Dude, Where's My Update

Dude, Where's My Update? #10

Some days I am like a bird by a pond, guarding a ramp.

It’s been a hot minute since I did an update. It’s weird. I find it simultaneously much easier to do a 4,000 word essay that requires extensive reading and research than a couple 400 word, stream-of-consciousness sections yet I dread thinking about the next big project I have to do to keep the articles coming. I’m sure this is a regular feeling for writers. I’ve just been feeling it more acutely since striking out on my own.

The hustle comes for us all and it comes in the form we least expect.

Anyway, one of the reasons for the paucity of articles is…I went on vacation. A honeymoon in fact! Without getting too personal, my wife and I had delayed going on a trip for quite a while after our wedding - life stuff and all that. I actually wasn’t sure we’d go on one. Never been big on the idea, even though I do like to travel. However, the stars finally aligned, we made plans, and then took a small trip away for a few days.

It was lovely and just what I needed. We stayed at the house of a family friend up near Albany. Did some walking, visited a museum or two, had a delicious lunch twice at a queer-friendly cafe that came recommended from our host, and came back refreshed and ready to get back into the swing of things.

And then the heat wave hit.

Turns out, not having a working AC system will completely crush any sense of urgency one might have. (We were waiting on a new unit, delayed by supply chain nonsense. Bad timing, it seems.) That’s been all sorted, thank goodness, and I’ve got a bunch of stuff in the works.

In fact, I’ve been working my ass off to get these articles in ship-shape and ready to read. They just need a little more time in the oven before they’re fully baked. Mostly it’s formatting stuff and a couple bits and bobs that need confirmation. Once they’re out, I’ll do my usual post-mortem discussion.

Thank you, by the way, for all the nice words about last week’s essay and for staying subscribed. Means a lot that you’re all still around.

What’ve You Been Working On Though?

Okay, okay. I’ll give. Much of my last month was spent polishing “Paper Davids and Paper Goliaths” as well as finishing up the year’s long process of updating my “TMNT” reading order (and getting Mangaversity out.) Turns out that a lot of comics come out in two years and the release of a bunch of new collections means I have to revisit stuff I thought was long settled.

For anyone who read the first versions, give these a look again. I’ve got new anecdotes, a new formatting system, plus I discovered that I had missed a few miscellaneous bits-and-bobs. I may do yearly updates to the IDW reading orders. We’ll see.

Tying into this, I’ve got a special second article out tomorrow. It was a lot of fun to do, something similar to “Letters from a Wolverine.” As a bit of a disclosure, I was pitched it by IDW to tie in with the release of “TMNT: The Last Ronin II: Re-Evolution.” Sounded like a neat idea and I was already working on the reading order so I said why not. Anyway, I hope you all enjoy it. Maybe I’ll share my thoughts on “Re-Evolution” itself another day.

I was also working on a piece for SOLRAD, which is now in the can and awaiting scheduling. Always nice to have those finished. I am a man who needs the stress of deadlines and expectations to work yet they also fill me with deep anxiety.

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Reviews

Just a couple books I read that I wanted to highlight.

“Deeply Dave” by Michael Grover

Brief disclosure: Michael sent me a review copy of “Deeply Dave” ahead of it being published, which I am very grateful for. I had, however, already purchased a copy, which I then donated to my library so we could have a copy for more people to discover and read. OK. Onto the review.

I was afraid that “Deeply Dave” would not transfer over to print well. In the same way that some vertical scroll comics simply resist easy transference - I’d love to see more ebooks be, or have, the vertical versions - the internet-based nature of the comic made it feel like a difficult task. No more music, no more gifs, no more wonderful jitteriness.

I shouldn’t have worried.

Grover did a wonderful job translating the comic to print. It retains the misanthropic energy of the web version and the choice to have it read length-wise gives plenty of room to create a feeling of descent as one reads. I will admit it’s an awkward book to handle thanks to the verticality but after a few pages, I quickly got over that. Helps that it’s not a heavy book and it’s only $15. 15 bucks! That’s a steal.

