The Reluctant Spy or On the Move

Ever feel like you just gotta get going? Ever feel like the opportunity is out there and it's up to you to reach out and grab it? Or, do you have to get going because of a sense of urgency? You don't have any other choice? An external force has given you no option but to move? Whatever the reason, I have that feeling right now. And the reason is that I am finally leaving my parents' home (I've been living with my folks since college, by the way) and moving into an apartment on my own (with a friend). The build-up to this time has been consuming, it has been hectic, it has been worrisome, but of all the things it could be - it is exciting. Changes are manifesting at this very moment and I'm not entirely sure what they are going to bring - all I can do is charge forward and see what's on the other side. I hope to continue to receive your support from my new location, coming soon!

Will this be effecting updates? Erm.......maybe? I don't mind saying that I have the 3rd installment of Pachi Profiles planned to go up before the end of the month, but those aren't as difficult to plan as a normal sketch. Your safest bet would be to assume that updates will come at about the speed they always have, with only possible delay within the next couple weeks. Please bear with me until then - I want to show you as much of my art as I can, and I promise you many more will be coming after I'm settled down in my new home. Look forward to it! :)

This drawing began as one idea, then it became another! I drew this random young man (let's just call him Spy) and then a long, disjointed corridor behind him. I was envisioning a man running through the hallways of an abstract mind, with weird visuals and sites surrounding him. But then I was staring at the far end, and I thought it would look really cool if he was running from a billowing smoke cloud at the onset of an explosion. So he turned into a spy, stealing important documents and fleeing from an unexplained action set piece. I think the smoke came out a little better here than in the Rising out of Dreams image - probably because it's not as overblown as in that one. This image made me realize that when I draw males, I tend to draw very young adult males and little else. I want to alleviate that, so I gave Spy a small goatee; just to give him some character and not make him look so "teenager".

BONUS: Speaking of changes, I have something to announce concerning the future of drawings that will appear on this blog. Thanks to my dear mother, I received for my birthday a new Intuos4 drawing tablet from Wacom, specifically for the purpose of drawing art digitally! I hold traditional techniques dear to my heart and I'm not going to stop drawing that way, so don't worry if that's what you prefer. However, there are many pros to digital art that appeal to me, and my dabbling in advanced photoshop techniques the last few months made me want to experiment with enhancing the drawing step itself instead of just the after-effects. Again, I'm not going to exclusively switch over to drawing with the tablet, but I am going to experiment with it and see how it goes. In fact, I have a few sketches I did while testing out the tablet that I'd like to show you. These are just very quick, untouched digital doodles, but I wanted to let you see as I learn to use this new tool. These were done in Adobe Photoshop Elements 10, on an Intuos4 Large tablet:

Even though these were aimless sketches, I have to say I was quite impressed with the crazy Simpsons-lipped girl in the upper-right corner. Between her an Chung, I must have a thing for drawing crazy girls. XD

The Companions or Clothing

When I'm drawing one of my characters, there is usually one thing on my mind: the face. The face is the part of a drawing that I MUST get right before I can feel happy moving on to something else - if the expression is wrong, or the eyes are positioned incorrectly, it can ruin an entire drawing for me. This is because when I see a drawing of a person, the first aspect I am drawn to is the face. The subject of an artwork, the primary character, creates a mood for me based on their expression, and I seek out that mood. That helps me form my initial reaction of whether I like or dislike a piece of art. The surrounding and aesthetics come after - for me, I like to go to the expressions first. Even if there is no "characters" in the work; I seek the expression in whatever the primary character of the work is.

But what am I rambling about? This post is about accessories in a drawing, not the face conveying emotion. My point is, I spend so much time obsessing over the emotion of the face in my art, I often neglect the extra bits. This isn't necessarily considered BAD. There are plenty of artists who don't feel comfortable drawing certain things, and they often stick to particular tropes in their work. I in particular have a penchant for drawing characters with simple clothing designs and minimal backgrounds, if any. It's what I tend to draw more than anything else. I still put a lot of attention to detail and care in my work, but most of it goes into making the character look good. Due largely in part to my inexperience with the other aspects.

