The update and its announcement were delayed by a long and irritating period during which our Internet came and went and our landline phone buzzed and crackled. It was so bad that I had to take my laptop to my church (which has wireless) in order to make an important professional Skype call (I was accepting a professional award via video link at a scholarly conference in Tallinn, Estonia). The tech person came today, walked in, looked around, and said, "You need to order a new router." My wife said (I was at the grocery) that our phone was experiencing interference too, as was everyone's on our street in the development. "Guess I'll take a look outside," the tech said, with a touch of reluctant irritation.
He was gone for an hour and a half. When he returned to fiddle with our outside phone box, I asked him what he'd found out. "Had to change circuits in every box from here to Cat Hell Road," he grumbled. ("Cat Hell" is the old name of the swamp where our development now is located, and the name of the main drag into it preserves this bit of history.) He fiddled and scrabbled with the phone box, then with the lead into our house, and finally came in and booted up the router. The Internet came up within a minute. "You
still need to order a new router," he commented, then growled, "I did a darn lot of work here, y'know" and left. We think that he expected to be tipped for restoring the service for which we pay, get it or no.
Anyhow, the update, which went up over several days by fits and starts, is now complete, as is the monthly makeover (banner, featured cel/sketch, etc.). It's not "May Madness" by now, but "Midsummer Madness" fits in a Shakespearean fashion.
Plastic first. As JadeDuo says in her update thread, there have been many fine cels on the market lately from the two
Cardcaptor Sakura movies. I'd love to be a newbie again and grab a bunch of these, but honestly, just how many CCS cels does one person need?
Well, at least this one more:
Yukito and Kero-chan at story’s end
This setup contains the end keys for Yuki and Kero, plus the sweatdrop and the A1 END cel of the hat, and the original matching background. It's worth noting that this cel is the absolute last image of Yukito in the entire CCS canon. (Kero-chan does an encore in the "Leave it to Kero" short that ran after the movie.)
The setup also came with
the layout of the start combination of images, which nicely complements the end-key setup.
Other plastic pleasures include a couple new cels from the classic 1980 Pierrot series,
The Wonderful Adventures of Nils (aka
Nils Holgersson). One, sadly, has the first signs of vinegar syndrome, but another was in perfect condition:
Nils, Carrot, and Marten: The Joy of Flying
And in an "only you would..." acquisition, I picked up what proved to be the poster-sized
“Hyper Police” OP Series Title Card
This was printed rather than painted on the back of a sheet of cel stock, but it is nice to have this familiar piece of calligraphic art in my possession. (In earlier auctions I'd gotten two of the individual letters -- "H" and "P" -- that appear earlier in the OP by themselves.)
And one of my increasingly uncommon
Tree of Palme additions brought a cel of
Koram mobbed by the bolas
This complements an earlier cut, for which I have the gengas and a number of the cels.
Now for the paper side. Thanks to Midori, I was able to make a sizeable addition to my already monumental
Asatte no Hōkō collection. My favorite comes from the last moments of one of the dark episodes, in which the main character Karada chooses to run away from home and live independently. After a discouraging first day in the city, her protective older brother locates her, just as her train is beginning to leave the terminal. As he runs alongside the speeding-up train, Karada finally turns to face him and
bids him farewell
Oh, man, what an episode ender, made the more dramatic for me since my original fansubs only went up to Episode 8, and (silly me) I thought this was how the series ended -- a sad, tragic, but perfectly fitting conclusion.
Happily, I later learned that there were four more episodes, of which Ep. 10 is one of my favorites. And, nicely enough, most of my other AnH additions fill in gaps from this fine story. Interestingly, though, this batch often featured a mysterious "fixer" who often came into cuts that were going south in a major way and refigured them in major, successful ways. A number of these additions this artist (who, alas, can't be clearly identified, as there were five artists credited for animation direction of this episode). I just call him/her "Ill at ease," after the first cut that I have that shows this artist's distinctive touch. You'll see his/her impressive roughs on deep pink paper here:
Shouko glares at Hiro
and here:
Karada running in the rain
Watch in these galleries for the reanimations, which I was able to make from the dougas when these were complete enough to scan and put together. They are often revealing of the details that the artists spent time working out as still images but were intended to have full effect when put into motion.
Rozen Maiden was not neglected (is it ever in an update?), at least the recent Studio Deen "Rewind" series. Wanting a nice Suigintou (the chief baddie in RM season 1 but demoted to #2 status in season 2 and Rewind, much to her irritation), I bit on a lot that included a nice layout that seemed to have been folded over in the dealer's scan. When I got it, I found it had in fact been folded twice:
Suigintou under the Time-Space Clock
(Noooo, I'm not going to try to explain this moment the plot. ANN says it doesn't make a lick of sense, from start to finish. But, hell, with a pint of craft beer it's a good watch and the art is nice, so what?)
And
Yamibou, even though I itch all over whenever I watch some of it, also wasn't neglected. I added two nice roughs (with corresponding gengas) of
Meirin accosted by Gargantua’s minions
and
An intense Natsuki
And now the surprise that I'd mentioned before. I'd been hearing good things about the work of Mamoru Hosoda, including his 2009 movie
Summer Wars. Much to my surprise, a lot of rough sketches from this project showed up on Mandarake in May, and, with a bit of a tussle, I managed to pick them up. They include a series of the virtual menace of the film, a rogue AI named Love Machine,
trying to break down the door of the cyber-room where he's been trapped.
Another series, from shortly after, features the virtual reality hero, a feisty martial arts rabbit warrior named King Kazuma
slamming shut the last escape route from Love Machine's new prison.
(Oh, but he gets out anyway, and more mayhem, virtual and real-world, ensue before the film's final conclusion.)
Check out these items and, as with the Asatte no Hōkō additions, watch for the reanimations I've included, which give a vivid sense of how this art was intended to be "images in motion" rather than a simple montage of still pictures.
See it all! Or at least see some of it. It certainly shows why I, at least, don't yet see any inclination to stop collecting.
It's been quiet around here. Love the sketches and I look forward to seeing what your big CCS addition is!
KuroiTsubasa4, who deserves kind thanks for a good job 
)
Hey, come along and join the fun.