something I am grateful for today

Shelter.

Last night I was cozying up in bed, settling down for the night, and I could hear a particularly vigorous wind causing something of a ruckus outside our windows. Add to that the knowledge of the snow being swept up and gusting along within it, and that wind even sounded chilly. And I realized what a blessing it is to be comfortable and protected while one slips into an unworried rest.

Marine Boy

Marine Boy first broadcast in North America in 1968, when I was 11. It was the first anime I ever saw, and what a strange experience it was.

Nothing I'd ever seen before in animation prepared me for it: the willowy figures with their elongated legs; immense eyes, lovingly highlighted; impossibly wide-open mouths that didn't move in time with what they were saying; Prof. Fumble's gargantuan proboscis; the sometimes stiff voice acting and scripting...

Even at my tender age, I realized some parts of the show were absurd. Marine Boy had no “secret identity”, no “real name” -- his own father called him “Marine Boy”. And he always wore his spiffy superhero-ey suit -- even when laid up in a hospital bed, he was in full costume, we never once saw his ears. [Yes, even way back then I was hung up on mundane little details like that. Mundanity runs deep into my core: that's why I drew Dishman and not Spawn...]

However, oddly enough I found myself fascinated by Marine Boy's depiction of the sea, especially the surface with its waves and eddies. Somehow I knew that this water had been drawn by people who were deeply familiar with the ocean, who had spent a lot of time studying its appearance and how it moves. The credits told me that this cartoon had been made in Japan and I suspected that had a lot to do with it. Marine Boy was truly, deeply different. Not brilliant, yet somehow fascinating nonetheless, and unique.

Today, I'm working on a couple of new comic ideas for this year, and I realize that one of them is being heavily influenced [albeit unconsciously, at first] by Marine Boy. I haven't seen the show in like forty years, and yet aspects of it remain clear and vivid with me after all this time. Hard to predict what things we will fixate on or latch onto in the course of our lives, what things will be important to us and stay with us...