“Deeply Dave” is a simple story about a boy and his mom (and aliens) that’s funny and deeply weird with a solid emotional core. This is a comic that makes a great gift for kids and adults alike. I read the whole thing cover-to-cover again and loved every minute of it. It’s nearly impossible not to grin from ear to ear reading about Amos the crustation and his Popeye-powers. That’s just good biz-ness.

Elias’ Anime Corner

Don’t you judge me. You know what you’re here for.

CITY The Animation

We’re so back, baby.

Kyoto Animation is one of the few animation houses in Japan, maybe the only one, where the entire staff is salaried. Their projects come out when they come out, taking the time needed to finish, rather than kept to the inhuman pace some other studios are forced to set. This has meant that, regardless of one’s fondness for the subject matter or source material, any show that comes out of that studio is worth checking out for the animation alone.

A few years back, they suffered a horrible arson attack that killed a number of animators and destroyed at least one of the studio buildings. This is their first project since then and it’s one that I’ve been hotly anticipating.

I say all this for context because while I know CITY The Animation will not be everyone’s cup of tea, it is 10,000% mine. I love the “CITY” manga. Arawi is a master of over-the-top gag humor and expressions. “CITY” is an intricate manga of interlocking people that has no real “story;” it truly is simply a series of ongoing gags that build and build and build. It’s the ultimate people-watching manga, only the people are the biggest personalities you can think of.

Kyo-ani killed it in bringing Nichijou to life way back when. As with that, CITY The Animation isn’t always uproarious but it is impeccably animated, beautifully designed, astonishingly acted, and the smoothest 22 to 24 minutes of TV you’ll watch week in and week out. The opening is a joy and the ending is from TOMOO, one of my favorite artists. I can only hope they have plans for more than 13 episodes (and that people find the damn thing on Amazon Prime.)

ZENSHU.

I really liked this series. It’s an old-school portal fantasy but using modern isekai tropes as its set-up instead. A great drama about a flawed central character that’s also a send-up to the animation industry (both in a clear-eyed and self-indulgent way,) it’s clear the creators have fond memories of the likes of “Record of Lodoss War” and other high-fantasy epics (or their downstream, lower-budget cousins) that have been usurped by the grey-sludge of generic light-novel adaptations.

I just wish we had gotten a full 24 episode series, or even the standard 13 instead of 12. Maybe we could’ve done two cours, with at least a year in-between?

ZENSHU was crying out to be longer, to have more character moments and breather episodes, to truly be more like those shows of yore. Despite being structured like an older show - full, beautifully animated, re-used power-up sequences; monster-of-the-week battles; a memorable, somewhat overbearing soundtrack that uses variations on the opening theme as motifs - it is paced in a modern manner, zipping through events to make sure the studio can have a new show out next quarter. ZENSHU is a victim of the market it lives in, much like how many older Shonen titles were victims of a different market, insatiable for weekly episodes when the story (and the ones creating it) could not support it.

While I think it was paced very respectfully, a few of its thematic threads were left poorly tied by the end and the finale made some choices that left me feeling…lacking. (Didn’t love the unexplored dig at people who like a downer ending, for example.) In some ways, this plays into the metatextual elements of the narrative, paralleling the implied troubled production of A Tale of Perishing, the fantasy film that Natusko Hirose, our main character, gets isekaied to, and asking us to see the show through the same prism: a slice of a world that lives more fully in the heads of the animators, constrained by reality to the product we’ve got.

That I yearn for more not out of confusion but of a desire to be more immersed is in the show’s favor. Would that we would have had more time to explore it, to see Tale of Perishing’s Kametaro Tsuruyama’s perspective and dig into the production of her original film, to draw more parallels for Natsuko, to broaden what was a tight, lean script into something fuller. Yet none of this detracts from the show’s success as an original anime. It is a bright spot in a sea of inky darkness and easily one of the top shows I’ve seen in 2025, even with my gripes about its finale.