davemerrill

Signed by the author Moyoco Anno and the subject, director Hideaki Anno. We were hanging around Moyoco's "women in manga" panel - quite a nice change to see a panel like that actually consist of women professionals in the Japanese industry, as opposed to a bunch of fans talking about them - and over to the left there he was, the Evangelion director. His appearance at the show was strictly in the "tagging along with the wife" vein and it was kept on the down-low - one attendee in an EVA sweatshirt noticed him and made a beeline for him but was intercepted by staff. I got this poster courtesy Ed from Vertical who is a prince of a fellow and works for an outfit that does great things with bringing great manga to the English-speaking world.

What's weird is that later in the day we went over to Eyesore Video to return some movies and we talked for a while with the staff - turns out one of the employees is connected with the people that do the crazy wrestling events at Anime North, and he's familiar with Anime Hell- and an older, dreadlocked punk rock looking guy came in, shopped for a while, bought a DVD and asked to make sure it wasn't PAL or SECAM because he hasn't got anything that could play that, and he was here from LA so he couldn't really bring it back. The guy looked familiar and in the back of my mind I knew I'd seen him somewhere in a musical context. So later I flipped through the local free weekly to see what bands were in town, and noticed the band "Off!" playing on Saturday. It took me a week to actually look Off! up and see that they're an LA based hardcore outfit one of whom is Keith Morris, former lead for the Circle Jerks and pre-Henry Rollins Black Flag (the best Black Flag IMHO). Yeah, that was Keith Morris. So that was last Saturday; rub shoulders with celebrities, kinda sorta.

Your weekly links:
Last week's ZERO FIGHTER was, I think, pretty successful and getting closer to what I want to see on the page, which is "lots of ink". The trend continues with this week's strip. BEHIND THE BLUE DOOR goes full color super submarine vs sock puppet snake. GEORGIE GIRLS examines the difficult question of which events are appropriate for the wearing of nazi cosplay (answer: almost none). And Stupid Comics is all about Stupid Ads from the 1940s that sell candy and shoes to children with mass destruction and/or hand grenades.

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