The other day, I decided that I wanted to see Kierra, protagonist of my graphic novel, looking pretty. She’s not meant to be a conventionally pretty person, and I think the things about her that are cool show. That said, she’s meant to be hot while she’s doing her thing. One of the issue with beauty standards is that beauty is treated like an objective quality you have or don’t. Beauty, to me, isn’t so much about what you look like as it is about how you look. It’s an active thing people work to cultivate, and so much of it is about presentation. Kierra doesn’t try to be pretty for anyone, but she is pretty when she’s in the zone; everyone looks hotter when they’re doing something skilled. So I challenged myself to draw a headshot of her that captures the kind of look she should have, that right balance of expression and intent. I like how it turned out.
On that note, I have reached a point in my graphic novel draft where I realized the rest of the scenes I have planned are various versions of two people having a conversation. That’s unacceptable, so I need to rethink how it goes. Facing that has also brought other concerns to the surface, and in simple terms, I don’t think this draft is focused enough on actions. There are scenes I think work fine as they are, but in general I want them to be more active. I started these thumbnails straight from story-focused notes, with not enough focus on image and action. So, I think I’m going to take a step back and brainstorm ideas for another draft. I already went back through once to shorten the amount of time it took to get to a particular point in the story, and honestly, it still takes a while to get there. Point being, I may be starting from scratch, because I need to find ways to combine multiple beats and communicate information while they’re actively doing stuff. Romance doesn’t mean conversation city, you know?
All that being said, I also have decided to remake my short comic Bet Your Sweet Bottom. I know what I said last week about throwing myself into projects, but this is different. I have actual lessons to learn, and I’ve taken notes on them. I have goals for how to make it better, and what better means. I also just really want to do it. There’s that one panel where Carmen is stretching that I’ve always regretted wasn’t framed up tight on her, because it should be. There’s other framing issues I’ve noticed, and issues with pacing. I was very worried at the time about how many panels would be too much for the page size, and how many words can appear, and I undersold on both counts. I would also just love to see how my art skills have grown by comparison. So it’ll be awesome to get into that.
Why this project now? For one, there are things I can learn from this earlier work that I want to apply to my graphic novel. BYSB is much more active, and part of my reworking is ways to enhance that action more. It’s just the reminder I need for what I want to be doing. I also feel like I got lost in this draft of the graphic novel because I was thinking of it in terms of one big, long story, whereas in another draft I wrote out distinct chapters. Chapters would make this more manageable, and I have experience working on shorter pieces; remaking a short comic is a great way to get my head back into the space for how I should be making each part of this bigger book. Finally, I kinda wanna use this new BYSB as a way to practice the business side. Not in any large scale at the moment, but I could make copies to sell somewhere (TBD) and try marketing it for online order.
That’s about it this week for art stuff. More concrete thinking right now. I saw Captain America: Brave New World this week. It’s perfectly fine. It’s a fun movie with some cool action sequences. The main performances were solid, given what the movie was. It’s not the movie it could have been, and certainly not the movie Anthony Mackie deserves. If you like fun action movies and have generally enjoyed Marvel films in that regard, it’s a fun time. I know there are people really slamming this movie online right now, because the MCU comes with many and often unfair expectations and baggage, so I just want to be a voice saying it’s alright. It’s fun. Bottom of the top half of these movies.
The thing I can really get into is Sabra, or as she’s called, hummus – I mean, Ruth. If you don’t know, Sabra is an old and pretty minor Marvel character, a mutant working for the Israeli intelligence agency, the Mossad. There was controversy about her being in Brave New World because of the recent genocide campaign in Gaza. The movie “addresses” this by changing basically everything about Ruth, such that she’s effectively a new character with the same name. While a character’s job isn’t the only thing about her, Sabra happens to have a very important job that defines the role you’d expect and want for her to play in a story. They took away Ruth’s Mossad job, and the movie has nothing to do with Israel. Not only that, but Ruth doesn’t do anything in the movie, really. You could cut her part entirely in many cases, hand over a few lines or actions to other characters, and the movie is the same. And while I’m not saying this movie should have done Israel stuff, there is an obvious parallel you could make between Ruth and Sam that’s thematically powerful and addresses the controversy. Like many real life Israeli soldiers, Ruth could start out on the side of the Israeli state, see the horrors in Gaza, and turn against the state’s position; that mirrors how Sam isn’t comfortable working for the US government anymore (or is supposed to be, if they stopped taking his character arc a half-step back every time he’s on screen), and they both have to figure out how to move forward. It could have worked, if the movie had an Israel thing, which they would never do, and rightly so. So they skip over the thing that could make Ruth interesting, they don’t connect the movie to the country she’s famously from, and they give her a nothing role that makes it irrelevant however accurately her personality was adapted. Why was she in this movie again?
