I am currently wrestling with the Amazon’s esoteric system in an effort to get Jake and the Dynamo published in the new edition. I breathed a sigh of relief when I saw the preview and realized that I and the artists had, in fact, got the dimensions correct. There is just the slightest error here, easy to repair—and props to you if you can spot it.
Looking at the interior, it appears also that Vellum, the software I’m using, behaves as advertised: I haven’t been through the whole thing, but so far, it appears that the formatting is correct with now weird artifacts or margins. I believe this new version will be even more attractive and readable than the original paperback publication, which I was already quite pleased with.
This is the best Old Fashioned I’ve ever made, so I’m going to give my recipe to anyone who cares.
1/2 ounce maple syrup
Angostura bitters
2 ounces bourbon
2 splashes lemon juice
Club soda
Orange peel
Ice
First, take an old-fashioned glass and chill it. Add ice (I have a mold from Corkcicle that makes bubble- and crack-free ice balls, so I place one of those ice balls in the glass).
Around the ice, wrap the peel of a small orange (like a cutie or halo) after rubbing the peel to bring out the oils. Keep the glass in the freezer while completing the following steps.
Add 1/2 ounce of maple syrup (real, of course), 2 splashes of lemon juice (pure, without preservatives), and three splashes of bitters to a shaker.
Add 2 ounces of bourbon (I’ve found recently that I like Old Forester, which is relatively cheap but drinkable and mixes well).
With a bar spoon, stir all ingredients with ice until ice-cold. Splash club soda into the frosted glass and strain the drink mixture in after it. Top with additional club soda to taste and serve.
Edit: I originally posted this with liters instead of ounces, lol.
I just got the final covers from the logo artist, so Jake and the Dynamo and Dead 2 Rites are almost ready to go out the door. I need to get some last ducks in a row, but it’s now for sure happening.
I’m really excited and also nervous. I’ve never done this before, so in my head, I’m envisioning getting the printed paperback and finding the cover all screwed up because I miscalculated something. I suppose if that does happen, I can probably (?) go back to the artists to fix it. Both were a pleasure to work with.
I’m currently finishing up my final work on Rags and Muffin, so commissioning the art for that is on my radar along with the launch of the two for which the art is complete. Considering my experience, I might go back to exactly the same people for the artwork.
With that in mind, my thanks to Barbusco Comics for the art and Nodsaibot for the logos. Their prices were reasonable, their demeanors upbeat and professional, and their turnaround times good. Barbusco, especially, is crazy fast.
The logo artist Nodsaibot is steadily working on finishing up the cover art for the first two books of Jake and the Dynamo. Unbidden, he generously produced a new version of Pretty Dynamo’s emblem, originally designed by another artist (whose name, unfortunately, I do not have with me to credit, as he was hired by the publisher).
I’ve become quite fond of this symbol, as you can probably guess. It is very different, but much more aesthetically pleasing, than what I pictured in my head when I described Pretty Dynamo’s wand as topped by a lightning bolt crossing a heart. In fact, I originally—and foolishly—pictured the heart as pink even though that does not go with Dynamo’s overall color scheme. Visual arists wiser than I quickly intuited that Dynamo’s dominant colors are blue and gold, and that her emblem should therefore be blue and gold.
I love the way it looks because it nicely captures Pretty Dynamo’s nature. She has electrical powers, of course, as indicated by the lightning bolt, and she is also a tomboy, as suggested by the angular look and color scheme. But she is still a magical girl, which is a girly sort of thing, as suggested by the heart shape at her emblem’s center.
At the top of this post are the two versions of this emblem. The left is the original and the right is the new version. As you can see, both have elements to recommend them. I admit I don’t have a preference, but the higher resolution of the new version is a plus, as that will make it easer to manipulate in various covers and in other places. It could even be translated into vector art and would then make a perfect website logo. I do, however, like the slight curve in the lightning bolt on the original version, as it gives it a sort of retro feel, perhaps reminiscent of the Art Deco that fills Urbanopolis.
I have not previously discussed Magical Girl Friendship Squad, a cartoon with a woefully generic title, because, although I was vaguely aware of its existence, it looked horribly uninteresting.
