The first draft of Episode 6 is finished. It’s currently being looked over by my friend to see if the actual story is interesting and/or good. After that it’ll come back to me for rewrites, more editing, more look overs, and then hours upon hours of editing, going through it with a fine tooth comb. I can’t give any real estimates into how long it’ll take considering what happened with Episode 5. Just know it’s being worked on.

The $10 tier guys can look at it now though if they really want to look at it and see an unholy mess.

Goal is sometime around march. Preferably early but again, no guarantees.

Hey! Coming up this Wednesday and next Sunday I’ll be doing a Patreon exclusive stream! I’ll be doing some studies and general practice while watching anime. The stream will be available for all levels starting at $1!

MGD6 Update: I finally got over that mother fucking writer’s block in this one section! It had plagued me for weeks, and even forced me to skip ahead and write around it for the sake of getting work done. But this past Friday I sat down and went “I’m fucking doing this shit today!” Cue about forty minutes of thinking I figured out the direction I needed to take and pumped out 1853 words for that chunk!

The problem I’m now faced is I can’t exactly go with the ending I was currently aiming for, but that’s okay. The ending for this arc in MGD has changed dramatically over the years as I’ve slowly worked on it. There was a time for about two years where The Masked Sorrow was suppose to be the son of Supreme Commander Vehes and playing that up. If you’ve been keeping up with MGD then you know that never wound up happening. Sometimes as you develop a story you have to give up the ending you wanted and go with what works better with the world and characters you’ve been developing.

Also this past week I saw I Want To Eat Your Pancreas. Sad to say I can’t recommend it.

The plot itself sorta treads on that A Walk To Remember type story: Guy and sick girl who’s eventually going to die before the ending of the story form a relationship. Her dying is not a spoiler, as they show her funeral way early on. For most of it it’s fine, and I thought kinda cute. Wasn’t groundbreaking or anime, but it was turning out to be a nice little film that was worth a rental or a stream at some point.

But then instead of going what you would’ve expected, the writer tried to throw a twist to make things more “dramatic” and “sad” that comes off more manipulating. Like where you see the strings being pulled behind the scene and the writer going “Didn’t expect that, huh? Are you sad? Are you depressed now? How about you shed some tears?”

Instead I felt kinda insulted, in a way. I understood how one would want to try and have a twist with their story, but sometimes you should let things just play out as expected. It felt like that two minute bit from Paranoia Agent where it parodied that style of story. Except in Paranoia Agent it’s done as a quick gag. I Want To Eat Your Pancreas pulls a similar stunt over an hour into the story and is sincere about the stupid scenario it came up with. Worse is it’s telegraphed earlier in the story on multiple occasions, but that doesn’t make it any better. Sure, stuff like that happens in real life. I get that. But there’s a reason the phrase “life is stranger than fiction.” Sometimes things that can happen in real life don’t make for an entertaining story.

Anyway, that twist soured me on the whole thing and made me felt like I wasted my time. There’s plenty of more enjoyable “girl dying to a disease starts relationship with guy” stories out there I’d rather revisit before going through this again.

Currently sitting at around 9k words, with a long way to go still before finishing the episode. The longer it gets the more I feel like I’m gonna end the episode earlier than originally outlined and moved what would’ve been the last scene or two of episode 6 and make it the start of episode 7. It’s not that I’m worried there’s too much content in the episode. What I’m more worried about is episode 7 winding up significantly shorter compared to episode 6. To give insight on where things stand in 6, there’s a massive hole in the writing where two sections were skipped over due to me being unable to get around a writer’s block. Along with that is about two more scenes before hitting where I plan to move the ending up to.

In the end I don’t think it’ll be too big of an issue. The original ending of the episode would be better suited as the opening of episode 7 anyway, as they’re more connected with the going ons in that chunk of story.

I’m more worried about the chunks of story I skipped over and have to get back to soon. I still haven’t figured out how the fuck I’m gonna write that shit down.

I checked out Hi Score Girl this weekend on Netflix. I gotta say, I wasn’t expecting a cute little romantic comedy from the little I heard about it.

Basically it follows a grade school kid in the early 90s who’s obsessed with video games, mostly arcade games. He develops a rivalry against a quiet rich girl who happens to be super awesome at video games, even moreso than him, and eventually developing into a love triangle with a girl he meets in middle school who develops a crush on him.

There’s a lot of callbacks and references to old school video games, usually with quick descriptions and a surprisingly large amount of unique recorded footage. If you saw the first season of Genshiken you might recall how they milked the same footage of Guilty Gear for all it was worth. Hi Score Girl instead uses unique footage for every scene it’s used, or at least from what I could tell. Since the plot sometimes heavily refers back to what’s going on on-screen, it makes sense.

One caveat with the show is that it’s 3DCG. It has a cel shaded look, which helps, but sometimes it can’t quite escape the awkwardness of Japanese style CG animation. They cut frames to make it appear more “anime like,” but I always think it looks like garbage whenever they do that. Thankfully there isn’t much action in the show proper, so it gets away with it most of the time. When characters are standing around talking it’s not noticeable.

