A weekly look into American otaku culture

Well after a very nice and relaxing weekend with my girlfriend, I’m back for another week of school (boo!) and blogging (yay!). So let me just touch on a couple of points from the past couple of days.

First of all, “He is My Master” still isn’t out yet. (-_-). I’m looking at screen caps of the 2nd episode, and it’s reached such a level of cuteness that it’s torture now not to watch it. Just gotta keep calm, Scott. Breath in… breath out… you’ll be able to see it soon. ::sigh::

Though while I’m at it, that site that I just linked too, lolitron, is a fantastic anime blog. I don’t know why it’s not mentioned more, maybe he’s just shy or something. I came across it on a fluke with a web search, and it’s been wowing me ever since. This guy works hard to create a virtual picture book of screen caps with every episode he writes about. I feel that I’ve been practically watching the newest season of Girls Bravo through him. Everyone should check him out.

There’s a sale right now at Borders and Waldenbooks across the US. Buy 2 books of manga, and get the 3ed free! So I used that for gather up the latest volumes in my collection, as well as work on a serious black log I have on some series. My hall this week:

• Negima vol. 5
• I’s vol. 1
• SaiKano vol. 4
• Tuxedo Gin vol. 11
• Ranma 1/2 vol. 13
• Video Girl Ai vol. 9
• Candidate for Goddess vol. 3

Quite a nice load, if I do say so myself (^_^) That should last me for a little while, at least. If anyone wants to see my collection, check out this site. Forgive the crappiness of that site with all the ads and whatnot. I want to transfer it to here, but it’s been so intergraded with Mircosoft Word that I would have to go in and re-code it all by hand again. One day I’ll get around to it.

Also, my girlfriend got most of the Tsubasa series. I didn’t really have too much of an interest in it, but after scanning through the first volume, I started getting a little excited over it. Maybe I’ll check out the anime now… well either way, I’m gonna look forward to borrowing them from here when she’s done with them (>_<)

And finally, I checked out “Sin City” over the weekend, and it was quite an interesting film. I mean, it’s far from being a great film. It might not be decent film either. While being a guilty pleasure of sex and violence, the plot is filled with as many noir clichés that they couldn’t be too serious about it. But the style was amazing. Now I might not be a big fan of American comics, I love the underground stuff like Johnen Vasquez and his “Johnny the Homicide Maniac” series. So while I never read “Sin City” myself, I was quite familiar with the style. They pulled it off PERFECTLY on the big screen, it’s really amazing to look at and think about.

But it suffers the same way that anime and manga suffers when you put it into a live action medium. With comics and animation, you’re free to create anything out want and have anything happen. You can defy all the limits of physics and realitly. When you have real people doing these things, it just looks silly and ridiculous. So while the live action “Sin City” was an interesting take on American graphic novels, I think that it would have done much better as an animation.

But then again… at least it wasn’t like the Cutie Honey movie…

::shivers::