Spring of Drowned Klutz

Life lesson: reading the visitors' guide is all well and good, but it's no substitute for watching your step.

Well, I really wanted to get in on MentalCrash's Ranma ½ commemorative event, but inexplicable communication difficulties prevented that, sad to say. But that just means an opportunity to start my own, with blackjack and hookers! Forgot the blackjack and hookers, though; fortunately, I still have this ;)

Ranma was neither my introduction to TG as a concept (that probably goes to Help! I'm Trapped In My Sister's Body, which I never read but noted with interest in the catalogue page at the back of some other Scholastic book^° back in middle school) nor TF in general (too many things to count,) but it was probably the single most critical catalyst in setting me on the path I now tread, for better and worse ;) Caught a preview for the (first) movie on the tail end of one of my brother's Pokemon tapes,^°° and there was so much raw unfiltered what-am-I-even-looking-at-here that I had to find out what this thing even was.

Fortunately, there was already plenty of information on the Internet, and not only did I get my answer, I was able to start reading it. And God, I just fell in love. On top of the transformation angle tickling that part of my brain that I'd already discovered was into that stuff, it's just a damn solid comedy. And I love Rumiko Takahashi's art – she's among my top three or four major influences. (I'd kill to have her breezy, confident linework.) It was not long after that that I started taking my very first (incredibly cringe-inducing) stabs at specifically TF/TG-themed drawings. And a mere couple decades later, I sometimes produce things I can look at without cringing!

So this one's for you, Takahashi-sensei. Sure, it'dve made more sense to do this on the 35th anniversary instead of the 36th, but sometimes you forget to really appreciate things until someone else reminds you. Thanks for multiple classics and a whole lot of laughs.

^° (Ah, the days when you could find weird shit like that in the juvenile-fiction section of the public library…!)
^°° (Ah, the days when they sometimes put the ads after the thing you bought the video for…!)