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this may not be the blog for personal feelings, but shit it's my blog.

my interest in comics, or if we're going into details, manga, stemmed when i was six years old, and my older sister brought home this oddly bound book titled "dragon ball." granted i also had "tintin" in my possession as well, but that didn't attract me as much as dragon ball did. maybe it was the fact i could relate myself to lil goku since i was that short and wished i had a tail like his. maybe because dragon ball didn't had much dialogue then. and even though tintin had full color print big pages for ease to read, i was more inclined to hunch down and huddle the palm sized little manga in my chubby hands.

so ever since then i've been fixated on manga solely. big eyes are cool to me. i couldn't wait to be fourteen because apparently that's when magical things start happening to you, as per the magical girl rules they set in mangas. i was waiting to find some ancient artifact or a talking animal or a secret book that will sprout wings and throw me off into some magical land. obviously none of those wishful hopes happened as i'm still here, being a cynic as ever.

i moved to the states at the age of twelve, and discovered to my disappointment, what i had been calling a comic back home, does not equate to what they call comics here. i was instead bombarded with super overly muscled men and women in brightly colored spandex with capes. sure i've known them before, but i knew them as cartoons, not as comic book characters. i was stumped, unable to find any of my beloved manga in any bookstores. that was more than ten years ago.

then through the years in my sadness of lack of manga, i've tried numerous times to get in with the webcomic fad they had booming back when the net started. i was only a youngun when that happened. time flies. but i've never managed to keep loyal to any ideas i had floating in my head, or i get intimidated by other webcomics that are so famous and wonderful. now i just don't give a crap and do whatever the hell i want. though i still need to update it more often. i digress.

so i started to nod my head and think to myself, "so maybe this comic thing isn't that bad after all." and few years later, i enrolled a summer class with an instructor whom i still herald now, bernard chang.

the class was 'introduction to graphic novels' or something along that line. i don't remember the name really, just what i learned.

i learned that comic, manga, manhua, manhwa, sunday strips, webcomics are different of each other. completely in their ways of telling a story and even their style, however, the theme they all retain is they are telling a story in their own way. comics are more action packed, more emphasis on actions, dramatic angles, money shots and they have to keep everything consistent and short. comic books in america don't have the luxury of spanning to 140+ pages like manga do (the mangaka do work per chapters and publish it on a monthly basis with other series, but they get to gather up all the chapters into one bound book later on). comic books get 30 pages (around there somewhere) and they even have to be bombarded with advertising, so they aren't free to have a lot of empty space with just one dialogue bubble or two as in some manga. and i thiiiiiiiiink comics are published weekly? or is it monthly as well.

in any case. i learned to appreciate them spandex people through this class, and appreciate more the way they use a different way of storytelling.

i think i have more ramble to ramble on, but i can't think of anything.