Before I go, I also want to address stuff with Dragon Ball Daima, as someone who’s been pretty DB forward. I’ve been catching up on summaries of it, and I’m just not happy with how this show sounds. I want to be fair-minded and assume that it looks or comes across better as a show than as a summary; I can’t speak to how cool the action is or how good the animation is or how charming any of the characters are. What I can say is that it’s a silly nonsense story where they run through a series of homages and do fan service. Like basically all the anime projects of late, it’s transformation porn and big muscles. Mostly, at least. And I’m very certain it’s not canon now, as an event.
Daima takes place five or six years before they meet Beerus. When that happens, Kibito and Shin are still fused, Vegeta can’t go SS3, and Goku can only go as high as SS3. Having Kibito and Shin unfuse, having Vegeta go SS3 in a way that looks really bad, and giving Goku a version of SS4, immediately after they defeated Buu, just doesn’t work, you know? Like, I know fans of Daima are quick to say it’s definitely all canon because Toriyama made it. But one, Toriyama also worked on the movies, which aren’t canon. Two, Toriyama didn’t make this show, he came in after it was greenlit. The anime team came up with it (instead of making more Super anime), and then Toriyama got involved and really invested. Which is to say, Toriyama’s involvement doesn’t guarantee its canonicity.
Plus, you can tell which is who’s idea. All the stuff with homaging past stories, giving Vegeta SS3, and pulling out a version of SS4 are all likely anime team ideas, because they’re lazier and want the hype of transformations. It’s fully consistent with all the ways the Super anime differs from the manga and their choices in film projects, in that it’s all about flashy transformations and using raw strength to overcome the enemy, while often relying on previous material over breaking new ground. The Toriyama stuff is likely all the Demon Realm lore, which is incredible and fascinating. There’s not nearly enough focus on it in Daima, and structurally there simply can’t be. No one can talk about how Zeno and the angels relate to the Demon Realm creating the multiverse, because at this point in the story, no one knows about any of that. I’ll accept that lore as canon, especially since there hasn’t been stuff about the Demon Realm before this, but I don’t think any of the events of the story are canon.
And Goku’s new SS4 is the height of the silly to me. SS4 isn’t a literal next step after SS3; it’s a hybrid form of the Super Saiyan and Great Ape forms. That’s why it makes sense, and why it’s still cool as a concept. Just having it unlocked by someone takes away from it, right? Like, imagine that you haven’t seen GT and don’t know about SS4, and then you see Daima. There’s no logical move from yellow hair getting longer and bigger with each form to red hair and being furry. It’s confusing and weird as a next step; it’s them plucking something from the past so they can put it here because older fans will recognize it. They should have done some new thing, a true SS4 separate from the hybrid form we give that name to. Goku doesn’t work for it, either, which is disappointing and lazy. How easy would it have been to have Goku regrow his tail when he was turned into a kid, go Golden Great Ape while fighting Gomah, and then become SS4? Why isn’t that what the show was? Plus, unlocking potential is what Gohan had done so he could skip wasteful transformations; after they completely screwed that idea over in Super Hero, it’s even more annoying they did it again.
Le sigh. I’m just done with anime stuff. I heard that there’s going to be a new chapter of the Super manga coming out soon, and that’s exciting. It’s more Goten and Trunks stuff, which I love (side note: My brother pointed out that Daima should be a Goten and Trunks adventure, and that’s definitely true, right?). This new chapter is probably just testing the waters, so I don’t expect it to move the series forward too far right away. I hope people receive it well, so we can get more of the manga from Toyotaro. Moro and Granolah were so incredible, and I’m looking forward to a future in Toyotaro’s hands. What will he do with this Demon Realm lore? That’s the real exciting thing.
Weekly Art Blog 2/9-2/16/2025
Life in the Gutters 