Studio Catch!

Yeah, I’m back at work on “Hockey, Love, & GUTS!” and it feels great once again! I can’t believe it’s been 6 months since the last installment, and unfortunately, it might be a few more until the next (I’m hoping to have chapter 5 done by early December… crossing my fingers here.) Thumbnails and script are done, and I’m a few pages into the roughs now. It’s 35 pages, and it seems that chapters are getting longer and longer! I really gotta find a good page length so I can put them out faster (15-20 pages is just fine, but I really needed all of these 35 pages to be chapter 5, so sorry.) Anyway, here’s a teaser.

I thought the scrapbook concept matches the high school girl drama… maybe. Well, I was also scrambling to do something quick and in color, and this is what came out. But, the comic will still be in black & white – (also, Mercedes is blond here, but she’s supposed to be somewhere between a blond and a red head… or maybe she’ll stay a blond… still thinking about that – I guess that is one of the cool things about making a black & white comic in a serialized manner: there is still a lot of experimentation going on) – so, don’t expect a color comic all of a sudden. Though I may make these teasers a more frequent thing, so if you like this, let me know.

ALSO!

I’m gonna be going to Japan in a couple of weeks! I’ll be there for almost 3 weeks, so no posts for a while – then again, considering my consistency of posts here, you may not even notice :/. But, maybe I’ll do another post right before I leave,  a “one for the road” so to speak… After all, this is a trip I’ve been planning on doing for 10 years! It also so happens that this is my honeymoon, so I gotta give it up to my wife for letting me chose the place for the occasion.

Yeah, I’m excited, but it really hasn’t sunk in yet, though I have been practicing my Japanese language skills by reading more manga in Japanese (my resume says I have a BA in Japanese – check it in the “About” page at the top – so I really should live up to that title.) I’ve got one volume (Vol 20) from series 3 of ジョジョの奇妙な冒険(Jojo’s Bizarre Adventures) on my shelf, as well as another one of Dragonball Z from years ago. I also have a Super JUMP manga magazine that my father brought from one of his trips to Japan in the late 1990’s (Super Jump Nº 22, from November 10th, 1999 to be more precise.) Apparently he found it lying around on the train, as someone probably just threw it away. Some pretty weird stories in there, and I’ve never read all of them, but, 大空港 ｰ Daikuukou – (the English title on the page says “Airport” but shouldn’t it be “Great Airport” or “Big Airport”?) always draws me in whenever I flip through it. 開運同盟あんじゅぱっせAnge Passe (I’ll translate it as “Good Luck Association Ange Passe”) is another one that looks pretty interesting. Oh, did I mention that Super JUMP is 18+? So yeah, Japanese “salary-men” were reading that on the train – totally NORMAL! :/

Maybe when I board that JAL flight in a couple of weeks it will sink in… that, and a lot of embarrassment trying to speak Japanese. ´_`¡

I’d love to be able to visit an animation studio while I’m there, but I really don’t know anyone there, so no plans as of yet, but maybe that’ll change (if there are any Japanese readers of this blog, let me know how I can visit a studio!)

All in all, still living the freelancer life, which is allowing me to work on cool projects, but they’re still somewhat sporadic. I really miss working on a long term project like a tv show or a feature film, so hopefully I’ll be able to get a gig like that soon. I’m also still trying to figure out how to get the “Hockey, Love, & GUTS!” comic seen by more people, whether published online or otherwise. Either way, chapter 5 will be published here first, but, from then on who knows…

(Damn, I wrote a lot on this post. And it was mostly just pointless babble… all those years of college… urgh :/ ~~~)