Like many guys my age (I was born during the "Summer of Love," 1967), I grew up watching Speed Racer. Unlike most guys my age, I later developed what I now gather was an unhealthy obsession with the programme.
1.) This "gateway drug" of a cartoon eventually led me to the "hard stuff": Battle of
the Planets, Starblazers, etc. This, in turn, led to any number of movies, many
of which are still in my collection: Battle Angel, Vampire Hunter
D, Akira, Kabuto, and even worse. To this very day, I still (not without a certain
measure of guilt, mind you) catch the odd episode of Full Metal Alchemist when
my wife is out of town.
2.) During the autumn of 1990, I found myself singing the Speed Racer themesong
with my two best friends as we barreled down 411 and I-75, trying to make it
home by nightfall, as the headlights on "the Mach V" (John's pickup truck) had
died the night before. Thanks to a mysterious, masked driver (some say he was
John's older brother Rex, who had run away
from home while John was still an infant), we made it from Knoxville to Atlanta
in three hours --without getting a single traffic ticket.
3.) The same bunch of us celebrated New Year's '91 with beer, champage, and an
all-night Speed Racer marathon.
4.) Photos of me posing with Apollo Smile at DragonCon '98 are still out there
somewhere.
5.) In my opinion, this is the coolest South Park send-up tune ever recorded.
In short, I've been hung up on bug-eyed cartoon characters with skinny legs and pointy chins since I was a kid.
Hmmm. When I give the matter some thought, it occurs to me that my peculiar (for the time, that is) taste in cartoons may have subconsciously influenced my equally peculiar taste in women, as well. My high-school, girlfriend, after all, was a bug-eyed cartoon character with skinny legs and a pointy chin. P'raps I'll mention it to the doc when next I renew my Timonil prescription... (Don't you just hate that, by the way? Every time you go to have the fucking thing filled, you have to bull your way through a crowd of yuppie larvae in line for their Ritalin and Risperdal. "Outta the way, ya little she-troll! Uh, sorry, kid. Didn't realize you were a boy. I guess the tits threw me off a bit...)
Uh, now where was I?
Oh, that's right!
Last night, the wife and I went to the local craft and hobby shop, in search of a few items to enhance a display she's set up at work. (Less than a year on the job, and she's already made the store #1 in the division, by the way. Not exactly a herculean feat for a woman who put her ex through med school and who, twenty-five years ago, turned a $1m/yr. company into a $43m/yr. company, but I'm still indecently proud of her.)
While she searched the seasonal merchandise for gew-gaws and "pretties," I wandered over to the arts and crafts section. The selection of leatherworking tools was as disappointing as ever (if your only choices are Michael's and Hobby Lobby, by the way, you might as well make or improvise your own tools. One of these days, I'll post an article on making a stamp with a hex bolt, a hacksaw, and a rat-tail file. It's the least I can do after Aaron taught me how to re-crown a rifle with a round-head machine screw a couple of years ago...), but the selection of drawing materials was a refreshing surprise.
I don't put much stock in "how to" books. They're no substitute for person-to-person instruction. Unless you have previous experience in a given field, or are a natual autodidact (I'll plead guilty to the second, but I'm not a "normal" person), they're useless. Every now and then, though, I'll find an exception to the rule.
One such exception is the book I purchased last night: Christopher Hart's Young Artists Draw Manga. (2011, Weston-Guptill Publications, ISBN 987-0-8230-2657-9, ~14.99 retail).
Assuming the possession of basic rendering skills on the purchaser's part, Young Artists will have him/her drawing honest-to-God anime/manga characters in an hour or so -- no kidding.
Even though I handn't drawn anything in years, I was able to churn out passable shoujo and bishonen-style characters in the space of a single episode of Spartacus: Vengeance. That was quite enough to convince me that my hard-earned shekels were well-spent. I gave the book a four-star rating on my Goodreads page, and I thought of recommending it to all my friends -- until it occurred to me that the twisted bastards would probably just sit around drawing hentai all day...
Anyway, if you have an artistically inclined kid (or still feel like one at times), you could do a lot worse than to purchase this title.
Comments