The culmination of a dream.

Ever since I started watching [and loving] the anime BECK in 2007, I have wished for a CD of the songs from that series. Soundtrack albums were released for the original Japanese cartoon, but not for the English dub, which are the songs I know and love. (The series was never big enough over to here to warrant that sort of treatment.) So I was S.O.L. in that regard.

Last night, I finally managed to cobble together and burn a homemade disc featuring the English songs -- and I tell ya, I love these songs so much that I tear up sometimes when listening to them. (Which I guess goes along with the fact that I sometimes tear up when watching the show.) Anyway, this is a very nice gift to myself.

This mornin, I was finally able to come up with a design for a gundam for Episode Five -- one which I am not only fairly happy with, but also one which I feel fits the feel of the series.

I need three gundam designs for that episode, but now that I have the first one nailed, it feels like the next two will be easier to whip up. Waggy tail!

The aftermath of an unusually good Father's Day, where lotsa swell sutff happened:

- we went shoppin and I got two new pairs o' pants
- I got to spend the afternoon working on the pencils for the next page of Space Kid!
- I got a haircut from my fave stylist
- for supper we had Swiss Chalet and giant donuts
- I got a hammock, and Sharon and Hunter even assembled it for me
- then we hung out together and watched some Gurren Lagann

Any one of those things woulda made for a pretty good day. Altogether they constitute an embarrassment of riches.

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...