I don't draw much these days, I just draw in between compiles and during this thing we have on Friday lovingly called "Drawing Meats." It's dinner and a night of drawing debauchery. That's the stuff I'll be posting on DA for shits and giggles. More shits, then giggles though, just so you know.

Recently I've been on a Galaxy Express 999 kick. I've seen the first 26 episodes of the old 1978 series, all three movies (if you can call Eternal Fantasy a movie), Space Symphony Maetel, and Maetel Legend. I actually bought Maetel Legend because, hey, I should support the thing if I like it so much, right? Note: Don't buy it. Even though Space Symphony Maetel is a sequel to it, Maetel Legend has crap animation and a feeling of rushed crapiness all around it. I'd buy the Galaxy Express DVDs if they were brought out over here, but alas, the show's not hip or popular. These days anime needs up-skirt and and white haired emo-boys to be considered decent. I also bought the GE999 Viz graphic novels -- very hard to track down and most of them I got are second hand, but it definitely brought the cost down. I know it's the second Galaxy Express series, but it's still decent to read. It probably definitely doesn't hold a candle to the original though.

I would help those guys fansub the rest of Galaxy Express if I knew a lick of Japanese or all the technical mumbo-jumbo that goes into doing whatever it is they do to make Xvid files. I'd do it just so I could see the rest of the old cartoon series.

What is it that's so attractive about the old series? For one thing, it's pretty creepy. Leiji Masumoto must have a fear of skeletons because they pop up all over the place in the show. Tetsuro'll take five steps and trip over a skull.

Tetsuro seems to be pimp too. Just about every woman who knocks the Galaxy Express out of commission is doing so to stare melodramatically at Maetel or to get with Tetsuro. Nevermind that he's eight years old. He's flesh and blood and warm and the cold, metallic cyborg chicks need them some of that.

The moralizing is wonderful stuff. There's a great episode where Tetsuro helps out a homeless woman, because he knows her pain (the pain of not eating). In return, she ends up kidnapping him, bringing him back to her family's home on a nearby moon, and putting him through a mock wedding to appease her senile parents. Maetel then reverse kidnaps Tetsuro and steals him away in the night. Maetel's moral: The woman, despite kidnapping him, is really a good and kind-hearted person trying to make her parents happy. Good stuff.

Of course, Maetel herself is a great reason to watch the show too. Elegant, blonde, beautiful, and fully of mystery and wisdom. What more could you want in an anime chick? Plus she's old school so we don't have to look up her skirt to prove any of the above.

That's enough rambling about GE999. It's time to go watch Speed Grapher. Sure it's not well animated. Story is, meh. Why am I watching it, you ask? I started watching it on IFC, but canceled my cable because I didn't want to keep paying Comcast a ridiculous amount of money, and now I want to know what happens so I Netflix'ed it.