Magical Girl Friendship Squad is drawn more-or-less in the “Cal Arts style,” which originally referred to a specific school of art and animation but which has become a shorthand for the flat, slovenly-looking designs now typical of “adult” American cartoons. The few previews that I came across featured excrutiatingly bad Millennial jokes about sex and lattes, and there was a villain who (already dated at the time the show aired) resembled a cross between Donald Trump and Pepe the frog.
Anyway, I ignored it. Most American attempts at the magical-girl genre stem from a belligerent unwillingness to understand what the genre is about: It’s about girls growing up, about the uncertainty but limitless potential of adolescence. In Japan, that means sparkles and elaborate transformation sequences and enormous powers, but to American feminists, that means undirected anger, broken homes, and lots and lots of sex, preferably perverted. Naturally, when combined with the degenerate state of American animation, this translates into an inability to make magical-girl shows worth watching.
Magical Girl Friendship Squad, which aired in , is about some aimless Millennials who live in the city and hover around coffee shops and end up with a talking cat that gives them powers. The show consists of six eleven-minute episodes, which aired late at night on SyFy; in other words, almost nobody was watching it anyway. I am bringing it up, however, first because it is (like it or not) a magical-girl show of sorts but also because it highlights the striking difference between audiences and critics, something we’ve seen repeatedly at the movies, where some big-budget, mega-corp film will often get slobbered over by “official” reviewers while audiences call it dreck.
According to Wikipedia, Magical Girl Friendship Squad received “mostly positive critical reception.” Those of us who are cynical about professional critics can easily see why: In the same Wikipedia article, the series has an entire section on “LGBTQ representation,” which points out glowingly that, and I quote, “Daisy is unambiguously queer as she has slept with ‘every barista’ at the local coffee shop”—because being a lesbian apparently means being a whore, at least in the minds of Wikipedia editors.
We already know that putting gayness in a cartoon is a sure way to make the tastemakers prostrate themselves in front of it: Simply witness Legend of Korra, which critics roundly mocked right up until its ambiguously lesbian ending—at which point they suddenly reversed course and heaped praise on it. For anyone paying attention, that was the moment when professional reviews ceased to have any worth.
I’m bringing this up because we can see the same thing here, a stark constrast between the critical reception and the audience reaction in the case of Magical Girl Friendship Squad. The reviews on IMDB are almost universally negative, and I think it worthwhile to quote a few:
Overall I tried watching it twice and its easy to say It’s very vague and it exagerates the humor which honestly comes out as just bland and unfunny and it tries to be random just for the sake of random. This show tries to make these characters be “spontaneous” but honestly it comes out more of just irritating.
After watching this show I’m not sure what confuses me more, the fact that someone thought that this story worked the way it is written, or the story having been written by anybody to begin with. Nothing flows into the next scene and the art style is incredibly lazy.
Seriously, by this point, the attempt of making another “deconstruction” (Curse you, Derrida. And curse you, Gen Urobuchi. And also curse all the people who keeps misusing this term) of magical girl cartoons is just as dull, unoriginal, lazy and stale as making “gritty” superhero deconstructions or “subversive” fairy tales where the prince charming is a jerk and the princess is a badass action hero.
Not funny or clever. More than anything it’s preachy and unappealing to anyone that’s not “woke”
Badly written, terribly animated, unimaginative, and so irritatingly dull that despite its short length it feels like nearly a whole hour has gone by once its finished. The people behind this series clearly happened to know the right people to get this greenlit and hot in development, because I am sorry but I cannot imagine a reality where somebody worked that hard to create this kind of concept and spent weeks preparing to create an effective pitch to an executive.
To be honest, this is so bad it makes the German invasion of Poland in September 1939 look like a good idea for a peaceful picnic.
I really tried… but what… what are we doing here? Phoning in pop culture jokes that will age like 3 day old yak milk? Making characters that are supposed to appeal to a specific demographic while also making them as bland as possible? This is a shining example of ‘edgy cartoon by boardroom’. There are better ways to waste your time, trust me.
I should add that there is a handful of positive reviews on IMDB; what is striking, however, is that the reviews, with few exceptions, rate the show with only one star or with a full ten stars—this strongly indicates that its defenders are defending it on purely ideological rather than artistic grounds. Indeed, just the screenshot at the top of this post is enough to deride it on artistic grounds.
There is a new trailer now available for a second sequel to Puella Magi Madoka Magica, the magical-girl title from Studio Shaft that reshaped the magical-girl genre.
