NB! Japanese layout! Reads RIGHT TO LEFT!!
Taking the DART train into Dublin can sometimes be an ordeal. For Aine…it’s a little more shocking 🙂
Now for some more back-story:
Part 5: Joining MSN and choosing a Manga story
As I mentioned last time, part of the Manga School Nakano’s online program had included a Manga Production Course, which was much like the courses typically offered to local manga students at the Nakano Campus.
This option was what had excited me the most in Nao’s proposed program. I had always wanted to attend a full blown manga study course, but those courses had the knack of being based in Japan and presented in Japanese, which were 2 challenges that could take me some time to overcome.
My bucket-list contains ‘Going to Japan’ as a goal and within that a further goal of visiting Manga School Nakano in person one day. I may very well still do this, however in the here-and-now, such a trip is not practical for me.
It’s on list. I’ll visit eventually 😀
Thus, when Nao invited me on as a test student for the online program, the choice for me was simple. I would engage in the most extensive option: the 12-week Manga Production Course.
The Manga Producion Course was listed by Nao as an ‘Advanced’ option, which ordinarily I wouldn’t have the guts to select, but given my 15+ years practicing cartooning I took the plunge anyway. The stated goal of the course was to ‘Produce a 16 Page One-shot Manga’, where the student could create their own story or use a story supplied by the school. I knew I should make my own story, but I was not sure what I would be allowed to get away with.
I considered 2 options:
- A new one-off ‘space opera’ story that I have been playing around with for a while.
- Chapter 6 of Bata Neart
Including Bata Neart’s Chapter 6 in there was partly due to me wanting to integrate any improvements I gained directly into Bata Neart, but also as a cheeky way of maintaining my already strained update buffer (which was about to get even more strained, as some of you might remember).
The other story was a little pet-project that fitted into my long-running love of space-opera Anime. Set in an 80’s style future, the story itself was inspired by the lyrics of the Final Countdown by Europe.
Entitled ‘Last Day: Stand tall’ it followed a group of kids who have won a lottery to spend their summer at giant-robot training camp on a space-station. On the last day of school they leave home to fly up to the station with all of the other lucky winners from around the world. Unknown to them, that was the Earth’s final day. The one-shot manga ends with the planet exploding and station drifting out into space & to safety. The ending suggests that the winners had been selected to keep humanity going into the future. Further stories would follow them while they tried to do this.
I presented both plans to Nao, and she suggested that I go forward with a Bata Neart one-shot, but not with Chapter 6. She explained that a one-shot needed to be something that could be used to attract new readers and that I should create a new self-contained story that would feature my characters. ‘Last Day’ didn’t fit the bill, mostly because I hadn’t developed the characters yet. However with Bata Neart I could put forward 3 fully developed characters: Ashling, Aine and Aoife.
The choice was made and the one-shot would be based on Bata Neart, thus we began the course itself.
Next week: Class schedules, maternity, and the ‘Rookie Manga-ka’ experience!
The train into Dublin is called DART? Ha, that’s funny. The bus system I take to visit my mom is also called DART. I guess there are only so many good acronyms to go around….
Although my favorite mass transit acronym is still one I saw when I was visiting Leeds, England: FTR. I forget what it really stands for at this point, but I decided it would be a great name for the ultimate in space transportation. The Ferguson Trans-Relativistic drive. When even Ludicrous Speed is too slow, use FTR, also known as the Faster Than Rumor drive. Now that’s fast. 😉
Ahh funny transport acronyms. In Ireland like may other places, the acronyms often stand for something fast, and you’d occasionally see names such as the aformentioned DART, but also ARROW, and recently LUAS (which is Irish for ‘fast’). They are almost always lies, and system itself isn’t all that fast.
The DART was brought in to increase capacity for commuter trains in the Dublin region and was planned to be part of a larger underground metro which never happened. The trains are mostly Japanese-built and do have a certain ‘Tokyo Hush-hour’ feel to them when they become overcrowed…especially when they run short trains :O
(Ps. What do you think of the ‘house-keeping’ i’m doing here on the site? I’m planning to revamp the whole site eventually, with new layout and artwork)
I like the house keeping. The page feels less cluttered and it’s definitely better to devote more space to the comic itself. I would suggest that you might want to consider making small illustrations for the chapters sidebar instead of just using thumbnails of the first page of each chapter.
One thing that I’m not thrilled with (that’s been around for a while, actually) is the top nav bar. I’m not sure if it’s an eccentricity of Firefox or not, but I only see the links there when I mouse over them.
Thanks for the feedback Kessy 😀 I’m planning to do something more fun for the chapter archive, I’ve just trying out the chapter thumbnails because they are an in-built ComicPress function.
I’ve been annoyed by the navbar myself. It seems to be some kind of fault in the wordpress child-theme I’m using for Bata Neart (there was a similar problem with Back Office for a short while). I’m planning on completely replacing this dark theme with something brighter and adorned with a colour motif featuring Ashling, Aine and Aoife. Once I replace the theme, the navbar should work again. I’ll probably work on that at the some time I work on a cover for Bata Neart – Book 🙂