No Yuri today – I have to be in NYC to do some stuff today, and while I’m there, I’m meeting Rica Takashima to visit the Center for Book Arts and take in their exhibit of Garo manga magazine.

Garo is, if you will excuse my mixing and matching of memes, the Dadism phase of manga. It focused on breaking the boundaries, and socio-political commentary which, as you know, every single generation of young artists does and thinks they are unique and groundbreaking. :-) (In many ways every generation is unique and groundbreaking – except the part where they think “no one has ever done this before” and are self-righteous and angry about things. lol.)

For most US fans, names that will be most recognizable from Garo is Yoshihiro Tatsumi, creator of A Drifting Life and  Usamaru Furuya, creator of Short Cuts. 


I’ll be doing a write up of the exhibit for another website, I’ll let you know when it goes up. 


Can I just tell you how amazing it is to be alive right now? We have the best of all possible worlds – the past and present are as accessible to us as we want them to be, no matter how obscure our interests. And we have an opportunity to create the future. It’s pretty spectacular.

Thank you Center for Book Arts – and every Library in the world that celebrates the printed word and image!

Hana and Natsu share an apartment. And food. And a budget. And lives.

Hana and Natsu have very little money for extras…like dinner.

Hana and Natsu make up silly games for themselves to pass the time, since they don’t have books or TV.

Hana and Natsu get to the beach by hitchhiking.

Hana and Natsu are very hungry.

Hana and Natsu play with the kid downstairs, whom they call “Doctor.”

Hana and Natsu make newspaper armor.

Hana and Natsu sometimes whack each other for making bad jokes.

Hana is the boke and Natsu is the tsukkomi unless it’s the other way around.

There is no reason to think that Hana and Natsu are a couple, except all of the above.

Ratings:

Art – 5
Story – 5
Character – 6
Overt Yuri – 0
Implicit Yuri – 5
Service – 1

Overall – 5

Flat & Flow (ふら・ふろ) is not a 4-panel comic, but it might as well be one. It’s silly, easier to take in small chunks than large ones, full of poverty-stricken-slice-of-life gags.

This is not everything we brought back – much of this is in piles and the kitsune collection is separate, but it gets the idea across.

You may notice a prominently placed Strike Witches item. This is a limited edition windbreaker that was a gift from Ana. As you might guess if you know anything about my tastes, Strike Witches the series holds little interest for me – too many things that don’t appeal – but I love the logo. I will proudly wear the windbreaker to venues where the logo is unlikely to be recognized.

Now I must eat, then sleep.

It’s nice to be back.

Oh, last random junk food item of the trip was a Pukapuka Tai – a taiyaki shaped wafer cookie with melon flavored cream. It was tasty, as long as you like melon-flavored stuff.

This morning dawned with the kind of weather I associate with March. Cold, raw, steady, drippy rain. It was absolutely blecch. A perfect day to head out to Big Sight and visit the Tokyo Anime Fair.

The Ariake station and approach to Big Sight was creepy and sodden, since every other time we had been there it was full of people, now it was just full of water. Where Comiket fills all 6 East Halls and all 4 West halls, TAF fills East Halls 1-3. It was exactly as I expected, a trade show for anime – many of which have been previously announced, so are not new news. We watched the trailer for the CGI Captain Harlock movie which was so good we wanted a cigarette after it, and I got a few Pixel Maritan character figurines among lots of pieces of paper announcing series available for licensing? Want a laugh? Rose of Versailles was listed as available for licensing. Hee. (If you don’t know why that is funny, don’t worry about it.)

We met up with some great folks, Ana and Mari and the Otakon folks and translator Bill Flanagan and some of us went to lunch and had a nice chat. I love industry gossip. :-)

After we had seen all that there was to be seen and gotten all the random items we wanted (we passed on the 4-foot tall Heroman bags) Bruce, the wife and I headed home, stopping for murasaki (purple) sweet potato treats at the station.

We flattened out a bit until we got a call from Mari – she and Ana wanted to have some tea with us, before they headed out to the TAF Gaijin Dinner (to which I was invited, but passed. If I had been by myself, I mighta gone, but with the wife, I felt it was unfair.)

We had tea and some okazu – mine was smoked daikon with cream cheese – and then we parted – my party went to Animate to do a little shopping for a few folks and they headed off to dinner.

Tomorrow, we’re going to hit Akihabara, finally, for a little surprise for Bruce. :-)

Today’s Random Junk Food Item: Pumpkin flavored Crunky. It wasn’t as pumpkin-y as the pumpkin seed bagel I had for breakfast (pumpkin bagel with corned beef, mayo, onion and lettuce.) And the sweet potato sweet, which was full of sweet potato-y goodness and was very purple. D’oh – forgot to take a picture. ^o^