To this is my first re-imaging of Ashling’s ‘transformation’ sequence. No doubt Aoife was hoping for a clothing-optional Sailor Moon-esque sequence, but this is what I’ve got 🙂
Bata Neart
Irish Magical Girls!
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To this is my first re-imaging of Ashling’s ‘transformation’ sequence. No doubt Aoife was hoping for a clothing-optional Sailor Moon-esque sequence, but this is what I’ve got 🙂
I dunno, Aoife looks pretty happy with what she got. I think Ashling looks pretty awesome, too. I love the dynamic poses.
And the Ashling Fan Club gains one more member. 😛
@Kessy: Thank you! It took a lot of re-draws to get it right 😀
@Azreal: Indeed! Although this one has a boyfriend, so Aoife needn’t worry about competition 🙂
This is a fantastic example of page layout, Rawr! 🙂 It looks great.
The only thing I would worry about? Witnesses. XD Maybe come back around when there are fewer to see the magic?
@Jen: Thank you, your making this old cartoonist blush with such a compliment 😀 I try my best to apply what Nao has taught me, and but it’s nice when it pays off. Although this page does seem like a fluke! I not usually good at this 😛
As for witnesses…I have little something planned for that, but I’m putting this episode down to them still being reckless teenagers 🙂
Well, Rawr, you got it very right. Ashling’s hair looks great – you got a wonderful cinematic “What wind machines? Of course there aren’t any wind machines just out of frame,” look.
As for witnesses, it is kind of traditional in the magical girl genre to ignore that particular detail. 😉 For my personal disbelief suspenders, I look at it that a lot of the special effects, light shows, etc, associated with magic in fiction should be taken metaphorically (like Aoife’s little floating hearts) not as something that somebody looking on from a distance would actually see. There was this great scene in the first episode of the Clannad anime where… Well, here’s the clip: (Hope I got the embed right this time.)
In real life, magick and such things are generally completely non visual. It’s usually something you feel in your gut. One thing that happened to me years ago at uni: It was the middle of winter and I was doing my laundry at a laundromat in the middle of the night. There was nobody else around at all, and I’d just finished, opened up the dryer and leaned in and buried my face in the warm clothes for a minute. All of a sudden, for no apparent reason I got this tremendous creepy feeling, like there was something nasty looking at me. I jerked up out of the dryer and looked around, didn’t see anything. Went outside and looked around, still didn’t see anything. But I still had this powerful feeling, so I grabbed my stuff and took off walking home. The feeling of some sort of threat stayed with me as I walked. I was passing the commons for one of the dorms, which was open 24/7, so I went inside and the feeling immediately went away. I asked the person on duty at the desk if anything strange had happened, they said no, I stopped and chatted with them for a bit. The feeling was completely gone and everything seemed normal again, so I set off to walk the rest of the way home. As soon as I walked out the door, the feeling was back full force, and it stayed with me until I got home and locked the door behind me.
In all of that, there was absolutely nothing visual that anyone watching could have seen.
Sailor Moon’s transformation wastes too much time anyway. I like the whole pocket-weapon idea.
@Rawr: I know what you mean. I’m very well acquainted with “Practice-makes-perfect”. Although I’m far too critical of my own stuff to put anything on show unless I’m very happy with it (at that moment. A month’s salary says I’ll find some flaw in it 2-6 weeks later and go “damn it!”.)
Ahh, the reckless teenage years. We’ve all… wait, no, I haven’t been there. I was well calm during my youth. Haha! My parents had little to no trouble with any of us (three children).
@Kessy: I know. Haha. I’m just: “Hmm… I’m just going to whisper whenever I cast my spells”. Although that takes away from dramatic effect in comics, I know. Just how like it’s a personal preference of the creator if the characters have thought bubbles or talk out loud when, in real life, they’d be thinking.
I definitely recognise what you’re talking about. I had a similar experience but without the threat attached to it. I’d had a short day at school (senior highschool, or whatever the equivalent is. Ages 15-18) and during the whole way home, I had this feeling I was missing something, like an event. I knew that no amount of time or money in the world could get me where I needed to go because I needed to be there now or in the next half hour or some such. When I got home, I tried to just lay down to get it to go away, purposefully trying to ignore it, but it didn’t work. I got up, walked around my room and then tried again but this time without forcing the feeling to go away or try to figure it out. I know the steps my body takes to fall asleep and to wake up and what happened was so different, I never could attribute it to sleep or dream. As soon as I’d closed my eyes I was in this long, blank corridor. You know the setting; undecorated, very basic looking hospital with white walls, floors and ceiling and just doors upon doors with little, frosted windows the size of an A4 or so. I began walking down the hall but quickly got to running until I suddenly came upon an open door. I stopped in the doorway and just stared at the only other person in there. It was a very simple hospital bed with a person literally covered in bandages, only the eyes were visible. I’ll never be able to say who that was, their name or anything else but I knew him. He stared back and maybe five seconds passed, maybe ten, then it was like I blinked and I was staring up at my ceiling again. The feeling of that I was missing something was gone and I was… fairly drained. Not physically but mentally. I never wake up feeling drained, nor do I feature in my own dreams as me or feel anything quite like that. I can’t say if that was something happening at the same time or if it was a premonition because the feeling after I opened my eyes was just… blank. Not sad, not worried, just… spent.
While not a fantastic experience, I feel lucky I’ve never had any sort of negative or threatening experience like you have. Also, I completely forgot to look back earlier in the week at this comment section. Damn.
@melaredblu: I sort of pilfered the idea from Cardcaptor Sakura. Except minus the whole majorette thing that Sakura had going on. I always felt that Ashling would crack her head with the Bata Neart if she ever tried to spin it around.