I watched it dubbed, which I found to be done well. The dub script flowed naturally and the voice actors did a good job. Biggest complaint was the mom character adding an (s) to the end of manga. I’m in the camp where you shouldn’t put an (s) at the end of anime or manga when referring to multiple. It sounds awful when people do that.

“Look at all this manga!” – okay

“Look at all these mangas!” – not okay

Whenever I hear it I think back to that Vice and Luna page from Anime News Network. 

Anywho, I recommend it. It’s a nice afternoon killer.

For the past few weeks I’ve been watching the Indigo League episodes of Pokemon. It’s been fun going back to episodes I only ever watched once back when they broadcasted initially. I’d completely forgotten a few of them, so it’s like watching new episodes of the original series. When I was a kid I recorded the episodes up to where Charmander evolved into Charmeleon as those episodes were shown on TV in syndication while I was at school (DFW UPN 21), so I watched that chunk over and over again. When Pokemon hopped over to Kids WB I didn’t bother recording them as I was able to watch them on Saturday, and thus didn’t see them nearly as repeated.

With me being on the last disc of the set, I went ahead and ordered the Orange Islands boxset so I could keep the Pokemon train going. I’m not sure how long I’m gonna be watching Pokemon while doing comic work, as I imagine I’ll get tired of it at some point. Doesn’t seem to be anytime soon as it’s the perfect show to put on in the background and half pay attention to it. There isn’t as much you need to pay attention to while watching compared to other shows. Plus since the majority of episodes follows the same cookie cutter pattern you already know what to expect.

The real challenge is gonna be once I get to Johto, as I stopped watching Pokemon around that time frame and started watching other stuff. Maybe that’ll kill my interest until the next DVD set of Sun and Moon comes out.

At long last! Episode 5 is coming out! It went through development hell, so I hope you all will enjoy it despite the massive delays!

So here’s a MZone and Cooper strip I did.

My new short story The Waitresses of Café des Gros Durs (are dudes) is now available! Right now I only got it up on Square Space, but I’m currently trying to work out the kinks on amazon. Unlike Magical Girl Dallas, this story has drawings in it!

Edit (10/08) I made it to the top 20! Thanks for everyone who voted for the first round!

I made a design for the 4chan virtual youtuber design contest! If you happen to have 4chan Pass you can vote on my entry (or someone else’s) over here! I’d really appreciate it if you voted for it and spread the word! Doubt I’ll win, but hey! I still had fun coming up with her.

Missed an update last week on Patreon so you guys have to suffer this week.

Here’s a link to where the stream is gonna be!

During Anime Fest 2018 I had the chance to attend two panels ran by the super amazing Helen McCarthy. And they’re both available on youtube! The Really Early History of Anime and Hayao Miyazaki’s Senpai: Isao Takahata! In the Isao Takahata panel (at 47m27s) I got to ask a question regarding this little bit of info that dropped last week. They gave a really good answer which can be applied to artists in general. Anyway both panels were fucking amazing so watch them in their entirety right now!

If you happen to see me feel free to say hi! I’m also giving away some shit on a first come/first serve basis!

Now you can get Magical Girl Dallas: Episode 3 as a pdf directly from square space for the sale price of $0.79 until I get around to uploading episode 4! Which will be in like a week, or two, or whenever. Anyway now’s the time if you haven’t gotten onto the MGD wagon yet! You can get it right here!

You can now wear page #324 on a t-shirt and show off how much you love Bodysuit 23 to the world!

But in case you don’t want to show the world you read a webcomic about a guy who wears a bodysuit of a women, there is also prints and posters available too! Along with mugs, a thermos, and even a tote bag! There’s a sale going on right now for the next couple of days if you want a discount!

Within the next 24 hours or so episode 2 of MGD will be available on nook and google play. However, it is available at this moment directly on Square Space! Grab your copy here: http://www.latisbooks.com/magical-girl-dallas/

It will also be 20% off through May 27th on Square Space only!

I will more than likely be uploading the next two episodes in the next two weeks to allow breathing room between episode releases.

I’m making episode 1 of Magical Girl Dallas free! Forever!

Not only that, but you no longer have to get it only through Amazon’s kindle service (which won’t make it free until it notices it being free everywhere else because they don’t like free). You can now get it from Nook, directly from my website, and down the road Google Play! Now if you never got around to reading Magical Girl Dallas you have absolutely no excuse! Because it’s free!

You can find links to the various options here! http://www.latisbooks.com/magical-girl-dallas/

The comic returns! Since the last arc was super long for my comic’s typical standard, we’re gonna go through a few small short stories before heading into a more typical longer chapter. I’m planning on doing three of them.

Also the archive is fixed in case you didn’t know! So no more worries! If you ever happen to come across something buggy again let me know!

With the chapter finally finishing up, I’m gonna take a short 2 week vacation from Bodysuit 23 to relax a bit/work on other stuff/prep up the next chapter of the comic starting today, March 30th. So see you all in about 2 weeks!

Last week Patreon had to miss a page due to needing some stuff checked by Cooper, who wound up signing off for the night by the time I could show him. Wound up moving everything a day back in progress, so I wound up pushing the page to the next update. I wound up asking for their input for a drawing to make up for it, with this being the result: