Paper Moon

Haven't done of these in a while!

( A girl and her flaming axe. )

Next: Soul Eater scanspam.

Y'know... Just when I thought that it couldn't get any worse, just when I thought that there couldn't possibly be any more monkey wrenches left for CLAMP to throw into this complete clusterfuck of an ending...

I'm proven wrong, yet again.

( This time there are low-quality scans, to properly convey the scale of this WTFery. )

Ohkubo da man.


Preview time:





Note to self: Scanning artbook pages without damaging the book itself is hard. Hence the blurriness all over poor Killik there. ( But here you go, I tried to scan some more anyway. )

That's it for this month's Soul Eater scanspam. Next on the scanning docket: Yummy Ah! My Goddess and Kyou Kara Maou artwork.

( Tim Burton, eat your heart out. )

Still not enough Maka for you? Well, there's also this, courtesy of jophiel2287, which simply cannot be linked enough.

Good morning, internet!

I am still on vacation with the lovely meiousei. But while we were in Tokyo, I finally bought a new scanner, as the old one was on its last legs. In order to properly inaugurate said new scanner, here's some high-res scanspam for y'all.

( Behind the cut: Ah! My Goddess, Sakura Wars, Fate/Unlimited Codes, and Soul Eater. )

Aaaaand that's it for this scanspam post. The quadruple-whammy of Animage, Animedia, Newtype, and GanGan are all going to hit the streets in a mere two days, though. I will try to have relevant Soul Eater scans posted in a timely fashion. But no promises, as I am still officially ON VACATION for the next week.

Went to the bookstore today. Hooray!

I picked up Ah! My Goddess volume 38, with Chrono on the cover. In the manga canon, I guess she's officially strawberry blonde, now.

So I guess Crono is important enough to rank among Rind, Chihiro, and other supporting characters who have gotten their own volume covers. I'm... not sure how I feel about that. I mean, Crono is just so... stupid. But oh well. There are enough better characters in the cast that I really don't care whether Crono deserves her moment in the sun, or not.

The big surprise was an announcement in the back of the book: the Ah! My Goddess "Total Illustration Artbook 1998 ~ 2008" hits the shelves on Christmas Day! Holy crap!! I can't believe that date wasn't announced in last month's Afternoon. Uh, way to advertise your release dates well in advance, guys. Or not.

Speaking of release dates... How to Make Deathscythe was supposed to hit the shelves today, too. But of course, Squeenix has yet to ship any copies to any bookstores in the southern Nagano area. Of course. This always happens, argh! But that's what I get for living in a backwater.

Oh hey, and since I do live in a backwater, today was the first day that I found a copy of Mutuality on the bookstore shelf. Of course I immediately bought it. ;) Yes, yes, I know, the book has been out for three weeks already. But hey, backwater living! Gotta love it.

Anyway, for those of you unfamiliar, Mutuality is the big giant artbook collection of all of CLAMP's illustrations for Code Geass. And it is, absolutely, in a word, stunning. Worth every single penny. Say what you will about Code Geass - and you know I'm not shy about repeatedly stating that I think that it's utter shite, albeit extremely entertaining shite - but it's impossible to deny that CLAMP's artwork for the series, both production designs and promotional materials, really do represent the pinnacle of modern manga artistry. (If you can stand how overwrought they are, that is.)

Anyway, the book is gorgeous, almost mind-blowingly so, and contains many paintings so visually complicated that I could stare at them for hours and still not be able to appreciate every single detail. The best part of the book, however, is an extensive section of all of the early, rejected character designs that CLAMP churned out. Some of them are outright LOLarious. And some of them are extremely... telling. I know that I've written about this phenomenon before, when the original Lelouch and Suzaku character designs were first revealed in an issue of Newtype. But it still *fascinates* me to observe the process that CLAMP applied to evolving those two character designs from their rough versions to their final versions.

( Really long entry in which I ramble about anime character designs, racial coding, and yes, I actually tie Code Geass to Avatar and all of the ugly racewank it's generating. )

Edited to add: Now with visuals! Hooray!

Edit again: Another thing just occurred to me. I originally wrote this post with the intent to debunk the "Aang looks white" meme, but there's a more insidious meme out there that can be addressed here as well. That would be the "Avatar characters are raceless" meme. The most common justification for which seems to be the idea that because the main Avatar characters have such varied facial features, they aren't meant to all be of the same race! Mai and Ty Lee look so completely different, that they couldn't possibly both be of the same race, right? WRONG! This is a stupid idea, because it assumes that there's never any physical variations between people of the same race. It is an insidious packaging of the same old racist belief that a) only white people have varied facial features and b) all Asian people look exactly the same. Oh, barf. The character designs in most anime series, as well as in Avatar, directly defy that idea. But, you know. Viewers are still people, and people are still stupid.

Edit the Third: Just added a bunch more images, including scans of CLAMP's original character designs for Lelouch and Suzaku.

Edit the Fourth: Ampersand links an old essay by Matt Thorn about the same dealio, and a fascinating discussion ensues in the comments.

My livejournal has been sadly lacking in three things lately: X-men. Saber. And puppies. So let's remedy that.



This gem of an advertisement has been running on the back of several of the previous issues of Shounen Magazine. Is it sad that I find my weekly dose of doe-eyed puppy more exciting than my weekly dose of Tsubasa? Probably. Especially considering that nothing about the puppy advertisement ever actually changes. Then again, neither does anything about any chapter of Tsubasa anymore. Oh, snap.



Lily Saber, from this month's Comptiq. Somehow that outfit looks a lot less stupid when she's in an action!pose.



An oldie but a goodie. I dug up this image because for the past week, I've been flipping through all of the American comics that I still have with me in Japan, desperately searching for a panel (or two) that would make a decent header image for that bloggity project that Jess and I are working on.

Anyway, this is probably my all-time favorite image of the fourth generation X-kids, if for no other reason than because of Julian's deliciously ridiculous pose. I mean, WTH is he doing, anyway?! Revving up his invisible motorcycle?! And I also love the sexy back-to-back pose that Noriko and David are striking. This is made even funnier in context, BTW. "Context" being "these two characters dated for years and then had a hugely traumatic and angsty breakup, which all subsequent writers and artists working on the X-books immediately totally and completely forgot about." Right, because this image? Which is supposed to be "placed" immediately after the breakup? Sure. They totally look like they just had a gigantic, ugly breakup. Totally.

Oh hey I'm still about... four months behind on the X-books. Sigh. And with the holidays coming up, I ain't planning on spending money to catch up anytime soon. Uh, so now there's a current storyline or something about Cypher coming back... as a black woman? Oh, X-Men. You so crazy.

Sorry that these are two weeks late, but I haven't gotten to a bookstore lately.

Anyway. First! Part five (apparently) of Kosuke Fujishima's new Mini-Goddess strip, which is being published on the spine of monthly issues of Afternoon. In case you missed any of the previous panels, you can find them all linked here.

( Behind the cut: Mini-Goddess comic, more 20th anniversary stuff, and old school Afternoon covers. )

Evangelion by Okumura Sachiko



Gundam by CLAMP



Sakura would fit pretty well in any Gundam series, methinks. What with her tendency to keep dying and coming back to life and all.

(Note: If you cannot see thumbnails above, try viewing this post from nenena.livejournal.com.)