Oh clothing, oh clothing, why do I have such difficulty with you? Forget about the post details like folds and texture (I could get into a completely different rant about my difficulty with that - one at a time now), I just have a hard time coming up types of clothing to draw that look interesting. I'm not including plain old shirts/jeans/whatever in this because they're run-of-the-mill and take little to no thought to come up with. Best case scenario would be drawings like Union on this Night where I research a particular type of clothing and create a design mixing my own style and whatever I happened upon. Worst case would be ones in which I just make up the design on the fly. I know I've said in a recent post that drawing the first thing that comes to your head can be a fun tactic when you're low on ideas (trust me, I do it all the time), but when you get down to nitty gritty details and accessory designs, you really should have SOME kind of plan for them. It doesn't take too much effort to make believable clothing, but it also doesn't take much more than that to make clothing look ridiculous. Unless ridiculous IS your style - there are exceptions for everything. :p

That's about it this time. I don't have any solid advice for you on clothing because I'm not very experienced with the topic myself. ^^; But if I'd say anything, it's this - unless it's clothing that's not being worn, the item should compliment the owner wearing it. No matter what type of situation it's in - a formal suit, school clothes, casual wear, a weird outfit the character in question would never wear - ANYTHING can work, no matter how ridiculous or straightforward. It's all a matter of finding the thin line that makes the clothing look like clothing. The easiest way to find this line, in my opinion, is to draw your clothing around the character last. Don't start drawing their clothing right where the collar begins - draw them as if they were naked first. (unless they're actually supposed to be, but in which case my tirade about clothing does not apply to you XD) Finalize the pose of the body before doing any accessories - then you'll be able to more firmly accentuate the clothing to the lines you've just defined, rather than trying to figure out the shape as you're creating the clothes. You're performing two steps at once that way, and if you can do it, more power to you. But if you find that makes things difficult or you're just not happy with how your clothed characters look, try it the way I said and see if that makes a difference. :)

I decided I hadn't drawn the siblings in awhile, so I'm letting Chung and Quan share the limelight today. The focus for this one was, of course, the clothing! I had an early vision of the two in Lord-of-the-Rings-esque outfits, or anything that could be considered LoTR-esque. I think I managed that okay with Quan, but Chung....she looks a little more like a gladiator. Or a well-clothed amazonian. Do you guys think so? Ah well. I was going for adventure/fantasy clothing, so both of them fit it well enough. I especially had fun designing their weapons and the shield - they get across the style I wanted more than the characters themselves. For this sketch I tried out the older style of nose these two used to have - I don't know if I like it. I'll probably go back to my more conventional nose style in the future.

A Pachi Break: New Update Venue

Hey guys - no drawing for you today, but I wanted to give you a quick update on a couple things. In the near future, I am going to be moving out of my parents' home and into an apartment with a friend. The preparation is pretty lax right now, but when the time comes closing in, I'm going to be busy and will probably have even less than usual in way of updates. I do have about three drawings on the back burner that should get on the site within the next couple weeks, but after that it'll probably be high and dry for awhile until my move is settled. Hope you all understand. I have some big plans for my work and this blog in the coming year, so I hope you will all stay tuned! =)

In other news, I just recently started a Twitter account! You can find my most recent tweets on the sidebar to the right and a link to follow me. It won't be strictly just about the blog - I'll be talking about pretty much anything there. So in case you were thinking this is a strictly-business twitter, it's not! It's also my personal twitter, so I may use language; fair warning. If my blog ever gets to a point where it's kind of successful I may separate it so I have one Twitter for the blog and one for myself, but for now that doesn't seem that necessary. Anyway, I'll be making notifications about future updates there from now on, so feel free to follow me if you'd like to find out about my drawings that way. I also still have a follow-by-email link if you'd prefer to get your updates via email. Or just stop by every now and then to see if there's anything new. The choice is yours!

