For instance, this blog! I’ve made much more than I’ve posted here, and I need to get better at updates! I’ve also resolved to create an RSS button for easier subscribing, and to create a new commission info page… but the drawing must always be my first priority!

Otherwise the weeks have passed quietly for me. Some family death happened, and birthdays loom on the horizon. Also my brother’s wedding, in which I am a participant!

Reviews were… mixed. A lot of folks took issue with a flabby, humanoid C’thulhu and said it simply wasn’t creepy enough. After all, people are supposed to go mad just looking at the beast, right?

Well message received, Lovecraftians. I hope this is more like how you’ve envisioned the cosmic horror from beyond the stars and beneath the waves.

We haven’t spoken in a while, so let me see… I got a new run at work with a new batch of kids. I’m free from the chain-smoking darkness of the earlier run, though I will miss those kids terribly. I took a hit to the paycheck in the process, but it’s just money, right? Yeah.

We’ve begun planning our wedding. It’s a secret. Don’t be offended you weren’t invited. Next to nobody is, just close family and select friends. You probably didn’t make the cut, but that’s okay because you can just send us money instead of eating food we have to pay for. We’re doing you a favor, really. You save on travel, accommodations, food and fancy dress for the reception. Okay, in all seriousness, we love you guys and we don’t intend to offend those who wish for a big, fancy wedding of their very own… but that’s just not us. We don’t care to dance. We don’t want to listen to half-hearted toasts. We don’t want to be forced to sit on display like the Last Supper while everyone lies to us about how it’s the most beautiful wedding they’ve ever been to when everything will be as cheap as we can possibly make it. Part of what makes us work as a couple is rejecting the artifice of traditional married lifestyle. That starts with all the unnecessary expenditure of a wedding. We’re not royalty. It’s not the joining of two great houses. We’re two poor folks who want to have and to hold and to forsake all others, and we don’t need an audience to make that promise.

What else… we got hooked on Game of Thrones’ parent series, A Song of Ice and Fire by George R. R. Martin, hereafter known as the Prince of Fucking Darkness. And I thought I was bloodthirsty when it came to writing likable characters and killing and maiming them in as many ways as possible. If you haven’t read it or seen it, you’re missing out. I won’t say you’re a fool, because you could probably do without the pain.

The final Harry Potter film looms on the horizon. I don’t have much to add except to say that I am excited. That is all.

I won’t go into Evangelion’s impact on anime as an art form or any of the historic impact of its original run and subsequent remakes.  I don’t care… Evangelion is very personal to me.  It set me on a path years ago that truly changed my life.  This may sound ridiculous, but if it wasn’t for Eva, I never would have met my fiance.

Follow this.  I first saw Evangelion in high school.  I was sleeping over at a friend’s house and I noticed his impressive anime collection.  I was AWARE of anime, but it all seemed kind of… bizarre to me.  The only things I’d had any exposure to were Pokemon, DragonballZ, or Sailor Moon.  I was curious though… obviously this was a world not dissimilar to my own world of comics, full of niches and hidden gems and truly remarkable stuff.  Something about Evangelion leapt out at me.  To this day, I couldn’t tell you what it was about the cover of the first VHS that made me ask, “Hey, could we watch this?”

To say it rocked my world would be putting it lightly.  I developed an insatiable thirst for more… but like Watchmen, Evangelion spoiled me.  I’d only accept well-translated, excellently voice-acted, groundbreaking stuff… so naturally I didn’t get into too many.  I was quick to find flaws in new series I was exposed to.

Nevertheless, I’d developed a taste for the stuff.  I knew it could speak to me across the chasm of culture and language that separated the US and Japan.  I knew it had innumerable genres, that it was growing bigger every day.

It was thanks to Evangelion that I came to seek the stuff.  And it was thanks to Evangelion that when I was getting a tour of the college I would eventually attend and the guide showed my group a sample room, I peered in and saw posters of anime characters leaping, posing, smiling and snarling.  The girl in the room was working on her computer, but she’d paused momentarily to answer questions of the group.

I walked up to her and held out my hand, which she took with a quizzical expression and shook.

“Hi. I’m Sal.  We’re going to be friends,” I said.

That was my esteemed creative partner and hetero-lifemate Lyndsey.  She GETS me.  Science has not yet come up with a unit of measurement to gauge how meaningful a relationship can be to a person’s life, but ours would be off the scale.  Together we’ve written novels (they remain in the editing phase but you can learn more about them at www.immortaltrilogy.com) and explored the pitted landscape of geekdom like astronauts tethered to each other.  Lyndsey was and is one of my dearest friends, and I can’t say if I would have returned to my college after the semester hiatus I took to gather funds two years in if she hadn’t still been there.

And once I’d returned, I met the girl I’d one day ask to be my wife.  So, see? I have Neon Genesis Evangelion to thank for meeting Danielle.  It makes total sense.  Stop raising your eyebrows!

There’s other reasons Evangelion was an influence on my life and continues to be to this day.  The main character’s self-loathing and relationship to his parents struck incredibly close to home for me.  The character design itself: gorgeous, and I don’t mean the female bodies but the clothes, armor, weapons and mecha.  The world became a real place of blood-red seas and giant angels.  The fate of the entire human race came to hinge on one boy learning not to hate himself, to find value in his own life when the parents who should have sheltered and nourished him either died or used him for their own selfish purposes.

Eva’s story continues today.  The series is being resurrected as a collection of films, entirely reanimated and with a far greater budget.  Characters are being added, stories are being changed, everything is in upheaval… between the changes from the original anime to the manga and now to the films Evangelion has demonstrated it isn’t afraid to reinvent itself.  It doesn’t take it’s success or popularity for granted, certainly (though at times I wonder how much of the story’s gravitas is actually parody – after all, this is a series which in it’s original run used the last two episodes to basically give their entire fanbase the middle finger).

Since watching it that first time, a bleary-eyed teen awash in hormones, I’ve seen many other anime series and enjoyed them immensely.  But none will ever hold the place Eva does in my heart.