front cover, 27 pages long, released Anime Expo 2004
There were 50 copies printed, all hand-made. It was painful.
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In my senior year of high school, my friends and I started a doujinshi circle called "Aoi Koi." The circle consisted of Janice, Doyeon, and myself and was mostly managed by Janice. Our first project together was an entry for the December 2003 "Tokyo Pop Rising Stars of Manga" contest, and our entry was a story about two bounty hunters and a kidnapped scientist that were trying to rob a laboratory. We each did about five pages of the story and the overall look of the book was mismatched but interesting. We didn't win at all. For the immediate 2004 Anime Expo, we wanted to get together and make a doujinshi about something popular that was guaranteed to be a hit. The first thing that came to mind was Final Fantasy, the series everyone loves and absolutely froths over. We decided to focus on more than just one particular game in the series, so we called it an anthology and represented only the post-SNES titles to appeal to the most fans. We split up the duties like so: I took Kingdom Hearts (because I had a firey hate for it), Doyeon took Final Fantasy X (because he never played it), and Janice took care of FFVII and FFVIII. FFIX received no love because of its lack of Nomura-ness and, thus, sellability. We pretty much made the book a week before the convention. It was down to the last minute and we were ripping our hair out to get it done, but we were able to somehow pull it off. We didn't know how to print it, so Janice spent a full 24 hours printing it all out on her inkjet printer. An hour before we had to leave for the convention, we were running out of time so Janice went to Kinkos and printed out the remaining pages, resulting in half the book looking really nice and the other half looking like shit. The chaos of that week was one of my fondest memories. This comic began my obsession with finding new ways to portray sword-masturbation. |