Dance Out Blue or Character Dictation

When someone tells you they "can't dance", what they probably mean is they don't "like" dancing. If we were to get technical about it, generic dancing doesn't have any strict style or form - if you simply move your body in some kind of rhythm, you can consider that dancing. Declaring that one can't do the waltz, or the twist, or ballet, is on the other hand justifiable, since a specific type of dance requires skill and practice. Me personally, I'm not a huge fan of dancing. I LIKE it - I think it's fun to dance. But I'm very self-conscious and I get nervous when dancing around a lot of people. But not Sei. I decided as a joke that one of Sei's favorite hobbies would be "dancing at raves". Because really, you look at him, and he doesn't seem to be the type to be into an outing involving mass social interaction. But he goes gun-ho about it; he takes it quite seriously. This is a situation where the technique of "author insertion" probably gets the most use - using our characters to do things we cannot do but wish we could. I am really nervous about dancing for long periods of time, but Sei can do it nightly and with no fear. It really is quite interesting to see how a character will appear and act in a situation you wouldn't expect them to be in.

And on that note, I'll segue into what I really wanted to talk about today - something I call "character dictation". I'm not talking about a character narrating a story, no no no. This is in regards to the art. For many comic artists, work doesn't finish when the chapter/issue is done. Quite commonly, characters have to be drawn for promotional art or greeting cards or holiday images or anything imaginable - miscellaneous works. A lot of my drawings are done in the style of miscellaneous works because I am usually not showing you scenes from my stories - I'm just showing my characters doing "things". I'll use my Summer 2011 pool drawing as an example. The Gogyouo characters are relaxing pool-side. But why? Do they ever take a break at a pool in the story? You don't know. There is no context for the image - it's just them doing "things" that they might do. And thinking about this made me wonder if artists ever have difficulty figuring out WHAT their characters will do. I don't really mean difficulty in picking the theme/setting of the drawing, but difficulty in deciding what character is going to do what in that setting. Group drawings especially are affected by these decisions. For me, character interaction is an extremely important part of Gogyouo, and I make no exception for character interactions in my drawings.

I have one rule/tip alone that I follow in making these decisions, and I hope you may consider trying it out if you're having trouble making them as well. What I call "character dictation" basically means to let the characters themselves decide what they want to be doing. I know full well you can't ask them, but you can consider the character and their personality. Think about their past experiences, their disposition, how they normally react to certain things. To go back to the pool drawing; Sei has fallen into the water and gotten soaking wet. Why is Sei the one to fall in the water? Why not Masashi, or Mikioi? The answer is simple - because Sei would be the one most annoyed by that action. Being the one who created Sei, I know that he doesn't like swimming, because it ruins his hair. So out of all the characters in that drawing, I took these factors into account and picked him because he would be the most irritated AND he would have the most childish reaction because he would be upset about his hair. Basically I decided that Sei falling into the water would provide the funniest reaction. Likewise, why is Mikioi the one relaxing in the shade? Why not Suunuku? Well, because Mikioi is vain - he would much rather sit back and relax when on vacation. Suunuku is the one who would be jumpy and energetic and want to goof off - that's why she's running up with the beach ball.

I realize that to a lot of people, this may seem like a backwards way of thinking. Most artists probably come up with a thing for each character to do last rather than picking a "thing" and then assigning a character to it. Actually, that's how I do it to. But before I start drawing them, I go back and really think about the decisions I've made. Would the character really do this? If not, is there a justifiable reason that is causing the character to do this? One thing I hate to do is to "force" a character to appear in a certain way or doing a certain thing that unrealistically goes against that character - I like to connect everything by reason. Even my most abstract works have reasons behind them - take The Woven Girl for example. It may seem completely random that she is leaning herself against the grip of a giant axe, but it's not; her character has a strong affinity to "weapons", and Suunu's favorite weapon just happens to be the axe. To be fair, you don't know this. Indeed, this whole process is one that usually will go unnoticed by the viewer - all they will see is the final product created from your decisions. But it can make getting their a whole lot easier if you let the character make those decisions for you. You created them, so let them decide what you're going to do with them!

