Sorry for popping in and out so much...I forgot how to be active on the internet ever since I started college so I keep ending up doing stuff like just watching youtube videos for hours and hours instead of being active on other websites...;orz
I have written the name for my manga (in Japanese) and now I am in the steps of drawing out the manuscript but I have gotten annoyed by my stale looking art style so I would say I am pretty stuck/frustrated right now. I think I shouldn't be because how will I improve if I don't keep drawing.
After this post I will probably just put my nose to the grind stone and draw even if I think it looks bad. I can always come back and fix it later. I think that is another problem, I keep thinking about how bothersome it is to fix stuff afterwards and that I just want it to be over...;orz I think that is something important to get over.
Akiko Higashimura once said that the greatest thing she ever learned was to just keep drawing and never stop. I think she wrote a manga about this theme. She went to an art school and had a difficult teacher who she didn't get along with and she didn't do super well in his classes and he kept yelling at her 'What are you doing? Keep drawing!' It is that kind of thing that made her one of the fastest producers of manga where she can churn out like 10 pages in a day.
I think I should keep drawing to get to where it is just natural to draw manga, use the techniques, think of angles and paneling and dialogue. Same for studying Japanese. Just gotta keep at it until it becomes less of a chore.
On another subject...
I just wanted to say my thinking out loud and ask if any of you guys know of manga about the internet?
I have been struggling with a story for my babies Klan and Seiichi because all the previous stories I tried to work on for them were very flat and boring or just unoriginal...
What I wanted to try and explore was modern day topics. Not like recent news sort of modern day topics but like ideas like increasing consumption in a globalized world. I know it's a topic that has been going on for a while but it has transformed our world in many ways and we have a new culture of reality intertwined with the internet.
My central theme now is just 'internet child' a person who grew up with the internet. I want to do express the feelings of being a person who grew up with the internet because I am one of those type of people. Since I was about 4 years old I have been using the internet. When I was 4 I would look up pictures of cats or Sailor Moon and then as I got older I slowly started to delve into the internet community.
I think I was 7 when I started going on neopets and participating in the boards in neopets. That is also where I met some of my best friends on the internet. When I was 7 I was only allowed 3 hours on the internet and this steadily grew until I spent more than 12 hours on the internet and now I spend pretty much every hour of the day on the internet. I guess that is sorta a problem but I feel more comfortable on the internet.
Like other people have street smarts I have internet smarts. I know what it means to properly behave on the internet and I know the invisible rules of the internet which other people like to believe don't exist.
Okay this is getting long...
Basically my idea is to make the setting for the manga in the internet. Where each website is like it's own city and the main character delves into other areas of the internet like one would on road trips and such, just seeing what it's like and maybe you like that community better. However there are also problems like mean people etc and then there are problems like government crack down and viruses.
It sounds a bit like .hack or something but I want to make it not like that and more relevant to the actual behaviors of the internet.
Somehow I will work in action battle stuff...('cause I do that for pretty much all my stories....;orz)
I am not sure what the goal or the villain is but I was wondering if this sort of story has been done before/done to death. Maybe it is too similar to the MMORPG stories like SAO or something?
Welp that's all for now~ Maybe I will get the hang of internet activity later...XD
