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Friday, September 24, 1999
Strip #4 is up, and the convention road trip is really happening, five weeks from now at the
end of October. Costume report: one cape, cut out but not sewn yet, from fabric I got on the
sale table, and one wooden dowel from the hardware store that's going to be a staff when it
grows up. The star on top will be cardboard and a lot of aluminum foil. If you know a better
way to make a star, please write and tell me.
Friday, September 17, 1999
Strip #3 is up. Good news from Thursday night: the VCR works again. Mostly. It makes a little
crunch at the start of every tape now, and Rudy says that's just how it says hello. Thank you
to the nine of you who wrote in about strip #2 to tell me whose side you're on. That was five
for subtitles, three for dubs, and one person who said "both." Whoever you are, you are not
alone.
Friday, September 10, 1999
Strip #2 is up. Rudy put my address on an anime newsgroup without telling me, which explains
why the counter went from 40 to over 600 in one weekend. I found out when I got e-mail from
Canada. Hello, Canada! (Rudy, I'm not mad. I'm a little mad.)
Friday, September 3, 1999
Welcome to THURSDAY NIGHT ANIME CLUB! It's a comic strip about the anime club at my school.
The club meets Thursday nights in a room in the basement of the student union, and the
strip goes up here every Friday. Strip #1 is about my very first meeting. I'm so nervous
about putting this up that I've been sitting in the computer lab for twenty minutes not clicking
the button.
Hi! I'm Mindy Lloyd. I'm 19, and I'm a freshman art major at a state university that I'm
not going to name, because then my professors could find this and see how I draw hands.
I've drawn in sketchbooks since I was about eleven: on the bus, in the margins of my math
homework, under the desk in study hall. Almost nobody has ever seen any of it. I'm telling you
this so you'll know that putting a comic on the World Wide Web for anyone to look at is the
bravest thing I have ever done, and so you'll be nice about the hands.
The first week of school I saw a flyer for the anime club on the corkboard in the student
union, and I walked past it three times before I went downstairs. The room was in the basement,
with cinder-block walls and a saggy couch and a bunch of folding chairs and an old TV on a
rolling cart. The president shook my hand with both of his hands and asked if I'd like to see a
fourth-generation fansub. I didn't know what that was. I said yes. I've been back every Thursday
since, and I have never felt so much like I was in the right place.
So I started drawing it. THURSDAY NIGHT ANIME CLUB is the club, more or less the way it
happens: the tapes, the arguments, the VCR, the road trip. It's drawn manga-style because big
eyes are what my hand does when I'm not paying attention. Everybody in it said I could draw them.
Rudy said yes before I finished asking. Christa said, "Fine. Get my eyebrows right." You can
meet them both on the cast page.
One promise: the shows we watch never appear in the strip. They belong to the people who made
them. So in my comic, whatever is on our TV is always fuzz, which, if you've ever seen a
fourth-generation tape, is honestly pretty accurate.
A few words for people who aren't in the club:
- Fansub -- a tape of a show from Japan that fans translated and put English subtitles
on themselves, then copied for other fans. You trade for them by mail: you send blank tapes and
return postage, and a few weeks later they come back full.
- Generation -- how many copies away from the first tape yours is. Every copy gets a
little fuzzier. Fourth-generation is fog with voices.
- Subs -- the original Japanese voices, with English subtitles along the bottom.
Christa's side.
- Dubs -- the same show with English voices recorded over it. Rudy's side.
- Con -- a convention. A whole weekend of fans in a hotel, with video rooms that run all
night, a dealers' room, and costumes.
No computer drawing at all. Every line is pen and ink on paper, and the computer only gets it
at the very end.
Pencils. I draw on a 9x12 pad of smooth bristol board, with the strip about 8 inches
square so it will fit on the scanner glass later. I rule the four panels first, then pencil
everything in lightly with a mechanical pencil. This is the step where I redraw my own glasses
forty times. Inks. Technical pens in three sizes for the panel borders, the balloons and the
backgrounds, and a brush pen for hair, Rudy's coat and anything that needs a line that goes from
thick to thin. When the ink is completely dry (I learned this the hard way), I erase all the
pencil with a kneaded eraser. Screentone. The grays aren't gray ink. They're screentone: clear sheets printed with
tiny black dots, with a sticky back. You lay a piece over the drawing, cut around the shape you
want with a hobby knife, peel away the extra and rub the rest down flat. One sheet from the art
store costs about as much as two lunches, so I keep every scrap in an envelope. I have cut myself
twice. Neither time was on the strip. Lettering. Every word is lettered by hand, in capitals. First I rule faint guidelines
with a lettering guide, a little plastic tool with a wheel full of holes: you put your pencil
point in a hole, slide the guide along a T-square, and you get perfectly even lines. Then I
letter with my smallest pen and draw the balloons around the words. Scanning. Friday morning I carry the board to the campus computer lab, scan it at
300 dpi, clean up the dust specks and eraser crumbs in Photoshop, and shrink it down to 400
pixels wide. Saving small. Each strip goes up as a GIF under 40K, so it loads in about ten seconds
on a 56K modem. When I first put up strip #1 it was much bigger, and over Labor Day weekend I
looked at it on the computer at home, on a 28.8, and watched it come in one line at a time like a
window shade for almost a minute. That Tuesday I made it small. Every strip also has a big version, about
80K, as a link, for anyone who wants to see the dots up close.
About eight hours a strip, spread across the week. Thursday nights don't count. That's
research.
If you'd like to put THURSDAY NIGHT ANIME CLUB on your links page, I'd be so happy I'd
probably tell Rudy. Here's a button. Please save it to your own page as tnac.gif instead
of loading it off mine, then paste in this HTML:
<a href="/Tokyo/Shibuya/7213/">
<img src="tnac.gif" width="88"
height="31" border="0"
alt="Thursday Night Anime Club"></a> |
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Then write and tell me where it is, so I can come see.
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