I seem to be doing a lot of drawings with more and more steps taking place in Photoshop lately. To be honest, I think I'm going to go back to strictly traditional for awhile after this one, but it's been fun experimenting with new techniques. For this one, I had originally planned to go full-on traditional. But in order to capture the feel of a night club, there needs to be a lot of darkness. Darkness on paper requires a lot of graphite and/or ink piling up in one place and ruining paper quality. So for this drawing I wanted to try only half-completing the drawing and doing the rest on my computer. The only thing I drew and inked all the way was Sei himself - the crowd I kept in pencil and went to work on it in PS. The eventual result is what you see. At first I was just using varying shades of grey to try and emulate what I could have done on paper on a computer. But then I decided it would be fun to give the image a light hint of color, to better give the impression that Sei was on a dance floor under colored lights; so I went with a kind of greyish-blue. The only thing I'm really not happy about with the image is the way the bottom of the crowd silhouettes blend with the floor - it's not very clean. But overall this was a fun experiment. Please don't ask why Sei has a large ring around his wrist. Glowsticks I get, but large rings? I'll never understand his rave-accessory sense.

Pachi Particulars 02: Color and Blocks

Hey guys, hope I haven't been leaving you too high and dry since the end of Manga Madness! To be honest, for the last week I was unable to come up with any new ideas; not to mention I had a very busy work week so I really couldn't take the time to think about the blog. But I've got some new works on the way, so look forward to those. For now, here's two miscellaneous drawings I worked on recently. One is new, and the other is a twist on an old...

This drawing is featured in the blog gallery, but I never included it in a post. It's also the image that inspired my first From the Action Pages sketch. Anyway, I felt a desire to mess around with a color image again, and though one day I'm going to seriously start an image from scratch with the intent of coloring it proper, I decided to use this old drawing and try to make it look more exciting. Adding in these effects in Photoshop has been mostly self-taught with the help of some tutorial videos on Youtube, but I'm starting to feel like I'm developing my own way of doing it that works. Some day when I make a serious post about coloring images using Photoshop, I'll lay out the steps I take, but I don't really feel qualified now since I'm still a beginner at this kind of coloring. I can say this - even if it's hard, it's a lot of fun. It's very rewarding to see color appear on your characters - it's as if they're coming to life.

As a side note, his boxers are supposed to be a dirty yellow, but all of the shading made them look olive green. Sei would NEVER wear olive green boxers. >_<' It's obviously why he's so angry, right? Right?

I did come up with ONE new idea last week - a drawing showcasing the fact that I had no ideas. So I thought, what would be an ideal way to conceptualize my artist's block? Well, with a block of course. I felt like I was being oppressed by this block, so naturally it needed to be crushing me. The block itself ended up as an amalgamation of random stone shapes with one stone on each side representing how I felt in my current state. It wasn't pre-meditated - it just turned out that way. That's what happens when I draw with zero ideas - randomness. But even so, I still tried to make it look good, but that didn't go over so well. I wish I had left shadows out of the equation in this way, because I came out with an incredibly uneven shade all around. On the bright side, if any of my sketches had to suffer from poorer quality control, I'd rather it be one I wasn't doing seriously.

Now then, I'll answer the question on all your minds: what's with the anthropomorphic teeth? Well, they have arms and legs and mouths because that's funny. My teeth are oppressing me, with actual spite! Hilarious! Oh, no, you mean, why are they teeth to begin with? Let's just say I had a trip to a new dentist last week and the visit was......how do you say.....enlightening. New worries in regards to my hygiene arose that made it doubly difficult for me to focus on the blog, thus the double oppression on my poor anime-self. Speaking of, if anything came out well in this drawing, I'd think that my rendition of myself did. I went for a more cartoony style using fewer lines of detail and less attention to realistic shapes, and I think in that regard it looks alright.

Manga Madness #4: E.O. Catalyst

Welcome one and all, to the final week of Manga Madness! It's been a long month, but it's been quite a trip. We've been through an action adventure in an alternate world, the quest of a vengeful young swordsman in historic Japan, and a tale of horror surrounding a cursed police station. Our final stop is by far the most unusual of my stories - it is a tale of "connection". And so, today's final manga is a futuristic drama one-shot called E.O. Catalyst.

