Codicier

Think I remember seeing that one & Ninja Scroll sitting on the back shelf of my local comic shop when I was 16-17 & they certainly did have a certain illicit draw. Never seen either of them though, when I was a penniless student my net connection was to crappy, and now I'm old & the same things that made me curious as a teenage now mean I have almost no interest. All I can say is, go Badhat go!! Live out our teenage regrets for us.

I was pretty happy with the way Eccentric Family ended too, everything being nice and neatly tied up would have felt wrong anyway. Have heard a little bit of QQ about it in various places though. Not that as you say seeing more of those characters wouldn't be great but so much of their interrelation was tied up in that one event in the past it gives the writer some issues. Either they just accept that the characters won't have one unifying moment tying them together or invent something new to fill that roll(which would feel pretty contrived).

Could be either a coincidence or causation, GP felt it was so close chronologically that there had to be some connection, he suggested that possibly the jab kicked my body's immune system into high alert and it found some virus that had been sitting dormant for years there and started attacking it.

So yesterday I had my flu jab, and then half an hour later left side of my face started to tingle, and then started to resemble the feeling you get after you've had a anaesthetic injection in your jaw at the dentist and the surrounding area though not numb is weirdly desensitised. So I then spent most of the rest of the day sitting in A&E while they ruled out a allergic reaction or a stroke. Thankfully the feeling subsided over time. But it was only when I visited my GP today that I got any sort of indication of what might be the cause, Which would have been much appreciated the night before so I didn't spend the entire evening worrying what the hell is wrong with me. Apparently I something is/was up with the Trigeminal Nerve on that side of my face, but they still don't know exactly what. All in all I've spent a lot of time in the last day or so sitting around waiting, and I still don't really know what's up. Which considering this affects my Face is slightly scary. What's frustrating me the most though is I'm going to miss a self imposed deadline on the work I'm doing ATM, and it's left me just feeling anxious and out of control. Suppose the only silver lining is despite all the waits and vagueness, the fact I'm in the UK means this whole mess at least isn't going to bankrupt me. It still shocks me every time I read something on here and someone mentions a medical bill of thousands.

Ladies and gentlemen do you have any good recommendations for football/soccer Anime (or even manga)? Any and all recommendations are appreciated but what I'm really interested in seeing good examples of how the movements of people playing sports are portrayed in animation (or just as static visuals).

Just a quick side note about Love and Rockets: The writing style of Jamie and Gilbert are really are very different, so given the fact the description you mentioned liking above was describing the Palomar series, the First Volume of the collected series you should think about picking up would be Heartbreak Soup.

Bit of a interesting mix there, so let's try and pick one equivalent for each so:Sandman : Promethea A Contract with God : Blankets Watchmen : The Boys Maus : Palestine Persepolis : Dotter of Her Fathers Eyes Oh and Love and Rockets, because it's gawd darn awesome

If your a iOS user there's some nice deals about, Battle of the Bulge, Pandemic the Board game, Phoenix Wright all have nice reductions. And World of Goo is free.

Thank you once again for all the suggestions. In the end I didn't end up using any of them but they led me to expand in the search in directions I wouldn't have thought of otherwise and led to my eventual choice http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17412749-the-encyclopedia-of-early-earth

Glad you came off that one on such a high. It feels like it's a very rare thing that we can talk about any show that we can unambiguously recommend to other people. It always seems to be some sort of catch, whether it's annoying Fan service, bad animation, or whatever. Which is all the more reason that when we do encounter such a show to sing its praises from the highest mountains.

I'm not sure what's brought this about but Lovefilm (Amazons uk dvd rental & stream arm) seem to have just added a crap load of anime to their collection. It's still mostly in their dvd section but i've got Porco Rosoo, Musashi, and PATLABOR (god i love the 1st film i really don't know why I don't own it) added to my que. While it remains frustrating that so few older anime films and series are available by streaming, i'm gonna take this chance to watch a few things i've been meaning to get around to for a while.

I've heard a lot of very good things about the Galaxy Note series of tablets from friends in the illustration industry, it's at 1024 levels of pressure sensitivity I think. Apparently it's very responsive and accurate, which is to be expected since once again wacoms behind the pen technology. Personally I use a Adonit Touch Bluetooth pen with my Ipad for sketching, and then do any cleanup and final art work on my Intuos. It's remarkable how far natural media apps have come in the last few years, with Artrage, Procreate, & Sketchbook Pro all excellent. Plus you have Paper(by 53) & Bamboo Paper (by wacom) if you want something free. And it's very hard to argue with their price vs their PC equivalents. Next year abode is releasing (in a hardware partnership with adonit) their own Stylus for ipad called Mighty sometime in the 1st half of 2014 which looks very interesting, it deals with the nib size problems which has held back ipad stylus for a long time now.

Does anyone have any experience with Hope Larson's work, considering adding Mercury or A Wrinkle in Time to the shortlist.

Thanks for the suggestions everyone, I've had a look at them and will get some second opinions on them from the rest of my family on whether they think my sister would like them. I can't buy her that, I want it too much myself! /drools From Hell is a great book (i have a copy myself) but she doesn't really tend to go in for things as violent as it that book can in her general media consumption but it is a great example of a very nicely self contained story.

