It’s trite, but it *is* appropriate for Americans to take a moment today to reflect on things that we’re thankful for, so here we go:

1) I’m thankful for the picture above, drawn by Kelli Nicely. One more addition to her Chibi-Erica shrine. It’s an accurate representation of my feelings on Saturday at Onna!. :-)

2) The folks who provide support, physical and emotional, for Yuricon and ALC endeavors, my staff and dear friends. Thank you to all the folks who have ever leant a hand, a foot or other body parts (including the money from your pocket) to get us to where were are today. Thank you Rica Takashima, Kelli, Serge, Donna, Paulette, May, Stacy, Sean, Bruce, Zyl, Janice and Gideon, Editor Ed, Katie and bunches and bunches of other people who I love and adore and simply can’t list.

3) The folks at the Fanfic Revolution for their friendship and mad editing skillz. And all the folks who read my stories on “Worldshaking” Fanfic and let me know.

4) I especially want to thank all the folks who read Okazu and comment, positively or negatively. The positive ones make me feel good, the negative one gives me a laugh or two. So, thanks.

5) All the members of Yuricon and the Yuricon Mailing List who have participated in coversations, bought yuri manga from ALC, stopped by our many tables at many shows and hung out, come to panels, etc, and generally make Yuricon the largest (and best) yuri community in the world.

6) The lovely ladies and gentlemen of Lililicious and #otenba, who are funny and fun, and scanlate yuri manga for yuri fandom at large.

7) The folks at Ichijinsha for backing Yuri Hime and other yuri manga endeavors with an actual eye to increasing the popularity of the genre.

8) Duh…my family. In fact, as I’m sitting here typing, my mother is nattering on about I have no idea what, telling me that she’ll let me finish writing before she bothers me about something else. LOL I love my family.

9) Last on this list, but always first in my thoughts, my beloved wife.

There’s so much this year to be thankful for that a real list would be absurd, so this is a short list. ;-) To all my American readers, a Happy Thanksgiving Day today…to everyone else around the world, have a lovely day full of things to be thankful for.

Blah, blah, blah.

No seriously – does anyone on a military mission talk this much!? ^_^;

So, waaaay back in the dawn of time, I had a copy of Ghost in the Shell in Japanese – you know, the version with the gratuitous lesbian sex scene left in. I sold it for a fair amount of $ because, at the time, the version put out by Dark Horse had removed those pages and you know how crucial to the plot they were – people freaked.

Time has moved on and I was killing an afternoon over at Anime Castle, torturing Bill, the owner (who is a seriously decent dude and we at Yuricon and Onna! owe him a great deal of thanks. In fact, I nabbed a fun toy prize for some lucky contest winner while I was there,) I saw the *2nd* editions for volume 1 and 2 and thought, “why not?” So here I was faced with actually reading the thing.

It’s four days later and I’m still not finished. Let me put this into perspective – I can complete a 200-page novel in about an hour and a half of uninterrupted reading. Four days of reading this thing and I’m going slower, and slower, and…..

It’s not even that they talk too much – it’s the typeface. It’s killing me. I *know* that the convention on lettering comics is ALL CAPS. I *know* that the convention is to fill the word balloons as full as one can (and with Masamune Shirow, it’s kind of inevitable anyway,) but seriously – this lettering is KILLING my eyes. I read two pages and have to stop.

I saw the original GiTS movie way back, when everyone else as old as I am did, and I wasn’t impressed. I loved the idea, but the movie was really dull, IMHO. And I feel much the same with the original manga. It’s such a cool idea, I wish someone had *done* something with it.

I wasn’t really interested in GitS until the first TV series, “Stand Alone Complex: 1st Gig”, and even then I found the end kind of a cop-out. The movie “Innocence” was, like the first movie, nothing more than a series of quotes strung together with visually rich, but essentially meaningless, imagery. I liked it, but not as a movie. It read like an attempt at playing Umberto Eco, without his ability at tying the links together to make a coherent whole. It was gorgeous, but left no real impression.

Of all of the GitS franchise, the one I liked the best was “Stand Alone Complex: 2nd Gig”, entirely because at the end, we’re left with a Major that one can actually *see* taking the route we were shown in the “Innocence” movie. For that, and that alone, I think the 2nd Gig was worth watching.

I’m also quite besotted with the Tachikoma. :-) When they pull that prank (if you’ve seen it, you know which one I mean…) on Batou, it made the entire franchise worth its existence. ^_^

But we don’t care about this! We want to know if the sex was worth the book! you scream.

No, don’t be stupid. It’s pointless fanservice. Mostly it’s the springboard for a goofy gag with Batou. But if you’re the kind of person who thinks that 3 pages of shiny unrealistic women having porn sex is worth shelling out $30 – then get thee over to the Yuricon Shop and buy thee copies of Yuri Monogatari 2 and 3. Two books for the same price…and twice the meaningless sex. ^_^

By the way – in case you’re wondering, I love the Major and I actually do like GitS for what it is. Great art? I don’t know. Groundbreaking? Let’s wait another 40 years and decide. A powerful idea and a popular franchise? Yes, 100 times yes.

Ratings:
Art – The hair! The HAIR!!! 6
Characters – 7
Story – 7
Yuri – 4 It’s all of three pages out of 300.