Synopsis: In the year 2187, the Great City of Progress looms over the countryside of the European nation no-one took the time to remember. It goes by the name of "Catalyst". An advanced cerebral chip tech known as the "E.O.", which allows people to link their minds directly to digital machinery, was invented and developed here; it is the lifeblood of Catalyst and the reason for its leap in progress. A complacent young girl named Esther Arghause, age 13, lives in this city, believing a world where everyone is connected to be the norm. But her illusion will be broken once she becomes intertwined in the plans of an embittered rebel with a vengeful past, as she comes to realize what truly is the catalyst for "connection"...

Origin:
At some point during my tenure in college - I saw an anime movie called Toki wo Kakeru Shoujo or The Girl Who Lept Through Time. Without giving too much away, it's a story about a girl who, well, gains the ability to leap through time, and the events that unfold around her as she uses this power. It's a wonderful, wonderful movie that I would heartily recommend to any anime fan who has not already seen it. It left a lasting impression on me personally - it was one of the first anime, of both series and movie length, I'd ever seen that moved me to tears. And I fondly remembered the movie as I was brainstorming ideas for the two new manga to follow Gogyouo and Hyozan. For the second, I decided I wanted to try a tale of drama. Not in the format of a series, but as a one-shot movie. My goal was to create the story of an anime movie that was as moving as Kakeru Shoujo - it held a strong influence on my story, which for the longest time went unnamed. However, it DID have the very lame and temporary working title of Middle School Murderer. Why that title? Read on through the Plot section to find out.

Plot/Character:
To explain the history of the working title of Middle School Murderer, I have to explain some of my own history. So allow me to get personal for a moment. I was always an introvert as a younger child. I still am, to a lesser degree, but I was very much an outcast back in the day. I acted a bit differently from the other kids, and because of that I was a target for verbal bullying through virtually all of elementary, middle, and about half of high school. It was a rough time where my family moved a lot (for unrelated reasons) and I kept hardly any friends. I hit an all-time low once out of depression, where I wished I didn't exist. Even though I did not enjoy it and I'm glad those darker times are behind me, I've drawn a lot of inspiration for my stories from them. The past of Sei from Gogyouo, for example, shares several elements from my own. But then there's today's story, which originally started as a kind of "revenge fantasy" against all of the children who had ever bullied me. Actually, I dreamed up this version of the story back in high school, long before I ever saw Kakeru Shoujo - I simply re-purposed it once I began brainstorming for new ideas. The original version of the story was about a man who had been absolutely shunned as a child - he was hated by everyone and bullied both physically and verbally by his peers. He wasn't good looking and he had no social skills - easy pickings. But then it turns into a tale of ugly karma, where this man grows up to become absolutely hateful and full of vengeance. He begins enacting a series of gruesome murders against those who wronged him as a child. It was an extremely basic slasher story from the split point-of-view of the killer and the law trying to take him down. But the horror cop story inevitably went to D/4-Laws; MSM went pretty much nowhere until I re-purposed it later on.

One thing I decided I had to do for this new version of MSM that I hadn't done for any of my other works was: use a female as the protagonist. From there I came up with the girl you see above (whom until now had been unnamed), Esther Arghause. She was now the main character of the story instead of the killer. One day, 13-year-old Esther is held up by some thugs on her daily walk home, but the man thought to be a cold killer appears and saves her life - by brutally slaughtering them. Esther runs in fright but is not sure what to think of the whole situation. Everyone in town knows about the man and that he is killing people, but it was never imagined that he may not be all bad. Keep in mind that Esther is wise for her age, but she is also quite curious to a fault; she is prone to making possibly bad decisions. Spurred by her curiosity, in the following weeks, Esther begins actively pursuing the man, and she eventually finds where he hides away. She decides to keep his hideout a secret from the police because she wants to learn more about the man and find out if he really isn't all bad, and maybe even convince him to stop killing people. From that point, the two develop a morally odd relationship as Esther begins to see the man as a mysterious big brother and the man sees her almost like a daughter to watch over. The story evolves based on Esther's actions and how she handles the idea of a killer that would spare her life for no apparent reason. It was kind of a morally bankrupt love story: two individuals who should not be related or attached to each other in any way do just that, and the story is what tragically culminates of that relationship.

