Rabid Sharks
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Prison Blog

In which Possum recounts his experiences as an offender in the system.

Possum Bones is autistic. He has identified as a dirty kid in the past, and he’s attended multiple rainbow gatherings. He has several years left to serve in the Washington Correctional system.

He has been making art since he could sit up. He communicates better in writing than speech. If you are interested in the experience of an autistic person doing prison time, check out his Prison Blog. If you are a fan of comic art, underground/outsider music, Lovecraft, Clarke Ashton Smith, Murakami, Cixui Liu, etc.

Shelton 9/19/19

Isekai manga ... sucks . I love manga, but its true that in manga, founding an entire series on a single gimmick is a common practice. This is not always bad, it can actually be really cool. Examples of manga/anime founded on a single gimmick that were good : Ranma 1/2, Gantz, Death Note, Hetalia, Arakawa Under The Bridge... there’s a lot of successful examples. But this Isekai trend is totally lame! Skeleton Knight was featured in Otaku USA this month. Another cookie cutter Isekai. This shameless bid to appeal to the largest audience for minimal creative effort reeks of capitalism in a way that I hate to see in the comics industry. As the comics industry grows more mainstream ( hello children of the 90s ), this type of profiteering has become more and more inevitable. We’re seeing more and more comics-to-cinema cash-ins and we’ll see more and more of this Isekai-caliber manga ... the comics renaissance so beautifully illustrated by Watchmen has led ultimately to this... the post-validation of comics era where now, an art form that was a haven for the disturbed freaks of the underground has become seeded by visionless hacks.
True, there are some Isekai that are sort of cool. I don’t know if Devilman G counts, but that one was amazing...even if the ending was sort of slapped together, but in manga (and I'm only saying this because I love manga as a religious fanatic loves martyrdom) for every original creation there are dozens of clones. It’s a cutthroat industry, is what it looks like.
Of course its not just Isekai. I pretty much automatically write off any manga or anime that centers on a school club. There are exceptions. The majority of those exceptions are exceptions because those manga came out before, oh, 2010. For example, if Oh My Goddess or Azumanga Daioh came out today I would probably write them off. But they've withstood the test of time. Kill La Kill and Boku No Hero were fine.
Sometimes tropes are a good thing. but...originality is the trump card. Isekai is just weak. What is it about this century and making soulless reboot after soulless reboot? Did original ideas all begin to die when the clock struck 2000? Did humanity just decide to rehash everything for a century?

Elisa Carlson