Overall – I rate it a 7. It’s not going to be my “go back to” book, but I like the whole group enough to keep trying.

One last thing – Dark Horse, with a book this thick, the binding is REALLY crappy. You needed to vent it or make it stronger. I’m not even through with reading it once and it’s starting to crack.

Hi everyone – life is blowing up at the moment. I’m not so self-absorbed that I think that you all care what’s going on. :-)

I will say this – there are so many exciting things happening at Onna!, that it will definitely be *the* place to be this October. We’ve got new guests joining us daily – they are emailing us and *asking* if they can come! These women work in comics, in gaming design, and film. It’s not an all-star cast – but these are the women who make it all happen. Pre-registration is going to stay open until just about a week or so before, but don’t wait until the last second to join us for this fantastic 3-day festival of women’s roles in animation and comics!

So, instead of a yuri review, I’ve decided to empty my phone and digital cameras and share the pictures with you – I think it’ll be fun. Here goes:

This is a picture of Alice Wu from the NYC premier of Saving Face. I reviewed that back in in May.

This is a scene you probably don’t see too often. This is the day before Otakon in the Dealer’s room.

It’s so empty and bright and full of bland, brown boxes. (And a huge multicolored bus…I’m not sure if you can see that in this picture. It’s in the next one, but kind of far away)

Isn’t it kind of cool and weird? In less than 24 hours after I took this picture, this room was filled with people, and noise and colorful, weird *stuff.* Like the psychedelic bus, which you can just make out.

This is a random picture I took before the Yuri panel at Otakon of one half the room.

And here’s the other half. Shifty-looking folks, aren’t they? But in reality, I think this was a very decent audience. The questions are always impossible to answer – but no weirdos who monopolized the Q&A, or hostility, or extreme stupidity. Mostly just folks who were really interested in yuri.

This is Sean Gaffney, yuri panelist extraordinaire. And he owes me a review, but since we’re working him weary for Onna!, I’ll cut him some slack. This picture was taken as he pontificated over dinner after Otakon.

Imagine these shelves with three-foot high piles of manga and anime, filled with DVDs and manga shoved into every corner, overflowing from every nook.. That was the situation.

You felt this coming, right? Here they are! My new shelves. (lovelovelove) Aren’t they wonderful? LOL

That’s it for today. If things don’t become more complicated than they already are, I’ll update this weekend with a real review. :-)

Jyoshi Kousei, aka High School Girls, is billed as a realistic depiction of life in an all-girl’s school in Japan. The author makes a point of commenting when things that seem especially bizarre actually happened to her. All I can say is, thank heaven I was a coed public school student. (Actually, I think that quite often. I lived between two private schools, one all-boys, one all-girls, for 15 years. In that time I learned one thing – private schools are good for boys…but so very not good for girls.)

I originally began following this series in Japanese, but it’s out in English now and since I could, I picked up the first three volumes. The first two volumes were put out by Comics One and the third by DR Master, with the added bonus of interesting typos and lack of cultural understanding. I recommend getting all three, so you can enjoy how bad Volume 3 is in comparison. :-)

Just because I’m feeling helpful: Volume 1 Volume 2 Volume 3

So, High School Girls, as I mentioned, tell the semi-autobiographical adventures of three girls who transfer into an all-girl high end high school. They expect to find a Maria-sama ga Miteru atmosphere of refined culture and instead find a cesspool. And it goes on from there. The clubs are creepy, the talk is filthy and there are many, many references to menstruation. LOL

Of course the girls, who are apparently all straight, obssess about guys in the way straight high school girls do. All the yuri is played entirely as fanservice and laughs – no one with a brain cell would ever think anything of it. Except….

Eriko, Yuma and Ayano have been friends since youth. Ayano (who nabs herself a boyfriend early on, but more than six months later has yet to kiss him) and Yuma are especially close. So close that several characters, including Ayano’s boyfriend and her mother, assume that the two of them are an item.

More subtle, but to me more interesting, is the relationship between “insider” Kouda Akari and Eriko. It wasn’t until I had read all three volumes at a go that I saw it, but I have absolutely no doubt at all that Kouda has a thing for Eriko. They pair up all the time, including for “special” moments like hair removal, and pretend dating. In one scene Kouda play acts the boy and tries to molest Eriko to “help” Ayano along with her boyfriend. In another, Kouda is the girl to Eriko’s impatient boy, as part of “acting training.” When asked what she wants to do for her date, Kouda happily suggests a love hotel.

By the time Ayano’s mother asked her if she and Yuma were an item, I was all for watching Kouda’s clumsy, (but somehow charming, because she probably doesn’t even realize she’s trying) attempts at nabbing Eriko.

So, no, no real yuri, but some amusing fanservice (like the time they all pretend to have sex to lose weight…for which they all remove their shirts, for some reason) and an interesting dynamic between the two couples. It won’t go anywhere, but it won’t kill you to follow it, either. :-)

Ratings:
Art – 7
Story – 7
Characters – 7
Yuri – 5

Overall – 7 for fun.

I am home, Otakon was *amazing* and I have many things to share.

But not now.

I’ll catch up with you tomorrow or the day after. Whenever.