If I may make a quick aside after that last sentence. I say "kind of" a love story because, well......Esther is 13. She doesn't really know what that kind of love is. And as soon as I said "love story" in context to a grown man and a 13-year-old girl, I'm sure everyone will be having certain thoughts, but........it really isn't meant to be anything like that. I just want everyone to know that I'm not positing underage relationships by way of this story - it's meant to be quite innocent, yet visually unnerving. But not in an explicit manner. The focus of the "relationship that should not be" is more on the fact that she's an innocent citizen and he's a convicted killer, not so much their age difference. I know there's no reason to defend myself because it's my own story, but I just want to be as honest as possible since this once hints at a subject some may find quite unsettling. But anyway.....even that story is not quite the final story I aimed to discuss today. Even that is not what eventually became E.O. Catalyst.

Themes:
Well, I'm fibbing a bit. Catalyst, at its heart, is a morally tragic drama about the relationship between two individuals who should never have any kind of relationship in a logical world. That is the heart of the story, but I felt it lacked context. It lacked any kind of world-building that makes this kind of story possible. Esther becomes enamored with a murderer for no reason other than she's a curious young girl. Maybe some people are okay with that level of simplicity, but I felt like the story needed something more to tie everything together. To "connect" it all together, rather. So I found it. There is one pivotal scene of the story in which the man shares his past with Esther on an incredibly personal level. I imagined a kind of merging of souls (again - this is all meant to be quite innocent); a moment where Esther truly was experiencing the pain of this man's past, and it breaks her heart. I took this scene and the idea of intimate connection to another level for the final aspect of the story - the technology. The world of Catalyst is set in a distant future, taking place entirely within the walls of a city (also named Catalyst) that has grown far in technological advancement. Their claim to fame is the "E.O", a data chip designed to be the missing link between man and machine. Many human beings born in Catalyst City are implanted with the E.O. chip (attached to the brain) and interface tools and become a subset of ever-growing test subjects. Everything in Catalyst is digitally enhanced, and human beings possessing the E.O. can reveal a connection wire from a small hole bored into the left side of the skull. This wire can be directly connected to any authorized device in the city; information is sent to the E.O. chip and amplified directly to the user's brain. This device provides the overall theme for the story - connection. In a future where connection has become all about technology and how to continually interface man with the machines they created, suddenly a morally questionable relationship between a young girl and a murderer can be viewed with more meaning. Because it's a REAL connection between two people not brought about by technology. That in a nutshell is E.O. Catalyst: it's a tale that warns against the advancements of technology that will eventually dehumanize the human race. How can we attempt to connect everything, if we forget how to meaningfully connect?

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And that's it, everybody! Thank you all so much for sticking with me for this month of manga stories. These were just sneak peaks into the worlds of my stories, so I hope you enjoyed the little glimpses I let through. As it is currently, I only have these four established stories running through my head, but I'm sure as the years go on I'll dream up more and more. And perhaps I'll share them here, too. But you can definitely count on seeing artwork from all of these stories appearing here at some time or another (though I imagine Gogyouo-Sama will still be my primary focus). With that said, we'll be returning to regular unscheduled updates for awhile, so thank you again for joining me on March Manga Madness!

One quick extra note: I've just added Email Alerts to the blog. Just enter your email address into the prompt on the side bar and submit and you'll be notified whenever I post!

