After a long summer spent filling my passport with long awaited stamps and working at my favorite store K.Sp. *wink* it is time to get back in the journalistic saddle. With the Bull Magazine‘s theme set on “Culture/Subculture” a great many ideas for possible stories were thrown around the newsroom like colored powder on Holi Day in India. Now although I am not at liberty to discuss the choices of the other writers (you’ll have to wait until December to read theirs) I can give you the scoop on mine.
So if you will, drum-roll please…
Anime Mania and Cosplay Phenoms!: An inside look at how the Japanese art forms have captivated American young adults
So why Anime and Manga?
Many years ago, too many to count, I myself was fascinated by the artwork displayed in manga comic books. It started in the 6th grade when a friend of mine who fancied herself a wicken lent me her dogearred copies of Tarot Cafeand Mars (the latter which would later go on to be partially accredited with my pseudo namesake). Despite my unjustified bias towards manga I humored my friend and read the comics. I have never been the same since.
The vast array of drawing styles found in manga and on screen in anime was the hook. I had learned to draw using the traditionalist style and I was “good” if I had to grade my own work. However I longed for something interesting; something unconventional that blurred the boundaries between real and fantasy. An art form that lingered between the two realms. Something that was clearly a product of the imagination come to full fruits. Manga and anime was just that. It was a visual plane for my mind to run free creating whatever it pleased without consequence.
The sinker were the stories that were woven so carefully by their authors. The brain babies of brilliant multi-talented artists the stories I devoured fed my daydreams and urged my pen to keep drawing. Taking my animation cues from Miyazaki while looking to distinguished manga authors for guidance word-wise I began to fabricate worlds of my own. Each as precious as the next with strikingly different tales.
This infatuation continued well into my senior year of high school. It was my dirty little secret that I hid from the rest of the world. Classmates often asked me how I was able to draw such flawless storyboards in film class. I would shrug and say “practice I guess.” It was true for the most part. I did practice. I drew for the vast majority of my days filling notebooks with various body parts I was struggling to perfect and images that I wanted to flesh out before adding them to my comics. However, like all love affairs this one ended suddenly with little cause or reason as to why.
After graduating high school I suppose you could say my priorities changed. I was looking down the dark throat of college life. The uncertainty of choosing the “right” career path plagued me the way it did every other freshman. I stopped drawing because I was too exhausted to move after a long day of school. The stories I would dream of vanished from my mind because there was only standing room left after hours of studying. I had become what I dreaded most, a killjoy. Yet not all hope was lost. Thanks to my little sister I slowly came back to life artistically speaking.
Whereas I had dabbled in manga art my sister Fate excelled. She created numerous comics, many of which were part of a fifteen part adaptation of a reoccurring dream she had as a child. To watch her breathe life into the bare white pages of a leather-bound journal was inspiring. She did this with great vigor everyday, even after a tiresome day of school lectures and STAR Leadership meetings. It was an escape that she fled to when the world outside was collapsing in on itself. And it was in this sheltered world for the imaginative that she met her cosplay companions.
From my old timer’s eye Cosplay was nothing more than a juvenile obsession with a world that could never be real. After becoming a killjoy my young creative eyes had dulled to a cold pessimistic gaze.”If you can’t touch it and you can’t see it in real life it’s useless” is what I would say. You could imagine my expression of disbelief when I accompanied Fate to Anime Expo and came face-to-face with living, breathing, speaking anime characters. Wandering the halls of the LA Convention Center in a stupor I met Isaac and Miria from “Baccano!“, shared an elevator with Miku Hatsune and Gakupo from Vocaloidand Zero, Kaname, and Yuki from “Vampire Knight”, and had lunch with Cloud Strife, Tifa, Ai Enma, L Lawliet, Gaara, and Naruto Uzumaki. Needless to say I still owe my sister $10 for betting that nobody could successfully pull offSora’s hair from Kingdom Hearts.
I suppose you could say I chose to do my feature story on cosplay and anime/manga because I really don’t know much of anything about that world. I thought I knew everything yet when I was faced with it again after a long hiatus I was dumbfounded by how much the community had changed. Cosplay was a serious line of work and anime/manga had taken the US by storm invading the homes of a great many American teens and preteens. This new story for me is educational and a revitalization of a part of myself that I once thought to be dead and buried. It is also for those who were/are like me and admire the ostentatious art form from afar for fear of being judged harshly. Just remember life is short and nobody gets out alive so why not play things up in the meanwhile?
Until the next time, stay lovely and stay strange.
Your liaison,
Mars
