Anime Roundup: Big Name Edition

That's right, it's another edition of Anime Roundup! This time, I'll be talking about some heavy hitters that, if you're even on the periphery of anime fandom, you've probably heard of before.

Attack on Titan

This one could also qualify for my previous Anime Roundup post in which I listed shows that I initially gave up on but then gave another chance to, because I actually tried watching it back when I first really started getting into anime but then stopped because of what I at the time called its "unrelenting bleakness." After I finished watching the Korean horror drama series Sweet Home, however (which you can hear me discuss with my bandmates from Second Player Score in Episode 69 of our podcast), I decided that there was no way this show could be bleaker than Sweet Home, so I restarted it, and behold! It was so much fun that, like a Titan eating humans, I consumed the whole 25-episode first season (which is all that's available on Netflix) in a matter of days. I now see why it's so popular, and I may have to sign up for Hulu just so I can watch the rest of it, dangit.

Demon Slayer

I had heard that a movie based on this series (a direct sequel to the first season) became the highest-grossing anime film of all time after it was released in Japan in late 2020, which is even more impressive when you consider that it happened IN THE MIDDLE OF A GLOBAL PANDEMIC when going to the theater is generally not a thing. So, naturally, I was excited when I saw that it - the series, not the movie - was coming to Netflix. And wow, let me tell you, it did not disappoint. About a boy who wants to become a demon slayer after his family is killed by a demon (except for his sister, who is turned into a demon), its particular blend of action, drama, humor, and gore is right in my sweet spot (although the supporting character Zenitsu is more than a little annoying at times). Also, the whole "nine Hashira" and "twelve Kizuki" thing makes my inner nerd squeal with delight. So now my only question is HOW CAN I SEE THE MOVIE??

One Piece

This show, about a boy with Mister Fantastic-like powers who wants to become the next King of the Pirates, is based on the best-selling manga of all time. Personally, I don't quite get it (I know, all you One Piece fans out there are like, whaaaa?), but I've only watched a relative fraction of the zillion gajillion available episodes so far, so perhaps it's a slow burn like many other shows I grew to love over time. I'm still plugging away at it, because if and when it ever does really take off for me, I will have an enormous catalog to enjoy.

Neon Genesis Evangelion

A classic from the mid-nineties, I'd heard that this show basically jumpstarted the entire anime industry at a time when interest was starting to wane. I thought, "but it's just a standard mecha show with giant kid-piloted robots fighting giant monsters, right?" Uh, wrong. After watching stuff like Kill la Kill, Gurren Lagaan, and Madoka Magica, you'd think I would have learned my lesson by now. Anyway, once I realized that this particular edition of Anime Roundup was starting to take on the "big name" theme, I decided to check this show out, since it (and a couple of related feature-length films) was readily available on Netflix. And...well, holy cow. HOLY COW. Not to give anything away, but from the early episodes where the show was just establishing its premise, you could already tell there was something different and groundbreaking about it. Even moments that were supposedly lighthearted still had a subversive undercurrent of dread and foreboding - a sense of "there's something not quite right here." It's also so thematic that you could probably write a college dissertation about it (and I'm pretty sure some folks have). On top of that, great pacing, terrific character development, lots of action, and some downright trippy sequences make this one required viewing for any anime fan.

Your Name

This is a full-length feature (not a series) that is the third-highest grossing anime film of all time, behind only the aforementioned Demon Slayer movie and Studio Ghibli's Spirited Away. And also, it is positively mind-blowing. Ostensibly a romantic dramedy on the surface, it blends a bunch of other tropes and genres in a way that you think wouldn't work at all, but it totally does, creating something that is far greater than the sum of its parts. I won't spoil anything even a little bit, but let me just say that watching this film was like a religious experience for me. It's only 107 minutes long but it feels like the journey of a lifetime (in a good way). My one complaint is that I could only find it in either English dub or Japanese with no subtitles, so I went with the dub version (curse my limited Japanese-language skills). By the time I was halfway through, though, I was so enthralled that it didn't matter. If you've been following this blog for a while and you feel like your taste in movies is anything similar to mine, do yourself an immense favor and watch this film as soon as you possibly can.

Glorified Issue #4 Kickstarter

Hey there! Just wanted to let everyone know that the creative team behind the Glorified comic book series has launched a Kickstarter campaign to help raise funds for the next issue in the series. I know that this is a tough time financially for many folks out there, but for those who can afford it, we have some fun rewards available, including the chance to appear as a character in the issue!

Issue #4 ("Liberty's End") shows Gloria and Gage stopping in a town called Liberty's End that is being terrorized by a local gang. In exchange for supplies, Gloria offers to train the townsfolk to defend themselves. But will they be ready in time? The answer might surprise you...

Anyway, the Kickstarter campaign can be found here, and Issues #1, #2, and #3 are available from the good folks at IndyPlanet. You can also find more information on the series itself here and here. Cheers!

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Four-D: The Winter Suite Launch Party And Other Interviews

In case you missed my band's virtual launch party for our new four-song EP Four-D: The Winter Suite, you can catch it at this link. It's nearly four hours long, but it's a whole lot of fun (especially as we get drunker and drunker as it goes along).

Huge thanks to host Punky Bruiser for having us, and for being a good friend and big supporter in general. We've been on his show a couple of times before (once for a general interview and another time to discuss our thoughts on Marvel's Wandavision), and we're planning on being on again in the near future, this time to play some good ol' D&D. I recommend checking out his other non-Second Player Score episodes as well, as he covers a lot of fun stuff from the worlds of music and pop culture.

We were also lucky enough to be recent guests on a bunch of other cool shows: the Beers With Bands podcast, New Rock City, and No, This Is Mattrick! (hosted by Matt, the guitarist from No, This Is Patrick!) Check out those episodes at these links:

Beers With Bands

New Rock City

No, This Is Mattrick!

And, of course, you can hear our new EP (as well as the rest of our catalog) on Spotify or basically anywhere else music is to be found online. Cheers!

Four-D: The Winter Suite EP

Today is the official release date of Four-D: The Winter Suite, the new EP from my band Second Player Score!

The EP, which is only available digitally, consists of four songs: "The Flow," "That Escalated Quickly," "Winner Takes It All," and "Dark Night of the Soul." It will eventually, when combined with the Summer Suite, Autumn Suite, and Spring Suite (all of which have been written but are yet to be recorded), be part of the full-length 16-song album titled, naturally, Four-D - of which there will be a physical CD and, hopefully, a companion card game and novella.

Four-D is, of course, a concept album, one that tells the story of a boy who chooses to compete in an interdimensional game for the prize of a single wish, only to find that the game is much more than he bargained for. Musically, we took on the challenge of making every song on the album just four chords, after we noticed that a lot of the best songs in pop music history are constructed in exactly that fashion.

We had also noticed that "four" seems to be sort of a magic number not only for music, but for the universe in general - four-chord songs, 4/4 time signature, four elements, four seasons, four compass points, four blood types, four mathematical operations, four DNA components, four forces of nature, and so on (in some East Asian cultures, the number four is actually considered bad luck, kind of like thirteen in the West, because the word for "four" - shi - is also the word for "death." But, well, death is just a natural part of life, right?)

So, since this was our fourth album, we decided to try to incorporate as much of that as we could into it. Along with having sixteen songs divided up into four EPs of four songs each, each EP would correspond to a season of the year, with the predominant key signatures for the songs representing that particular seasonal element - F# for fire/summer, A for air/autumn, E for earth/spring, and D for winter/water (D standing for water's chemical name, dihydrogen monoxide).

Basically, it's next-level nerdiness.

But while the songs together tell an overall story, individually they're grounded in common emotions that anyone can relate to. "The Flow" is a short and speedy rocker about when you're in the zone, whether it be creative or athletic. "That Escalated Quickly" reflects the feelings you have when things are getting out of control. "Winner Takes It All" is an inspirational ska-influenced number for when your back is against the wall and you have to pull out all the stops. And "Dark Night of the Soul" is for when you feel like all is lost, but some small light at the end of the tunnel keeps you going.