Originally I was planning to do a rather artsy piece. It was going to be very minimalist - just Esther facing away from the viewer with her arms spread like wings before a burst of light, and in the foreground behind her would be a collection of symbolic imagery placed deliberately to convey the mood of the story. This drawing was being planned in my head several months in advance. BUT, I then did the Freebird drawing. Girl with arms spread was out. Then I did the drawing for D/4-Laws, where I tried adding a collection of symbolic images, and it came out ok, but it did not look very profound. That was out too. All I knew was that I wanted to draw Esther, with her attention shifted away from us. I decided to try an angle that I don't often draw full poses for: a direct side angle. It's another one of my weak points, but I think I did well here. As usual I totally fail when it comes to clothing. I can never seem to decide what kind of clothes I want a character to have, so I usually just throw some kind of robes or one-piece cloth on them, because they're easy to draw. One of these days I'm going to meaningfully plan out what a character is going to wear before I draw it, I swear. You can also see my amateur attempt at a "future city" in the bottom left. The structure in the center is supposed to represent the control tower that houses all of the connection wires that keeps Catalyst running. I don't know where a barren clif like this would be inside the walls of a technologically advanced future city.

Also, there is a dog. No reason, there's.......just a dog. I felt like Esther needed a pet sidekick, so I gave her a dog. :p

Manga Madness #3: Dead/Four-Laws

Here we go, Manga Madness Week 3! Today's manga is an action thriller that goes by Shi-Housoku, or Dead/Four Laws.

Full Title: Shi-Housoku
Translation: Laws of Death, The Four Laws, Dead/Four-Laws

Synopsis: Ryuusuke Yamanaka, age 28, is the newest rookie in Criminal Investigations at the Ebetsu Police Station. His goal is to become the best investigator in Hokkaido and stop at nothing to bring criminals to justice, as atonement for his late wife who lost her life in an attempted robbery. As the days grind on, Ryuusuke hears various tidbits and tall-tales from his colleagues; apparently, Ebetsu Station is cursed. Every 25 years, an ex-cop known only as the "Policeman's Ghoul", a man who is supposed to be dead, comes to town in late fall and makes people disappear. Ryuusuke barely pays any mind to their stories. However, one day he begins to hear whispers in the streets as he leaves work. And when a man wearing a cop's badge unlike any he's ever seen before begins tailing him in the shadows, Ryuusuke just might become a believer........

Origin:
For the longest time, Gogyouo-Sama was the only story to my name. My entire focus was spent on developing it and nothing else. But when I came up with Hyozan, I realized how fun it was to make up more new worlds and stories - I suddenly was driven to create a bigger library of characters to pull from. I started brainstorming and eventually dreamed up two new stories - the first of which being this one. Both Gogyouo-Sama and Hyozan were shounen action works at heart, so this time I wanted to try something different. I decided to try a horror/mystery action work, and I came up with it from a very simple concept: a pun. In Japanese the character for death (死) is prounced "shi". The character for the number 4 (四) is usually pronounced "yon", but in some instances it can also be pronounced as "shi". The two kanji have similar radicals as well. Because of this, 4 is a very unlucky number in Japan, and is often not even used in certain places since it gives allusions of "death". I challenged myself to create a story based on this, and Shi-Housoku is what came of it. I also give it the fancier English title of Dead/Four-Laws because the actual translation (Death Laws) sounds a bit too much like Death Note.

Character/Plot:
For my past works, I had already utilized a teenager and a child as protagonists. D/4-Laws is a darker story meant for a more adult audience, so I wanted to try out an adult protagonist. Enter Ryuusuke Yamanaka, a spineless wimp aiming to make it big. If I could compare him to any characters from my other works, I would pick Masashi from Gogyou; although he doesn't live in to the "spineless wimp" stereotype quite as strongly. He's a wimp, but he's also quite friendly and social, despite his insecurities (he's had those white streaks in his hair since his adolescence, and is constantly teased about them). He also has drive - in his early 20's as a young married man, he tragically lost his wife when a burglar broke into their home while he was out on the job (working as a night-shift security guard); the two had a struggle that brought about his wife's death. This event drove Ryuusuke to work towards becoming a full-fledged cop so he could actively pursue criminals, and hopefully prevent the same tragedy that befell his wife for others.

