Five Awesome Links

February 10th, 2007 by Brack

Great Pop Things - Great Pop Things was a comic strip that ran in the NME around the time I started reading it regularly. 1992 I think as Father Ted writer chap, Arthur Matthews’s  “Doctor Crawshaft’s World of Pop” cartoon was running at the same time. GPT was the creation of Colin B Morton and Chuck Death. Chuck Death being a psuedonym of the Mekons’ Jon Langford. It was great. My brother and I still refer to Steve Albini as “Steve Albundy” to this day because this strip.

Ghost In The Shell Lego - It’s the crab tank thingy from the end of the Ghost In The Shell film. In Lego.

Moriyama Miki and The Honkytonk Devils - Another Japanese country band. I’m kind of fascinated by the Japanese country scene as the best I can tell, it seems to work exactly like the British country scene.

The Usuta World - A fansite for the works of humour manga author, Kyosuke Usuta. The most well known work of Usuta’s in the west is “Sexy Commando Side Story, That’s Amazing Masaru-san” through the fansubs of the late 90s anime. And when I say well known, I’m guessing it’s known by a couple of thousand people at most. Currently running in Japan is the strip “He Blows Like PYU! Jaguar” which hasn’t made it to anime yet, but has a number of video games and CDs out. Usuta’s humour is along the lines of something like Cromartie, but is more surreal and fractured, with a less of a reliance on hammering a joke into the ground.

Marvel Super Heroes - Scans of the old TSR Marvel RPG, known fondly as the FASERIP system after the seven stats it used. I ran this on and off from the late 80s in secondary school, until the much better SAGA system came out in, I think 1998 or 97. The books produced were more bad than good. I know this, as until recently I owned all but 3 of the products produced for it. The Advanced Rules, the Ultimate City Campaign Set, the Ultimate Powers book, the MX modules, and the MT modules are probably the only essentials. The Gamers handbooks are nice if you want to play specific Marvel characters. Those MT modules by Ray Winninger are awesome adventures, with the best meta-payoff I’ve ever seen.

Posted in Anime, Comics, Manga, Music, Role-playing Games | Tags: , , , , , , , | No Comments »

#56 - Ghost in the Shell -Stand Alone Complex-

October 8th, 2006 by Brack

I have to say that Masamune Shirow's work does nothing for me.

His manga work comes across too compressed and wordy for my tastes. Full of dense info dumps. And the adaptation into anime tends to suffer even more. Just look at the latest Appleseed adaptation for instance. His work to me is pretty much everything that turns me off science fiction - priority to complicated world building and plot over nuanced characters and dialogue.

I've seen a little of the first 2002 series of Stand Alone Complex. It's Production IG so the standard of animation is pretty slick. However it just seemed really dull and somewhat out of date. Cyborgs and hacking seem almost like retro sci-fi nowadays. Like director Kenji Kamiyama's other works (Blood:The Last Vampire and WXIII: Patlabor) it seems the work of a skilled craftsman rather than talented artist. In fact I'd say his MiniPato shorts were the most charismatic work he's done.

Shirow's work has historically been very popular in the west. His manga proved an early success for Dark Horse as it's density is similar to the way US comics were written then. And of course Manga Entertainment were involved in the production of the GitS film. And both Manga and Bandai are still involved with the current iteration of the franchise - the latest being the TV movie - Solid State Society.

Posted in Animation, Anime | Tags: , , | No Comments »