Welcome to the WORLD of Shannon "Roku-chan" Townsend, artist for the webcomic Otaku -no- Yen. Shannon is a professional freelance artist who specializes in the style of Anime and Manga, and is happy to have a spot here on TheOtaku! Visit Otaku -no- Yen online Mondays and Thursdays www.otakunoyen.com

One Artist's Musings

I was sixteen years old when I discovered Japanese animation.

Like all self respecting teenagers, I was watching cartoons before school, aimlessly flipping through the channels while shoveling shredded wheat into my mouth and quietly remarking to myself that most of what was on at six thirty in the morning was more than a little lame. Except the old Bugs and Daffy cartoons; those rocked, and still do. But the rest of it was all the same junk, channel after channel of the same old stuff. But in that channel surfing, I came across something that would alter my life, for better or for worse.

The girl on the screen looked bizarre, spinning in a rainbow of colors and bubbles and stupid looking sparkles. Her hair was long, blond, pinned with crazy little dumplings on her head, and she had a...talking cat? The hell was that?! And why did the animal sound like Julie Andrews on crack?

Thus began my infatuation with Japanese animation and comics. I shifted interests from the western books I was into such as X-men and The Darkness or Witchblade, to the stranger fare that was quietly becoming more available. My boyfriend at the time was something of a closet Otaku, hiding his love of the art for fear his quietly geeky theatre-loving girlfriend would shun him for watching something where tentacles were a regular occurance...as were panty shots (oh Blue Seed, how I love you). He introduced me to everything from Tenchi Muyo to Patlabor and Evangelion, Guyver, and of course, the first two Sailor Moon movies, which were enchanting to me in a way the television show could never aspire to be. But my hatrid of DIC is another story.

My father, of course, knew that was all it would take. He'd had me watching the films of Akira Kurosawa since I was twelve, and my fascination with Japan only took off more with the discovery of large eyes and oddball hairstyles. Thank the gods my father is an understanding, artsy type. Though I think the LARP phase almost did him in...But enough of my geekdoms for now.

I never would have dreamed that a simple hobby would turn into so much more for me. I knew I wanted to draw, but after a short weekend of poking around a prominent animation school, I discovered that the prospect of doodling the same crap day in and day out held no interest for me. If anything, it sounded boring, lackluster, and certainly far more schooling than I wanted to go through just to become a storyboard artist. So I tried comics.

The problem was my handle on anatomy...or rather, my complete lack thereof. I was trying to draw Rogue and Gambit and every try made them look like Disney characters on some type of quelude. In other words, they sucked. I just couldn't get a handle on it. I could draw WB style characters with ease, but the animation industry was shifting, starting to change. With the introduction of companies like Pixar, the face of what I had thought of doing my whole childhood was rapidly changing into something I wasn't sure I wanted. Then one day, just for grins and giggles, I picked up my pencil and tried to draw Sailor Mars. I swear to god it was like a little choir sounded somewhere over my head or something. Hallelujah! You don't completely suck at everything!

Mind you, it still looked like crap, but it was passable crap.

Over the years, hobby turned to paying gigs. Paying gigs turned into published works, and that all led to the start of our webcomic, in a roundabout way.

I'll babble more about that later. I have a million stories to tell, a million rants in my head involving the industry, and I'm grateful to have the forum to do such a thing here at theotaku.com. But I urge you to share with me how you discovered Anime, and the kind of influence it had on your life.

Hoakey as it sounds; it changed mine in ways I can't even explain, and I hope to share more stories with you all in the future.