Pixels and Panels #2: Online Comics
Here are two web comics that feature world-building on a grand scale.
Hidden Treasures: Review of a Manga Reference Book
Used bookstores are veritable treasure troves, as I’m sure many Amazing Stories readers will agree. Digging through the shelves and piles of every type of book imaginable is a bibliophile’s dream especially when it doesn’t […]
Anime roundup 6/21/2013: The Great Chain of Beating
Hunter x Hunter #84 – One of the recurring features of shōnen series is a tendency to look at characters exclusively through who they can and can’t defeat in a fight. The shōnen world can […]
Characters: Faye Valentine From Cowboy Bebop
My last article talked about Spike from Cowboy Bebop. I decided to write this week’s article on Bebop’s other fan-favorite character, Faye Valentine. Originally a theif who trusts no one, Faye becomes an important […]
The Lasting Impact of Miyazaki’s Princess
There are some artists who leave a lasting impression on every life their work touches. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that Hayao Miyazaki is one of those artists; I know that his […]
Anime roundup 6/14/2013: Strange Aeons
Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet #10 – So the magical glowing trails from which all the fleets of Earth draw their electricity are, basically, squid dandruff. Next it will probably turn out that the lightbugs […]
Michiko to Hatchin is the Best Anime You’ve Never Watched
Michiko to Hatchin is as good as Cowboy Bebop. There, I said it. It’s also as good as Serial Experiments Lain and Neon Genesis Evangelion, but Bebop is the important comparison here. Did you enjoy […]
That Fighting Spirit! Yankees, Bad Boys, and Yakuza
Girls just love a bad boy, right? At least that’s what we’re led to believe in Western media. But I’ve never been into the bad boy trope myself (we are momentarily excluding Buffy the Vampire […]
Anime roundup 6/9/2013: Meeting the Enemy
Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet #9 – Now Ledo knows what, or rather who, he’s been fighting… almost. The descendants of the human/squid symbionts went to space, copied the wormhole technology, put on some better […]
MCM Expo (Comic-Con) Part Deux
I was recently in London – less than a week ago to be exact – and had the great pleasure of once again attending another MCM Expo at the Excel Centre in east London. It […]
Characters: Spike Spiegel
Ask someone to name the most important SF anime of all time, and chances are they’ll say Cowboy Bebop. It’s hard to argue. The sometimes-drama-sometimes-comedy about spacefaring bounty hunters had most of what you could […]
Slice-Of-Life and the Open Ending
I have noticed a trend in newer anime in the last few months: The completely open-ended conclusion. To be fair, anime stories have always had a different flavor to their endings than Western cartoons, in […]
Anime roundup 6/2/2013: Graduation Day
Hunter x Hunter #81 – Watch that fight scene in isolation, and it’s just another case of insanely exaggerated martial arts. But watch it with the weight of 80 previous episodes of struggling and training, […]
Pretty Soldiers: Hotaru Tomoe
Hotaru Tomoe is abused by her father. She suffers from an illness that leaves her breathless, weak and wracked with pain. She is picked on by her classmates. Sailor Uranus and Sailor Neptune are planning […]
The Trouble With Definitions; or, Not All Anime Fans Watch Hentai
[Author’s Note: The following post discusses hentai, which is a type of animated pornography. No lewd images are present; however, there is a link to an erotic woodblock print. The author asks that readers use […]
Anime roundup 5/26/2013: In the Long Run We Are All Dead
Hunter x Hunter #80 – The Chimera Ant queen has just collected the brain of a man so misanthropic that he founded an entire country just to give him a base from which to make […]
East vs. West: Comic Book Showdown
Though my position here, such as it is, is that of “anime blogger,” I think that my real interest in media from the Land of the Rising Sun is comic books, otherwise known as manga. […]
Anime roundup 5/19/2013: Ant Misbehavin’
Space Brothers #57 – Everyone caught that piko-piko is the Japanese onomatopoeic equivalent to “beep”, right? So we all know how the author picked Pico’s name? Well then, let’s talk about a slightly less obvious […]
The Real Manga Blues: A “Me and the Devil Blues” Review
Of all the potential stories to succeed phenomenally in manga form, not many people expect a story centering around blues music in the deep American South to qualify. Even less likely is a story about […]
Anime roundup 5/12/2013: Failure Analysis
First, some big news for those of you in Spain and Portugal: Crunchyroll expanded its offerings for you as of May 9th. The specific list of shows involved isn’t accessible outside your countries, so I […]
Interview – The Amazing Art of Anja Uhren
I met Anja Uhren recently at an Easter egg painting event. She was casually painting a face on an off-cut of card and I was immediately impressed by the effortlessness with which she produced a […]
ASM Blog Horde Interview with Zachary Clemente
Welcome to the Amazing Stories BLOG HORDE INTERVIEWS! The ASM Blog Horde is a diverse and wonderful species. I have the privilege of talking with all of them, and I get to share those chats with […]
Hayao Miyazaki and Epic Fantasy
Since taking on this blogging position, I have been struggling to find works that would appeal to the audience that Amazing Stories has, particularly those who are interested in fantasy. I would categorize a large […]
Anime roundup 5/3/2013: Photoeugenic
Hunter x Hunter #77 – Giant ants! Giant mutant intelligent ants! Giant intelligent ants which eat people and then practice Lamarckian evolution! I expect to start hearing a theremin any minute now. I can think […]
5 More Anime and Manga Titles for HBO to Adapt
Between Game of Thrones and the planned American Gods series, HBO has been drinking deeply from the Nerd Money well. This is, of course, part of that much-discussed wave of geek culture we’ve seen ripple […]
Art in Action: A Bakuman Review
I spend a lot of time lately complaining about the state of anime and the series that have been created within the last five or so years. In the course of this tirade, shounen manga […]
The Beautiful Tiny Worlds of Animated Music Videos
Music videos are a strange amalgamation of variant creative forces merging together, all too often used to further market or popularize a song with flamboyant budgets, unnecessary celebrity appearances and overall lame concepts. For […]
Anime roundup 4/28/2013: Tribal knowledge
Hunter x Hunter #76 – Hunter x Hunter was previously adapted for TV in 1998-1999 for a series that ran to the middle of the Yorknew City arc and stopped. Various direct-to-video continuations (none of […]
Characters: Clare of Claymore
Claymore is one of the more interesting anime I’ve seen in a while. It’s a pretty standard story. Monsters, known as yoma, feed on humans, and the only ones who can defeat them are swords […]
The Young Animators’ Project, and What We Can Hope For
It has recently been brought to my attention that every year, the Japanese government pays a large sum of money to a handful of animation studios so that those studios will each produce a half-hour […]
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