Anyway, you can now find all four songs on Spotify, Apple Music, and all other streaming outlets. We're also going to be having a virtual release party TONIGHT on the Punky's Mixtape show on Twitch from 5 to 5:30pm PST, so be sure to tune in to that!

Volume Six Status Update

With Volume Five now officially out in the world, I have turned my full attention (or, at least, the part of my attention devoted to writing stuff) to - gasp - Volume Six.

That's right, work on the next installment of the Joel Suzuki series - which will, of course, be "The Indigo Book" (official subtitle to be announced later) - is well underway. I had actually started on it earlier, while Volume Five was in editing, and as of October 1st of last year I was at 5500 words, or about 22 pages. So far, there's been the usual amount of false starts and early rewrites, but since I now have five books - and a bunch of other projects - under my belt, I know that this is just standard operating procedure and that I just need to keep plugging away. As a result, I am now up to (drum roll)...

22,000 words, or about 88 pages!

(Some of which will get thrown away and/or rewritten, but like I said - standard operating procedure. Either way, it's progress, folks.)

To give you a little advance taste of what it's about, suffice it to say that while Volume Five took place mostly on Earth, this book will not only return the series to its otherworldly origins, it will expand it greatly, delving into multiple timelines and alternate realities. Because, of course, it's the penultimate chapter in the main seven-book arc (Volumes Eight through Eleven - remember when I announced them? - will be "post-adventures"), so naturally it needs to escalate things pretty dramatically.

Anyway, it's coming along quite nicely so far, and I'm having a lot of fun writing it, which is always a good sign. Stay tuned for more updates!

Glorified Issue #3 Now Available!

Great news - Issue #3 of Glorified (titled "Broken Ecstasy") is now available for general sale on IndyPlanet!

In case you don't know, IndyPlanet is an awesome online store that offers titles from indie comics creators from all over the world in both print-on-demand and digital download formats. To order copies of Glorified's new issue (and the previous two as well), just go to these links:

Glorified #1, "Eye of the Needle"

Glorified #2, "Ragged Town"

Glorified #3, "Broken Ecstasy"

Also, a little bit of status update news - work on Issue #4 ("Liberty's End") is well underway, with all of the thumbnail sketches complete and preliminary line art for the first five pages in progress. A new Kickstarter campaign for the issue will be launching soon, which I will announce here when it does!

Anime Roundup: Second Chance Edition

I'm a firm believer in second chances. My band Second Player Score - the second major musical musical project I've been involved with - is an example of that. And, as I've mentioned before, sometimes with anime you just have to stick with a show before it gets good. A few that I've revisited that have paid off big-time include Fullmetal Alchemist, Saiki K., and Seven Deadly Sins, and so for this roundup I decided to go back and check out a bunch more, such as:

Kill la Kill

I starting watching this show back in the summer of 2018, when I was still a relative anime noob. I think it was because I was a noob that I was kind of caught off guard by its quirky and, yes, racy nature, so I stopped after three episodes. But now that I am a grizzled anime veteran, I know that quirky and racy are standard operating procedure! So I revisited this one and, well, I fell in love with it. Deeply. What starts off as a simple revenge tale quickly builds into something far more deep, epic, and unique than I could have ever expected or imagined. Even the raciness, instead of just being there for so-called "fan service," is actually an integral part of the overall plot! The pace is fast (they even call this fact out in a fun meta moment), the action is intense, the writing is amazing, the twists are twisty, there's drama, humor, suspense, intrigue...I just can't say enough good stuff about this show. They even made it so that when there were relatively long passages of expository dialogue, instead of feeling bored, I hung breathlessly on the characters' every word - and sometimes even replayed those sections to make sure I got everything. Oh, and if you watch this show, trust me - you will never look at your own clothes the same way again.

