For this week, alongside reading Battle Angel Alita, I took a look of Winsor Mccays Little Nemo. I have had experience reading his comic strips a while back and remember looking at the way he designs his characters and environments. The amount of imagination he puts in each strip is incredible and puts a good amount of effort in each panel while it's either the way he sets up the perspectives and linework.
Since the comic takes place in a kids dreams, Mccay went wild with the designs for the characters and environments. Each comic seems to take place in a different world whether it's a world with large mushrooms or a massive ice cave ruled by an ice king. The majority of each strip ends with the main character waking up with his parents always scolding him to stop having bad dreams (Can't blame the kid, not his fault his dreams go fucking crazy with him always put into danger before he wakes up.) I'd recommend reading this if you are into seeing the history of comics.

The film is not a bad watch either if you are into animation, shame the movie was a bit of a cluster fuck to put together, isn't that right Miyazaki?

This week, I decided to read myself a Manga because I haven't read a good one in years because to me, it's really hard to find one that interests me. My roommate told me about this series called Battle Angel Alita and told me that it had a neat retro and unique style. Of course, having nothing better to do, I decided to check it out. What I saw was some of the most beautiful pen work I have seen in Japanese comics (Alongside Berserk) and some of the craziest characters that I ave seen in the media. Since I know Steling doesn't care about the story too much, I will briefly say what the plot is.

Robot girl has amnesia and is rebuilt by a scientist and finds that she has a hankering for fighting, so he puts her head on a powerful battle body and fights evil cyborg mutants in a post apocalyptic world setting. That's the gist of the plot, but there is a lot of batshit insane things going on there that I will leave the reader to find out for themselves. There were four things that made me want to go read the entirety of the series.

1. Unique setting
2. Great artwork
3. Fun and interesting characters
4. Good pacing and a story that makes you care about the characters.

Also, it's one of the only manga I have read where I leave satisfied because it actually had a decent ending for once. I can't complain enough for how many time I finish a story and the ending comes off half assed or rushed because of deadlines or the series being cancelled. The amount of detail on each page in terms of the artwork is astonishing with plenty of crosshatching on each character and backgrounds which help liven the movement and immersiveness of the story.

Also, a theme that was recurring in the story was the fact that do you need a human heart and organs to be human or is it something else? The majority of the characters are either cyborgs or androids, so they usually talk about what it takes to be human and how one can lose their own humanity.

I also wanted to mention that James Cameron is interested in doing a live action version of the the first 3 volumes because of his love for the series. He said he'll get to doing that after doing the second and third Avatar movies (which means he'll never get around to doing it considering how long it took for the first movie to come out).

Overall, I think this is a manga worth reading because of its great artwork and insane story that I think the majority of people would enjoy.

For my first article, I will be talking about one of my favorite Graphic Novel which introduced me to the media, Bone. I don't know what caught my interest in reading this but if I recall correctly, I remember being in a large comic book store when I was young, in High school and looking through monstrous shelf of large volumes of Graphic Novel collections. Looking through the books which had a majority of violent, dark and gritty themes, I found one that had a rather simplistic character on it called Bone.
I was intrigued and decided to skim through the book a bit. For some reason, I had no opinion on it but the image of the book cover and title stuck with me until the day I decided to ask my parents to get the complete collection for me. After getting it for christmas, I read that book ever day, looking at the pen work of Jeff Smith, the creator of the series, and getting immersed in the stories world with its vast and interesting characters.

One of the things that always made this series interesting is that the titular characters are very cartoony and would fit in a very stylized newspaper cartoon while the area they go through is sort of a high fantasy Conan the barbarian themed land with dragons, rat creatures and princesses. The contrast between the characters always stood out to me but it never felt like they were to out of place. I also was surprised to see how dark this story got near the end, there's a couple of deaths of some of the main characters, there's a major war happening and the story is not afraid to show blood and gore. There's also quite a number of twists and turns that did catch me off guard although there was was one that I did kind of expect (Like the girl being a princess, pretty cliche in my book)

Overall, after reading it again, I still think it's a graphic novel worth reading. With it's attractive art, unique characters and large and epic story, I kind definitely recommend this to anyone looking for something interesting to read.

Testing the blog.