This new movie is entitled, deep breath, Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magica Movie: Walpurgis no Kaiten. I assume an official English-language release, when and if it happens, will bring the title back into line with the other English-language titles (i.e., have “Puella Magi” instead of “Mahou Shoujo”).
No release date appears to be available as of this writing.
This is the fourth movie. The first two were a reshaping of the twelve-episode television series, and the third, Puella Magi Madoka Magica: Rebellion was a sequel, which famously reversed the first’s already controversial themes. The creators indicated at the time that they did not consider the story complete yet, so it is possible that this fourth film, which has been a long time in coming, will be the finale to the Madoka saga.
I have to admit I have never seen Rebellion. Not only is it harder to find in the U.S. than the original series is, but I have never bothered to look for it for the same reason I’ve never been able to bring myself to watch The Godfather: Part II. The original is such a masterpiece, and so complete in itself, that I feel no need to see it continue. The fate of Madoka at the end of the original show is about as final as a character’s fate can get, so I sincerely doubt there is any way to continue her story that will not feel contrived to me.
Also, I must admit that I am ambivalent about Madoka: It is unquestionably one of the greatest magical-girl stories of all time, but what it has done to the genre has not been good: It was followed by too many imitators eager to copy its angst or its violence without understanding the purpose of either. I once naïvely hoped that Yuki Yuna Is a Hero, which openly challenged Madoka’s themes, might close out the “Madoka era,” but that was not to be.
Perhaps the true answer to Madoka has not yet been made. Princess Tutu, which was created as an answer to Revolutionary Girl Utena, successfully refuted Utena’s ideas in part because it was Utena’s artistic equal. You can set those two shows side by side and note that both, though flawed, are excellent works that stand shoulder to shoulder. However, the series that can both answer Madoka and stand beside it unembarrassed has not yet been made.
I know I haven’t posted much of anything lately that isn’t about my own projects, but I ask for your patience. I’ve put things together for a logo artist who does impressive work, and though I haven’t quite sealed the deal yet, I’m optimistic that this exchange will result in completed book covers
Once that’s done, we will have two books ready to go with a third on the way. The publication date will depend on the logo artist’s ETA, so I won’t presume to give that final date yet.
Due to an abundance of caution, I have been reluctant to show images of the chibi magical girl (a.k.a., my daughter) on this blog, but I’m going to show this one picture because it’s extra cute and because I think it would be difficult to identify her on sight based on this. So here she is: I dub this, Anastasia Waiting for a Train.
She is just a little over four months old as of this writing, and she is just a little over three months old in this photograph. I took this photo at a public garden that had a play area for children with miniature buildings forming an imaginary town. This particular building is designed to resemble a real (and, obviously, much larger) historical train station located in the same garden.
I had an issue with a particular logo I needed to make these upcoming book releases look as official as possible, but I think I have that worked out. It appears I have also found someone to do the title graphics for the covers; I have to wait for my publishing logo first, but then we’ll go ahead with finishing up the cover designs.
I’m hesitant to give a definite date still. I’m new at self-publishing, and my last projection (last month) is obviously something I didn’t make. However, barring unexpected contingencies or work simply taking longer than I anticipate, I don’t know any reason why Jake and the Dynamo can’t see its re-release this month. If we make that happen, I intend to open Dead 2 Rites for pre-order at the same time. Its actual release will be a month later.
Things are also progressing well on Rags and Muffin. Again, I best not give a date, but I see no reason it can’t release soon after the two Jake and the Dynamo novels.
As for my optimistic goal of getting five books out this year, I think four is more likely, but aside from despondency and laziness and family issues, there is no reason I can’t get out four.
Also, I haven’t decided yet on cover art for Rags and Muffin, but I’m so pleased with the artwork of Eduardo Barbosa that I might employ him again.
Obviously, I’m behind the timeline I was hoping for, but I’m new to self-publishing, so that’s not particularly surprising. I’m waiting on a few things and also spending this evening putting together a package for the next guy I’m commissioning.
I can also tell you I’m approaching finished on the final product of Rags and Muffin. Haven’t quite decided what to do with its cover art, but I really should have three books ready to go in the near future here.
As for both Jake and the Dynamo, logos and title designs are all that still need to happen. I wanted the cover art and formatting squared away for both of those before commissioning the title designs so the artist could do both at once.
