man, just finished working out and playing the baki ova while doing it, and it was so intriguing early one when baki was this dude who mastered karate by just reading it. its a shame baki suffered from that unfortunate disease of lasting too long, so characters get way more over powered then they need to be, and you lose some of that early essence of what made it intriguing.
i mean, dont get me wrong, i think baki floats in and out of this wtf, oh thats awesome stage. like his shadow boxing stuff later on was pretty awesome. the entire prisoner arc for me was pretty interesting, but well, i dont know, i guess i cannot articulate a good point right now, but it was such an interesting, mysterious thing when you first saw that ova and youre like holy shit he mastered karate by just reading it, thats awesome. well at least it was for me in the late 90s when i saw the ova. it just left me and my friend who were super heavy into martial arts as teens, in aw, like fuck we need more. haha. we had no idea it was a manga or anything. we just thought it was another japanese short movie with no end that we bought again. lol. hindsight is too funny.
well hats out of the bag, im planning to write and draw a martial arts comic. my goal is april 2013 to get it out. the writing isnt hard, as i go over the story daily and have written my thoughts that i can easily turn into my first 30-40 page chapter. its just the drawing is going to take a bit to revamp. so wish me luck. im looking to provide an itagaki style for my males, with a little modification, especially in leg length, but no long shitty upper torsos like in, tough, but i want my females to be oh! great style, but i’ll probably shoot to more of an american female comic style like ed benes who draws very powerful women, or j scott campbell. we will see, but i def want the males to be kind of that itagaki style. i dont wanna be shitty about it and just trace a bunch of shit from the internet, and then modify it to my liking and use it. that would be easy, as im not trying to make money from this, but i really want to learn to draw again.
the gist of one of the stories i have that i think i might roll with for a 5 chapter short of sorts, is a current time martial artist who at a bar one day decides to tell an aspiring mma fighter who thinks little of the competition and the sport, the stories of his travels around the world training, while also teaching this young adult a few techniques to shake the world when he gets to the main stage. the first one is him telling a story of meeting a chinese kung fu master in brazil on his hunt to meet the gracies to train and or beat them. the main styles that the kung fu master would use are southern style praying mantis, taiji, and one of the many claw styles, not sure.
my ultimate goal is to just get really good at drawing, because i can do the writing all day, that way i can get these chapters out faster, and provide a creative outlet for myself, and for us, because lord knows i would love to draw a few splashes of yujiro vs shozan to entertain myself and to entertain us all with some bad ass wallpapers. haha. maybe a nice pic of baki beating the shit out of mitt romney. haha
Mamiya