Gurren Lagann

After finishing Kill la Kill, I discovered that its writer (Kazuki Nakashima) and director (Hiroyuki Imaishi) also did another show called Gurren Lagann a number of years earlier (they also did Promare, which I watched and talked about in another post). As it just so happens, I had also tried watching Gurren Lagann back when I was an anime noob but gave up after only three episodes thinking that it was a dull and generic mecha show. But so, since I loved Kill la Kill after giving it a second chance, I figured I would try this one again, and...boy, was I wrong about the "dull and generic" thing. Sure, it does start off a little slow and at first it seems like just a bunch of big robots fighting each other, but if you stick with it, it does the same thing as Kill la Kill (although I guess I should say Kill la Kill does the same thing as Gurren Lagann, since the latter came first) and evolves into so, so much more, complete with a few shocking twists. Also, a lot of the stuff that happens near the end will definitely provide inspiration for the sixth and seventh volumes of the Joel Suzuki series. Otsukaresama deshita, Imaishi-san and Nakashima-san, you guys are brilliant geniuses.

Violet Evergarden

Another one from the summer of '18 that I had given up on, this time after only two episodes. What the heck was I thinking? Sure, it starts off a little slow, and the overall tone of the show is pretty melancholy, but if you stick with it, it gets really powerful, poignant, and heartfelt. Oh, and the artwork is fantastic - probably among the best anime art I've ever seen (and by now, I've seen a lot). It's also kind of neat that the protagonist - a young woman named Violet Evergarden, naturally - is similar in a lot of ways to Gloria Sin from my own comic book series, Glorified. They both have backgrounds as emotionless soldiers who had the ability from a young age to take out entire troops singlehandedly (the show never explains how Violet got her training, but it doesn't matter) along with prosthetic limbs (Gloria has one to replace a lost hand, Violet has two mechanical arms that reminded me of the automail from Fullmetal Alchemist), and both of their journeys involve them trying to gain or regain their respective versions of humanity.

Children of the Whales

In the fall of 2018 I watched this one and said in this previous post, "I watched the first few episodes and couldn't figure out why it was rated TV-MA. I believe I stopped right before I was about to find out." Sure enough, in episode three, I found out (Netflix has since changed it to TV-14, but - spoiler alert - there are some pretty intense scenes of violence). It's hard to pin down how I feel about this one because the tone of this show is kind of all over the place, bouncing from gentle and reflective one moment to dark and grisly the next with moments of standard anime-style levity sprinkled in between. The world-building, while unique, is also a little confusing, although that's probably my fault for not paying better attention (there were a few times when I said out loud to my TV, "I have no idea what's going on here"). Still, though, it was very watchable the second time around, and the twelve episodes (which - spoiler alert - only adapts part of the original manga) went by pretty quickly.

Inuyashiki Last Hero

I actually started on this one fairly recently after seeing it appear on some best-of lists. Then, for whatever unknown reason, I stopped after one episode. I have no idea why. Was I distracted by some bright and shiny object? Was I put off by the slightly-uncanny-valley computer-generated art style? Who knows. Anyway, after seeing it on yet another best-of list, I decided to give it a second chance. Which was a very good decision. I mean, you have to love it just based on the premise alone - a middle-aged man (he's 58 but looks 78 or maybe even 88) who has terminal health issues and is treated with utter contempt by his kids is accidentally killed and then turned into a superpowered cyborg by extraterrestrials (who had apparently taken a wrong turn) and then he goes off to save people before eventually facing off with a teenage dude who had gained the same powers but uses them to be a mass murderer instead. As a middle-aged man myself, I approve of this concept. Even the teenage guy - named "Hiro" with obvious on-the-nose irony - says at one point (mild spoiler alert), "wait, you mean I'M the villain, and this old guy is the hero??" Bonus points awarded for the hilarious meta moment when the teenager makes an offhand comment about what a terrible manga Gantz is (the writer of Gantz is also the writer of this show).

Anonymous Noise

This was not one I had to give a second chance to, but I'm just including it here anyway. It's a rom-com/dram with rock bands and love triangles and all that sort of stuff, so it was right up my alley. And at only twelve episodes, quick and easy to get through. One of the lessons learned from it is: beware, because random students at your local high school may actually be secretly moonlighting as famous rock stars in their spare time (while also engaging in immature and melodramatic romantic attachments typical of that age).