2644 I Release You.

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I almost never write a blog post in advance, but I did for tonight’s page because I was doing something and happened to have the blog page open. Except this evening before I started working on the art the news dropped about Akira Toriyama dying on the first of March. It threw me off enough that I wasn’t able to get through the page on time, plus I just wanted to stop and mark the event in the blog. So I saved the other one and now I’m writing this.

My art is passable, but because of that it’s difficult to pick out influences, since it gets filtered through my lack of skill. I really love Toriyama’s style, though it’s probably impossible to see any influence in mine. The clean lines on the black and white manga pages are some of my favorite. It’s rarely muddy the way it gets with some manga styles if a lot is going on. I get visually overwhelmed easily since my eyes have always been a little off. Being able to follow action keeps me in the story. Putting aside the art stuff there’s also the fact that I just liked the stories he told and the franchises he worked on. Dragon Quest 8 was my favorite in that series since it was the first to translate the art into a cartoon generated in real time. The DBZ games got there a bit faster but I was never a big fan of reliving the battles as a participant. I’ve always dreamed of a time when I could construct my characters as 3d models and manipulate them without having to try and draw everything all the time. That’s an entirely other skillset, but whatever. The actual cartoons eventually did just that. It’s harder to tell now, but DBZ hasn’t been hand animated for a while. It’s just that technology bridged the gap at some point. Anyway that’s all as may be. I’m right in the middle of reading Dragon Ball Super as it comes out, and I don’t know how much of the story was worked out in advance. Whatever happens it won’t be in the hands of the creator and that is always dicey. Black Frieza was just introduced and that was clearly going to be a big deal at some point. Toriyama’s successor clearly has the art skills to continue, but he has expressed on more than one occasion how comforting it was to have the master behind him to guide him.

This page might seem like a reaction to these events, but it’s just happenstance. I wanted to cut away to Jessica and express her feelings about resisting change. By whatever magic causes these things the page just happens to resonate. Accepting change, releasing control, and that sort of thing is very difficult for some people, but you can’t stop it, so you eventually have to learn to accept it and adapt to it. For a moment though it’s not evil to stop and grieve the loss of what you had.

He was 68. There could have been 30 more years of good times or more, but that isn’t the reality we live in now. I wish we only had to wait a year to wish him back, or we could grab him out of the time stream and save him before it was too late. Alas, that’s only for fiction.

Please come back to me on Monday. I look forward to our next meeting.