Vlog! All about Manga 20170811 (Patreon)

Okay! Hello everyone it's Friday. I am back in Smokey Vancouver British Columbia... there've been a lot of forest fires up north and basically the smoke has drifted over the city and has blanketed us for like over a week now. It's pretty rough but it's not affecting me too badly so that's good, but it's really hot.

And I wanted to apologize-- I've missed a couple of vlog update I think and things have been a little bit quiet on Patreon. What happened is something urgent came up in my personal life and I had to drop everything and deal with it. Everything is fine now and I'm starting to get back to my rhythm back to producing in a regular way. But I wanted to apologize and there's a bit of a gap. Sorry.

I wanted to talk to you today about some things that I've been reading, actually. So as you may know, I'm part of a podcast called the Tradewaiters. I just posted our most recent podcast and that's probably the biggest reason that I read comics now. I am either reading a book that we're going to be reviewing together, or I'm reading ahead to find something that I can recommend to the group. I just posted the episode for Shadoweyes by Sophie Campbell and our next one will be Scott Pilgrim books 1 and 2. We decided to call it our "Scott Pilgrimage" but we're gonna be doing reviews on all three books (sorry.. on all six books) and now I'm gonna read three and four and five and six. I've read them before, so it's not too big of a deal.  Scot Pilgrim is easy to read and I recommend it.

The harder problem for me has been finding a long series to recommend. So, occasionally we like to do one off graphic novels where we just review the one graphic novel, but occasionally we do longer series because comics can sometimes encompass like 10, 20, 30 volumes depending on what you're reading. And you can't develop a fair interpretation of the work until you've a lot of it. And I'm kind of known in the group as the "Manga aficionado". I'm the one who loves manga the most, but it's honestly a little bit difficult to recommend manga. It is a particular kind of thing, right, where it has its own tropes and its own conventions that I really love but don't necessarily apply to a general audience. 

And what's also been interesting is that when I was young manga was really hard to find. There wasn't really such a thing as scanlations when I was in high school... you're kind of at the whim of the publishers for what they wanted to bring over and translate. There was probably only TokyoPop and Viz and like a couple of the biggest manga producers and they weren't translating that much. So any manga that I found I devoured, right? Because I'm like "oh my god, this comic this is so good! Finally I get to read the kind comics that I like!" ...but I didn't get a chance to really develop an understanding of what about manga I like. And that's been really interesting. As I've been reading some more series to evaluate there's a lot of manga that I don't like. And it's caused me to reevaluate what it is I do like about manga in order to find things that I enjoy reading.

So one of the ones that I read recently was Cross Game... [let me pull up the screen cap here.] Cross Game is... it's a manga about -- ostensibly about baseball -- but it's about two young families that have been together since they were growing up. And it's really well regarded, and really well reviewed. I hear the this manga coming up a lot when people are talking about manga that they recommend. But funnily enough I didn't like it. I will say it's really good for atmospherics... So you can see in this page there's a lot of space and time dedicated to just setting the scene. And everything is done very slowly and emotionally. And in the most recent Tradewaiters -- or one of the more recent Tradewaiters -- I talk about the concept of slowburn romance. This is definitely a slowburn romance. And I love this scene from a funeral... So I'm definitely glad that I read Cross Game it actually isn't one that I recommend.

[Let me get to the next one now.] So after Cross Game I thought I would read some CLAMP. CLAMP is an all-female manga collective and they wrote one of my favourite series which is X 1999... And I wanted to read some more by them so I decided to read the manga for Card Captor Sakura. This was something that I watched as an anime and I wanted to read the manga of it. The manga is quite pretty but actually found.. [come on, focus].. I found this one a little bit disappointing as well. You can tell here that the line weight is really light... There isn't any black, there's hardly any black... Like here's a panel where they're using using black but most of it is very thin lines with not a lot of differentiation in line weight. And I find that a little bit unpleasant to read, I guess. When I can't very clearly define what's going on. But CLAMP is also really good at atmospherics and emotional things like a really love this page where Sakura is falling into a dream. And the plot in this one is kinda campy. Which I guess I should've known because the TV show was also kinda campy... And I guess... It's hard to say why.. I'm just not into it. What more do you want, I'm not into it /:) . So it was fun.. if you want something fun and light to read that's, you know, kind of a bit childish ... but I love all the different customs that Sakura wears..  then I would recommend CardCaptor Sakura. 

And let me get to the last one... so after I read that I decided to read Princess jellyfish. so Princess jellyfish is totally new to me.. but it has been recommended a few times and so I picked up volume 1 and 2. And so far I really really like it. Basically it is about a clan of nerds.. a clan of women otaku who live in the same apartment building. And they rallied together and formed their own little family... and kind of resist the world.  And they have a hard time going through the world with "stylish people"... stylish folk. And the plot revolves around this person whose name I am now forgetting... but they refer to them as the Princess but they're actually a cross-dresser or a transvestite. What their gender identity is it's not 100% clear yet... but they come in and decide that they really want to be friends with this one who is a nerd for jellyfish. and that's why it's called Princess Jellyfish. I love this so far. This is really fun. I love the style, I love the plot... and so I think this is a strong contender for my next recommend. So if you want to get ahead, because the long series are.. we are reading probably four volumes of it depending on what the group decides, but Princess jellyfish. Strong recommend.

Okay I think that's all I need to say today I will see you guys soon. I will be posting a bunch of stuff on Patreon that I have been finishing recently. So alright! Baiee <3