Thursday, July 18, 2013

 

Welcome to the new blog about me as an aspiring mangaka

NOTE: I've bold-bracketed the part that's just me talking about myself as a service to those of you who care enough to read this, but, geez, not all that crap!

"The term manga (kanji漫画hiraganaまんがkatakanaマンガAbout this sound listen English /ˈmɑːŋɡə/ or /ˈmæŋɡə/) is a Japanese word referring both to comics and cartooning."
-The wikipedia page on manga, in case you don't even know what manga is, dope.

Hi my name is still Josh Wehrheim-Gegel, but now I'm a different Josh Wehrheim-Gegel.  The old Josh Wehrheim-Gegel was, well not legitimately anything, really, and I murdered him and replaced him with Josh Wehrheim-Gegel: an aspiring mangaka ("aspiring" is a big clue that I am also not legitimately anything.)

I love (♡) manga and I read it so much that if I made a pie chart of how I spend my time, it would look like this:


"if"

[I read a ton of manga.  I read my first manga in junior high sometime (I think it might have been Parasyte?  How terrifying is that?), about the time I was getting into anime.  Then, over time, more and more manga became available over the internet, and I began acquiring manga by more respectable methods that involved the authors getting paid (I assume?)  Now I have a fledgling manga shelf, although it's still pretty lame. (I mean lame as in it doesn't have enough manga, not lame because it's blue and has a red choo-choo train painted on the side.)  I read all kinds of manga.  Manga for kids, manga for adults, fan manga (dojinshi), manga from outside of Japan, manga that I decide to stop reading because, yikes, ALL KINDS OF MANGA.  I read manga, read news about which ones are being animated, reread my favorites, buy it, listen to podcasts about it, tweet manga panels that I pretend my followers will like.  Last month, I read Old Boy one weekend just because I figured I should since Spike Lee's adaptation of the Korean movie adaptation is going to be a thing.

Ever since I was a kid, before I knew what manga was, I wanted to draw comics.  And to be a comedian and a musician and make films and to play in the NBA and to have a twin etc.  But comics were a pretty thing.  When my Dad was a kid, he lived in Sparta Illinois, (I should probably donate next wikipedia drive http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparta,_Illinois#Printing_industry) and at my grandparents' house they had rubbermaid containers filled with old DC silver age, Archie, Casper, Hot Stuff, Little Dot, etc.  I read and watched X-men, Batman, Spiderman, the whole gang, and especially Sonic the Hedgehog.  I'm a proud owner of a comic where Sabrina the Teenage Witch meets Sonic the Hedgehog, one where Sonic meets Spawn, and one where Spawn meets Batman.  (Not the one where comic Sabrina meets TV Sabrina aka Melissa Joan Hart, though yet)  In college there was a period where I read too many webcomics, but I still read Qwantz and Megatokyo, and reread my personal copy of The Great Outdoor Fight every once and again.  I also have the comics I tried to draw as a kid in a box in the basement with X-KIDS written on it big block letters with crayon.  The problem was, drawing is hard and as a kid, hard things were TOO FRUSTRATING!  But now as an adult, hard things are (still frustrating) things that I try until I run out of patience and then return to later to try again.]


Anyway, Shonen Jump (here's the wikipedia page for it http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sh%C5%8Dnen_Jump uggggh you're so ignorant of my interests) is celebrating its 45th year and its increasingly global scale by holding a worldwide contest and I am going to participate in it.  (No link because in a worldwide contest everyone is my competition and I'm definitely not talented enough to risk helping anyone in the slightest if that will add to my odds.)  So I'm going to participate!  The prize for the best English-language one is 500,000 yen  (yen are just about cents), which is pretty rad, but more importantly, I could share a story I made that people can enjoy or hate and have something concrete to show my confused and worried Grandma Eunice.

So anyway, I've been working on it for a while, and wrote half a script for one before I realized the story I was telling was longer than the maximum length for entry.  (The titular octopus hero didn't appear until page 16?)  Now I've restarted.  Here's a rough sketchout I made yesterday of the first page!

This is a right-to-left manga!

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