it's may so it must be time for

Hey, why no Let's Anime posts lately? Well, it's not because I don't have goofy stuff to write about. Nope, I've been working on getting things ready for the upcoming Anime North, which is this weekend. If you're in town you should come on by! It's a great show full of events, guests, dealers, costumes, dances - check the website for full details - and I'm doing some panels and things. Three-day passes have already sold out but you can still get one-day tickets for Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. 

So what am I up to at AN this year? Friday at 7pm Shain and I will be holding down the Mr Kitty table at the NOMINOICHI, Anime North's garage sale swap meet event. It takes place in the Convention Center, hall F. We're giving our closets one final cleaning and that means YOU get to take home our old anime VHS, anime posters, books, manga, and anything else we can get rid of. 

Of course Friday at 10pm in the Plaza Ballroom in the Doubletree is... ANIME HELL.

 

This two-hour freeform clip show event has been a mild amusement to Canadian audiences for more than six years, and this year's show promises to be just as confusing and laff-packed as previous installments. Followed at midnight by our feature film presentation, 2010's SPACE BATTLESHIP YAMATO.

  

 This screening features special custom subtitles unavailable anywhere else! 

Saturday at 1pm join Helen McCarthy and I as we take a look at the animation of the god of comics, Osamu Tezuka's animation legacy. It's happening in International B in the Doubletree and will be packed with clips from the thirty-plus years Tezuka created animation to go along with his voluminous manga output.

  

And yeah, some of it gets kind of peculiar. 

At 3pm on Saturday in the same room Mister Kitty brings you Stupid Comics - LIVE! Shain and I are bringing our popular web feature to real life as we highlight some of the lowlights of our investigation into the world of bad comics. It's guaranteed to shock and amuse, especially when we get to the bad wanna-be manga.

 And on Sunday at 1pm, again in International B I'll be taking a look at Spooky Classic Anime, the kind of cartoons your parents wouldn't let you watch in the 60s and 70s, except if you had been able to watch these cartoons in the 60s and 70s you'd be Japanese and it would be OK.

  

Don't be afraid! See you at the show!

the quiet time is not so quiet

Apologies for my lack of blog here for the past few weeks. I've been busy as heck on a few real-life projects that have taken my time and energy that otherwise would have been spent talking about thirty-year old Japanese cartoons, and for that I am deeply sorry. At any rate here's what's been going on instead:



This weekend is the Toronto Comics Arts Festival which I am a volunteer at. It's two days of indy cartoonist stars and legends of comic art meeting the public at the Toronto Public Library Main Branch - and it's free! So if you have a free couple of days it's well worth your time.

Two weekends later:



That's right, it's Anime North, Canada's number-one Japanese animation festival! I'm on staff at that show as well. Additionally, I will be on a "Classic Anime" panel Saturday at noon, and Sunday at 1pm I will be delivering an illustrated lecture on the influence of Western literature upon Japanese animation (meaning: Captain Future, among other things). And Saturday night... well, Saturday night is special.



That's right, Anime Hell returns to Canada for one night only of cerebral-cortex-crushing video madness. Followed by TOTALLY LAME ANIME: AFTER DARK!! Don't miss it.

And then I go to a wedding and then May is over and I spend June goofing off. Er, I mean, writing for Let's Anime!! Of course. See you then!

the untold saga of Anime Hell flyers

For years I've been doing a free-form anime-themed clip show called "Anime Hell". It started out as hotel room parties at SF conventions in the late 80s, and as anime cons came into being, the event moved into function rooms and eventually 1000+ seat ballrooms with giant video screens, projectors, PAs, and all the technological accoutrements that are really hard to operate when it's 10pm on a Saturday night and you've had a few. Today five or six separate groups of people do "Anime Hell" type events at anime conventions in two different countries.

The show itself has been described as "all about the corniest, strangest and otherwise anime/anime-related things out there," and that's not a bad description. I've shown educational films, anime music videos, fake commercials, clips from 60s 70s and 80s anime, scenes from 8-bit video games, homemade Indiana Jones films, parody subtitles, promotional beer cartoons, anti-drug PSAs, European TV singers, and dogs riding bicycles.

Part of the fun of the show is the promotional flyers; I started making flyers for the Anime Hell parties in the late 80s with clip art and markers. When I started doing all-night Anime Hells at Atlanta's Dragoncon, the flyers got more elaborate.



(flyer from Dragoncon 1996)

Eventually stronger graphic elements started to come to the fore, as I determined scientifically that teeny tiny text might not be the best thing to read when it's taped to the wall of a hotel elevator.



(Flyer from Anime Central 1999)

The "Hell" logo with the flames was taken from the early 70s Marvel war comic "War Is Hell". The other clip art elements came from damn near everywhere - Chick comics, old UFO magazines, Weekly World News, Archie comics, Dirty Pair "mooks", old encyclopedias, whatever would hold still long enough to photocopy. I stopped doing Anime Hell at Dragoncon in... I wanna say 1999, and concentrated on Anime Weekend Atlanta and Anime Central, but for some reason I didn't do flyers for the AWA shows. Anyways, everybody at the early AWAs knew what Anime Hell was.



(flyer from Anime Central 2001)

In the early '00s the capacity crowds and my laziness meant I wasn't doing any more flyers, which was OK since the months before two conventions were taken up with feverish preparations anyway.

When I moved to Canada in 2004 and started doing Anime Hell at Anime North, I knew I couldn't slack off any more. Canada had no idea what Anime Hell was. I needed to get back on the job!



This flyer is my first color flyer, and features a totally reverse-engineered "Canada" logo. For the next year I went back to black and white, but produced five different flyers, of which this is one:



At this point I was getting more into taking an image that already had ironic or kitsch value, and manipulating it in a very basic way. There are 10,000 people at Anime North and most of them are only going to be able to see this flyer for five seconds, max, so a lot of frippery details and confusing, conflicting images will only deflect my message. So simplification became my watchword. My AWA flyer for that year was even simpler:



For the next Anime North I went back to color, taking a cheesy movie poster and reworking it to my own advantage. It's still a little busy, in my opinion.



For AWA that October, I had been really stuck for ideas and was getting desperate, until I saw a one-sheet for EASY RIDER. What resulted is the simplest and the best Anime Hell flyer I think I've ever done.



Sailor Moon's head is a little off, but other than that, it's perfect; the quintessential mix of weird and powerful and kitsch. Besting that flyer is a tough challenge, and I don't know if I'll ever do it, but this year's Anime North flyer is a strong contender:



Anime Hell, Saturday May the 24th, 8pm, Doubletree International Hotel, International Ballrooms B and C, Toronto Ontario Canada. Brought to you by Anime North. See you there!