This is Ryuusuke's backstory that brings us to the starting point of the series, where he has achieved part of his goal and become a Criminal Investigations officer in Ebetsu. The story begins with its serious tone, but also rather light-hearted, as we see Ryuusuke adjusting to his new position and co-workers at Ebetsu Station. He learns quickly that several of his fellow officers are heavily into the occult and all things supernatural, forming a sort of "occult gang" within the station. It turns out Ryuuske's assigned partner is the president of this so-called gang, and he gets coerced into joining them in their hobby, even though he has no interest in the occult. While taking a weekend excursion to a ghost town, the gang tells Ryuusuke of the supposed "curse" of Ebetsu Station. In the early 1900's, there was a special cop who worked at Ebetsu Station who was sort of a spy; he would infiltrate criminal hideouts and leak information back to the police. He was a sadistic man who loved his work far too much; he would often kill criminals in cold blood without giving them proper trial, which gave the other cops reason to fear him. They called him "The Policeman's Ghoul" because of his pale complexion and sunken-in eyes. The man's corruption became worse and worse over time; he began acting as a spy not only for the police, but also for the criminals he was supposed to be spying on. The final straw was pulled when the Ghoul murdered a fellow officer in broad daylight. No-one knows what caused him to snap, but he went on a rampage, officers left and right, until the remaining police force of Ebetsu pinned him down and shot him dead. The incident became a legend in Ebetsu - and the Occult Gang is convinced that every 25 years, the Ghoul rises from the grave to seek revenge on the Ebetsu police. Ryuusuke, of course, thinks the story is ridiculous and doesn't believe a word of it, especially the '25 years' bit. But as the days go on, Ryuusuke can't help but let his mind wander back to the story; though he did not believe it, the story itself chilled him to the bone. The story continues to haunt him as strange things start occurring wherever he goes in town, and he discovers that someone really is haunting him. One day he is led by strange happenings and whispers to an abandoned subway tunnel, where he finds a man waiting for him. The meeting of Ryuusuke and this man sets forth a series of events that will plunge the town of Ebetsu into chaos once again.

Themes:
The title Dead/Four-Laws refers to a set of cryptic, unwritten rules that are the Ghoul's credo - the way he performed his work and how he balanced his dual nature as a cop and a criminal. In this story, the sides of right and wrong as defined by the "law" is a prevalent theme. Ryuusuke is a moral man - he always follows the rules down to the letter, and he vows to not let any criminals get away with "breaking the rules" after the death of his wife. So, what would happen if Ryuusuke himself were forced to break some of these rules? Or what if he was made to follow a new set of rules that contradicts the old rules? Is he still a moral man because he's "following the rules", regardless of what the rules are? These are the kinds of situations that D/4-Laws examines: satirizing the legal system by presenting its corruption as a supposedly antagonistic entity and a slew of moral dilemmas for those who uphold it. Honestly, the whole "occult ghost story" setup is mostly a backdrop for these bigger themes, but there are still plenty of supernatural themes and events in the story that ultimately drive the plot forward and will truly put Ryuusuke's morality to the test.

That's three down, one to go. Tune in again next week for the finale of Manga Madness, Part 4!

It took me awhile to figure out exactly what kind of image I wanted to represent D/4-Laws. The mood is radically different from my first two stories, so I wanted a mood shift in the imagery as well. After several test images and one re-do, I ended up with this image of Ryuusuke in despair, being towered over by the Ghoul (that's not really what the Ghoul looks like - it's just how I've chosen to depict him here). As for the imagery in the background: the sign on the right is a Japanese stop sign that says "tomare" (止まれ　- imperative of the verb "stop"); the words in the frame on the left say "Ebetsu Station"; the badge is based of the design of an actual Hokkaido policeman's badge; and the gravestone is meant to be a possible image of the Ghoul's grave. I know it seems really weird that they would put "GHOUL" on the grave instead of his actual name, but I haven't given him one yet and I was running out of ideas at this point in the drawing. ^^; Once again, the images for the logo were drawn by hand and then combined and touched up in Photoshop. The shading in the background was also done with Photoshop.