Much as I hate to push that FAQ post off the front page, I thought I should mention that once again I'll be attending MetroCon, Tampa Bay's annual anime/manga convention. It's this weekend (June 19-21), and you can specifically find me either in Doug Smith's Digital Drawing panel on Friday evening (7PM, I think) or in the Careers in Creating Anime & Manga panel on Sunday (2PM). If you're going to be in the area and you have an interest in either subject, I hope I'll see you there!



So, another year, and it all went pretty nicely. I participated in two (technically three) panels, a "Careers in Creating Anime and Manga" panel and the two-part "Digital Drawing with Doug Smith", which I've officially crashed two years running now. If you don't know Doug, he's pretty awesome, and the fact that he puts up with me proves it.

It never fails that after these things are over, I feel like I barely scratched the surface of what I had hoped to pass on to the audience. If you were there and you had a question that didn't get answered (or that didn't get answered well), please don't hesitate to ask again here or send me a Note. I feel like the Careers panel was especially hard to direct, because I was the one directing it, and with me at the helm that boat can go anywhere.

An extra shoutout goes to the ever-excellent Dave Stanworth of Snafu Comics (who I'm pretty sure I referred to as "Dan Southworth" at least twice... sorry 'bout that, Dave), who was willing to participate in the Careers panel on extremely short notice, and who made a huge difference just by being there and offering his insights into the career of a comics artist in the modern distribution environment. We ended up talking a lot about illustration and webcomics in particular, so I feel like I might have shortchanged the members of the audience who were more interesting in animation, but that's entirely on me.

Then again, I feel pretty strongly that (at least in my experience) the career aspects of animators and illustrators have a lot in common. Maybe that's 'cause I keep straddling the line myself, but you often study the same basics for both careers, and you have to be mindful of many of the same pitfalls.

And as usual I did a little shopping, nothing especial, but I managed to fill out my Blade of the Immortal set a bit more (only missing a handful of volumes now) and I picked up the remaining 6 books in the OldBoy series, which I'm really enjoying. I haven't seen the movie, but from what I understand it's not a very accurate adaptation of the books, so I don't know that I'm missing much. The novels are great, though, a thriller about a man who's locked in a tiny room for ten years, and then released with no better understanding of why he was put away than he had a decade before. The story follows his path to discovering who it was that imprisoned him, and why, and what vengeance he might gain from that. I'm not quite done with the books (up to 6 now, but I go through each one pretty fast), but so far it's one of my new favorites.

Got a few little tchotchkes for Becca, and because I cannot help myself I picked up a couple more costume swords (they're pretty damn cheap nowadays, possibly because of troubles in Pakistan). I'm sworn off katanas and I'm not usually a fan of anime replicas, but a halfway-nice Aragorn (not Narsil/Andúril, the other one with the small, sheath-bound dagger) and a knockoff of Conan's sword (which I had before and broke) were too much to pass up. That puts my total collection of semi-useless steel at 11 blades (plus one good carbon-steel shikomi-zue that nearly cost me a couple fingers for my disrespect). I spent less on pair of them than I would on a new videogame, and less than I did on books, so I don't feel too stupid for feeding my silly habits. Still... somewhere in me is a responsible adult that shrieks at such behavior. I'm not a very good grownup.

Hey, would you rather I started smoking again?

Well, too late. Filthy habit, but it seems I haven't shaken it entirely. Blame the President.

So another MetroCon, and a good time seemed to be had by all. I'm thinking I might make Dragon*Con this year (guest application pending), so if you missed me here you might catch me there. And if you weren't able to make it but you had a question (or as mentioned, you didn't get a good answer at the Con), feel free to ask!





In other news, I'm catching up with this boxset of Full Metal Panic that I got a few years back and never did watch until recently. It's a pretty good show, I like the mecha action, but I'm irritated that I can't stop noting the differences between the A and B-teams who assembled the animation. If I had known that making a career out of this was going to wreck my enjoyment of shows that don't maintain a consistent level of quality (and I know all too well how hard that is, I cannot call the kettle black), I wonder if I would have stuck to stick figures...