Comic for Monday September 1st, 2003

As I had warned, there will be no comic for Monday and just as likely, no comic for Thursday. I'll need some time to recuperate from my labor day weekend trip to Long Island. Hopefully, everyone doesn't mind with a few make up drawings in the meanwhile. The first piece up is the original concept character design sheet for Misaki Yuki. Although everything is still in rough sketch you can see that the design had been changed slightly from this sheet to the eventual design that would show up in Spirit One. Again, the "Pirelli" logo and IMFC logo were dropped to make everything easier to color and draw. One point that does annoy me is that I like the way I did Yuki's hair in this pre-comic design. The first spike in the "front" of Yuki's hair is down and not out like the other spikes. I like it a hundred times better that way and I don't know how and why I changed it. Go figure.

I hope you all enjoyed this sneak peak behind the scenes.

As for my weekend I had a great time and enjoyed myself thoroughly. I went out shopping with my mom all Saturday at a Japanese shopping center in Jersey. My brother even came along and it was the fist time in a long time that the three of us got to spend time together. It was loads of fun. Afterwards, Dave came over and we watched the Two Towers. My brother had never seen it before.

Like I mentioned, on Sunday we went out to the Big Apple Anime Fest. The crew consisted of The Kelly, Dave, Joe, Kris, and myself. We spent a few hours at BAAF. It was smaller then I had thought and I guess failed to live up to my expectations. The biggest room was the exhibitors room and while I found a few Cyber Formula books, it was filled with stuff you could probably find online.

Afterwards we went to the Jekyll and Hyde's club to eat Lunch. The food as excellent and from then we were off and running. We hit the Village and hit the various comic and toy shops around the area. We saw tons of weird and cool stuff for sale and I was amazed by the sheer volume of the things we saw. We're talking Castle Grayskull, Blythe dolls, Saint Seiya figures, and the original full Devestator Tranformer.

We ate pizza for dinner and then hit a bar to end the night. Or so we thought. After we dropped Kris off at his subway station, we struggled to find our own. We eventually found it, but at that point we only had 5 or so minutes to reach Penn Station and catch a ride back to LI. We made it to Penn in about 5 minutes and then proceeded to RUN up into Manhattan and back into the main Penn Station platform. I mean we were running past people on escalators and crap. As we reach the LIRR terminals we can hear the PA announce last call for the Ronkonkoma line (the line we needed). We barely made it onto the train and saved ourselves from at least an hour and quite possibly a longer wait till the next train.

I arrived back home at around 1:30 and proceeded to pass right on out.

I think before I end this tale, I also want to make a special thanks out to my friend Dave who scored me and Joe some awesome swag from Otakon. Thanks to him I am now the proud owner of Megatokyo Book 1. The big gift though was an original concept drawing made by Ian J of RPG World. It has rough sketches of Hero, Eikre, and Evil Soldier on it. It was even signed by the man himself. Since we're talking about one of two of my biggest influences for making a web comic, it's a pretty big deal. So I end this tale with a happy note.

I will try to get something a little better for Thursday, but be aware that when Ninja Spirit comes back for next week, 49 and 50 will be bigger then the usual comic to make up for this week. Also be aware that both comics will in turn resolve many of the questions that had been festering in all of your minds over the course of the last month or so.

River is apologizes for the no comic situation.