Current Ramblings
Sunday, November 28, 2004
We Are All Adults Here
(But first, a quick note: Transformers: Legends is out now, and I strongly recommend anyone so inclined to go find themselves a copy. This is the payoff for buying those ghastly "adult novels" iBooks put out. Sometimes you just have to be patient and support something long enough to let it get better. Though yes, I realize this concept was an abyssimal failure when I applied it to Dreamwave. But this...I cannot remember the last time I grinned so much reading a Transformers story, and I'm sure it's been longer still since it was because it was actually a solidly enjoyable story and not just from fangirlish glee.)
Yesterday was the very first time I have ever attended a convention by myself. I have always had at least one and in recent years a gaggle of friends to go to things like Mid-Ohio-Con with me. But Steve-o was out of town, Walky...works at TRU, and Graham just didn't feel like going. Admittedly, we didn't have anybody TF-related to pester this year like our previous merciless harassment of Marv Wolfman, but I still wanted to go. After all, I had asked for the Saturday after Thanksgiving off work, and you just don't do that in retail without a very good reason. As it turned out, it wasn't a bad choice. Shortly after arriving I ran into some guys who recognized me from online, so I chatted with them for a while about the future of OTFCC and other assorted Transformers geekery. Then I attended the panel about working as part of a comic creator collective, which featured my friend and coworker Matt Kish. (There, Matt, I'm mentioning you! ;) ) I had noticed looking over the panel schedule the night before that he was hosting a surprising number of panels, so we shared convention war stories for a bit after the panel. I cruised the exhibitor room and was struck by just how much T&A there was. I don't know why, after over ten years reading comics, including the Image era, this should surprise me, but it did a little. There were also a lot of artists of serious artistic merit, but they were easily drowned out by the boobies. So, not really intending to shell out the cash for art anyway, I headed back to the dealer room, bought myself the first Cowboy Bebop soundtrack and a Christmas present for someone, and decided to brave one of the largest McDonald's in the United States on Black Saturday. I don't recommend it. I got back to the convention (stopping at the Friends of Lulu table to buy their anth book on the way) in time to catch the "Developing the Feminine Character" panel, featuring...the woman who played Lois Lane in the 50s Superman show and the woman from Tron. But hey, I got to sit down. I ran into Jeff later, who I previously thought of as "Jeff from the Laughing Ogre" but who will now be "my friend Jeff", because anybody who will go through a box of yaoi dojinshi with you is truly a friend. I also got asked if I was over 18 not once but thrice, first by an Asian man as I poked at some stacks that I only realized then were hentai dojinshi, then by Jeff's friend as we shared questionable jokes, and again by a guy who was easily 5 years my junior at the table with the yaoi. Yow. So Jeff and I shopped until the show was about to close, then I called it a night with the Cowboy Bebop theme carrying me home.
On the subject of dojinshi, I looked up the URL to a legendary site called Happy Hentai Home after I got home last night, becasue it came up in conversation. Happy Hentai Home is a store site, and while the site itself doesn't have anything beyond smallish cover scans of (primarily hentai) dojinshi, the Engrish descriptions of the books are priceless. One of my favorites is for a Street Fighter book: "Chung Li ( game character on the cover page) is licking a male genital and takes all extreme amount of protein riched liquid in her mouth. She takes a position of dog like pose and asks putting a big one in it." The whole site proceeds in about that same fashion. The main site has taken down the index page for most of it, though the "Doujin For Girls" (primarily yaoi and stuff like Sailor Moon) remains and is also a comedy goldmine. But the actual pages for the rest of the site remain, so through the magic of the web archive you can still visit them. I strongly recommend both the Street Fighter and Sailor Moon sections.
posted@5:44 PM by:Trixter: 0 comments