Hi guys I was hoping I could get some recommendations from you fine folks. I'm looking to buy a graphic novel for my sister for Christmas, I bought the complete Bone collection a few years back and it was a success, and I'm hoping to repeat the trick. She's not a big comics fan but when she does take a liking to one it tend to be a big hit. Specifically I'm looking for recommendations for either complete collections, or self contained graphic novels. I want her to be able to get the whole story from the book, and for it not to just the first in a long series. Anya's Ghost http://amazon.co.uk/dp/1596435526 Is top of my list at the moment. Also manga recommendations are fine. In particular I think some of the older stuff might appeal to her, but I don't really have any knowledge of books in the era myself. So in summary I'm looking for a single book which tells a complete story, which is suitable for a female reader in her mid 20s. Cheers in advance for any of the help you can give.

& this week she basically got her own episode! Overall I feel KLK has kinda levelled out now after some really variable episodes and now is going along at a reasonable pace.

The name Machiavelli really does get across far more about what makes that game interesting than the name Citadels does, it really is one of those games where the mechanic's just provide a fun structure around which social interaction can occur.

I've been going through one of my patches of insomnia recently so after reading what you had to say about it I decided that Ergo Proxy could serve as my bedtime (animated) story of choice. It feels like with a really good producer keeping the director in check you could have boiled down what was a rather rambling 23 episodes into something a bit more coherent and had a far better series(no to mention as SG hinted at they could have cut down on the animation short cuts). The entire first half of the run seems to take it's self incredibly seriously, and pretty much suffocates the characters under the weight of the world building going on. So while it does do a good job of conveying the concept of a world that had been kept in stasis for millennia I do feel it labours over long doing so. Something seems to happen after the half way mark though, the scene is, it seems finally set. And they are ready to let the actors step up onto the stage and do interesting things. The Quizshow and Smileland episodes mentioned were both interesting in their own right but sometimes their humour felt a little forced, it was almost more as if they just ignored the rest of the series and existed in their own little vacuum. When they finally do decide to have a episode that's pure unpretentious character interaction (ep16 where the ship is becalmed) it was my favourite of the bunch by a country mile. In particular I loved the start of the episode. Where the directors execute a wonderfully paced piece of build up to a equally great little deadpan comedy moment, it caught me totally off guard with what had been a previously unevident sense of comic timing and ability to be self deprecating. Again in their defence there's probably a case that if the characters previous interaction hadn't been so focused on moving the plot forward, then a a episode where they just talk and goof about wouldn't have been as interesting or refreshing. There's definitely moments that make it a flawed gem of a series worth spending time on, but i don't think it does anything particularity original or really shows any great technical artistry.

It's certainly not a tour de force by any means but i did enjoy it. It's a bit of a let down if you were hoping for more fun superpower stuff to do, but it did have some great dialogue, and nice character moments. It reminded me more of good episode of a sitcom than anything else, and while the little musical beat they had at the end may not have bettered the use of aerosmith in the SR4 it still made me laugh.

Everyone I'm sorry, I really must be fundamentally a bad bad person, because i just watched Kill la Kill episode 4 and found myself REALLY really liking it again. The cheesecake though not entirely gone was hugely cut back (no shots that made me flinch to watch them as in episode 2), and we basically got a whole show of really well executed and relentlessly kinetic comedy. There were a few shot's of visual comedy that were just absolutely superb, where the art choices, framing, and animation techniques selection were about as good as I've ever seen in anime. Add to that the throughout the episode it's slapstick timing was near flawless, and it kinda nailed every target it tried to parody too. /sigh Why oh why could we just not have got a whole series of this, it reminded me of Excel saga at it best.

Was Ergo Proxy the one where the heroine was a dead ringer for a very popular lead singer of a emo rock band? I seem to remember at the time finding a bit "meh" but maybe my pallet has changed since then.

For me there was something kinda amazing about the way the south pole's isolation from the rest of the world is brought home by that sequence, it's utterly the only unchanging thing in a world in flux. Would a;so love to see the same image but with sea temperature mapped in too

Are there any fellow UK readers going to Game City in Nottingham this year? was wondering if anyone fancies doing a small scale reader meetup? Obviously Hot Scoops Gaynor is doing his talks/ diretor commentary stuff on Thursday/Friday so maybe that would be the ideal day for the majority, but sadly as strong as the urge is to be there to ask "is there a ghost?" i wont be there those days, I'm going to be there on the Monday & Tuesday (possibly wed morning too) so will miss out on all the gaynor goodness.

In some ways you could also use that as a good description of what the Kenshin OVA's do right. The introspection is still there but its internalised by both Kenshin and his antagonists, rather than shouted in long bits of exposition I'll probably do the same >_<, god damn we are suckers I wonder if some of this comes from the way most people are introduced to anime, we come in with pretty low expectations and then something comes along and blows our minds and then we find ourselves forever chasing that initial high. Then we end up disappointed so many times we rationalise our disappointment with "it's a guilty pleasure" while still secretly hoping for more.

*Sigh* Your probably right, I guess I want it to be striving for something more than it is because I find the lead likeable. As i put it before i dig her whole "no fuss" attitude. A sort of "ok this is where life has taken me, but that doesn't change what i want to achieve" outlook, which was both refreshing in a media where navel gazing can sometimes be endemic, and something I admire in people in general.