutionary Girl Utena, a TV series I’ve been rewieving this week. Without further ado I give you Zettai Unmei Mokushiroku, courtesy of YouTube; hit the jump for a bit of rambling analysis on the music of Utena and, more importantly, even more and even cooler videos from this series.

(As a side note, notice the appearance of roses, staircases and gates, as discussed previously).

The music in Utena is (almost) all like this, relying as it does on heavy guitars and bass, but also, more uniquely, featuring polyphonic choral arrangements. It’s very distinctive - like everything else in this series - and it sets the mood nicely for the scenes where it’s used. Particularly, each duel scene is set to a different song in this spirit, making for a pretty nifty experience when you’re listening to the full soundtrack.

Not all the background music conforms to this style, but only two of the main songs (as fas as I can remember) don’t; the opening and the original ending. This ending is fine but nothing special. The opening, Rinbu Revolution, is well worth one minute and twenty nine seconds of your time, I say.

The last song I want to call your attention to is the best one the show has to offer in my opinion. It’s used in one of the later duels, and then from that episode onwards it’s used as the ending song. It’s pretty spectacular, queer and beautiful, which is the very definition of the show. It also helps that the second ending utilices some wondrous abstract imagery as well, with black silhouettes, elevators and floating inverted castles (!). Anyways, if you’re going to watch just one video from this entry, let it be the one for Virtual Star Embriology:

Below you’ll find a series of links to places where you can buy some of the soundtracks. Utena offers something like seven different OST albums. Personally I recommend the first and second one, which cover all the songs I mentioned as well as most (if not all) the spectacular duel songs, and also the fifth one, which is very different but has a number of really great tracks.

• OST 2 - Revolutionary Girl Utena: The Eve of Absolute Evolution Revolution
• OST 2 - La Fillette Révolutionnaire Utena: Virtual Star Embryology
• OST 5 - OST 5 - Saa, Watashi to Engage Shite (sorry, can’t find a place where this is sold!)

[Utena review: Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4]

There are some movies here that I haven’t even seen, but that won’t stop me from criticizing them!
I definitevely took some liberties here in order to place each series where I saw fit. Like that bit where I only took into account Star Trek movies 2 to 4 (then again, Star Trek deserves its own “Trilogy Rollercoaster” chart), or how I completely ignored fourth or later movies in some series.
Also I mostly added the new Batman series and the Harry Potter series so that the Trilogy Ramp chart wouldn’t look so lonely.

This is kind of a lame comic, both visually and overall. It’s also a divisive issue. I might lose some readers because of this. And, this doesn’t even happen in a place I live in, so why even bother?

Because at some point you have to stand up for what you believe in.

To all those who might feel offended or alienated by this: I understand you. I felt like you, not that long ago. But you need to stop fearing and start understanding. Give it a shot.

I dedicate this comic to all my GLB friends and relatives (sorry, don’t know any T in person). May you find happiness at the end of the rainbow:

Actually funny comic courtesy of Cyanide & Happiness @ Explosm.net

By the way, my comic is released under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license, meaning you can modify it and generally do whatever you want with it as long as you credit me and allow others to do the same. You could even print and sell t-shirts with this image if you’d like.

Utena revels in using suggestive or allegorical imagery throughout each episode, often for nefarious purposes. Well, not really (I just wanted to use the word “nefarious” once in my life). But yes, the authors definitely had a field day when designing the baroque architecture seen everywhere in the Ohtori Academy campus (where most of the series takes place), the uniforms and dresses of the characters, and the many different visual motifs used liberally sprinkled around each chapter, of which the most prominent is the rose. Oh yes, roses:

The Ohtori Academy logo, a rose

The atrium of Ohtori Academy. Notice the roses.

A frame of roses for Anthy... the Rose Bride

You would think that’s enough roses for a while, but those are only a few selected screenshots for the first couple of minutes of the first chapter, and it wasn’t even all the roses in display. There were rose rings, rose-engraved buildings, even more rose frames, a rose booklet, even a basketball game played amongst falling rose petals. A. Basketball. Game. And, that shot of Anthy? She’s inside a greenhouse, where she raises… well, you can figure it out already.

The rose frame is, I think, a play on a staple of the magical girl genre of showcasing the main characters in similarly abstract devices to call attention to them. It’s not so blatant so far: you have to wait until the male characters are introduced inside their very own rose frames. It’s also possible that roses are used to symbolize feminity (even in the male characters? Perhaps…), while masculinity is symbolized by swords, towers and cars.

Now I’m not usually one to consider anything tall and thin as a phallic symbol, and in fact people who drop the “it’s phallic!” phrase too often tend to irritate me (not everything is freudian! Sometimes it’s just a damn tall tower!), but Utena is rather blatant in this sense and, well, since they do a lot of allegorical play, it’s kinda hard (hah!) not to see it as such sometimes. For instance, there is a scene (I was going to post some screencaps but it would have been too spoilerish) where someone is being seduced, having her foot touched in a rather, huh, interesting way (in what is also a throwback to Cinderella, continuing with the fairy tale theme), and then she’s kissed, and all along the scene cuts back and forth to this shot:

...yeah.

…for no other possible reason whatsoever.

Other recurring motifs include cars (masculinity, possibly sexual desire), elevators (change), staircases and gates. Quite beyond their meanings, these are all beautifully done. I’m rather fond of the gates in particular, though they don’t really appear that often.

Let’s end this entry with a little video. Made by fans with images from the movie (which I haven’t yet seen), this AMV features Bachelorette by Björk, which is doubly good because it allows me to post an Utena video while leaving the music for another entry. Anyways, this doesn’t seem to have many spoilers. The style seems to have been changed in the movie to something more abstract and lineal with very marked light and dark areas, and apparently almost entirely consisting of black, red and white. Even so, the elements mentioned before are there: take notice of the impossibly tall staircases, the abundance of roses, and even the gates appear briefly.

And with that, I leave you for the time being.

Edit: I have, since writing the above entry, watched the movie (which is fantastic, if wholly undecipherable). Anyways, there have been some stylistic changes in the movie. For instance, that tower has been changed somewhat. Behold:

Woah.

I mean, that was a phallic symbol if there was ever one, right? The way it looks here is troubling for us males.

[Utena review: Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4]