Reaching Alpha Blog

I’ve been in Tokyo since October.  It has been a great stay.  I went to Kamakura, Enoshima, and Hakone for onsen.  Onsen in Hakone is like being in a heaven, so relaxing.  I also visited my family in Niigata and had some great food.  I wrote some ideas for Reaching Alpha along the way.  I wish I could stay longer in Japan, but I’ll be going back to LA tomorrow.  I have uploaded a couple of comic strips while I’m in Japan so please check them out!

Reaching Alpha is updated with new character designs.  I got 4 strips up.  Please check them out.  I’m also supporting Pray for Japan on Kickstarter.  Pray for Japan is a documentary film about Japan earthquake that destroyed coastal area of Tohoku region in March this year.  Please click on the Pray for Japan banner to see more details about the film and how you can contribute.

Hi everyone!  I have written 12 comic strips of Reaching Alpha so far and it has been a great leaning experience.  I was able to gather some comments from readers including what they like and what they don’t like about Reaching Alpha.  I consider them as my pilot and I would like to rework my character designs, story and website to make better comic strips in the coming future.  I will be updating soon again with a strong relaunch of Reaching Alpha, but for now, I need to hide under a rock and focus on what I have to do to create a great webcomic.  I’ll see you soon!!

Caricature Part 3 – Promotion is up.  This indicates where George is going in the story.  More to come!

So I’ve been writing Reaching Alpha in 2 languages, English and Japanese.  I normally write in Japanese and then translate it into English.  I grew up in Japan and Japanese is my first language.  However, I have spent many years in the U.S. and all of my characters in Reaching Alpha speak in English.  So for those who are bilingual in English and Japanese can probably tell by reading my strips in both languages that my strips are very different in each language.  Especially it’s true for my most recent strip “Vanity”.  I made a joke about “Jordan” in Japanese.  “Jordan” means a “joke” in Japanese, so May makes a joke about Jordan saying that “it’s not a ‘joke’ (Jordan) to ask you to redraw caricatures”.  Then at the end, Jordan replies to May when she doesn’t look happy about her caricature “It’s not a joke (Jordan), is it?”.  This strip title is “Jordan” in Japanese.  In English, I call it “Vanity”.  May tells Jordan how great his drawings are and how she would never ask him to redraw her caricature like other people.  But of course at the end, May doesn’t like how her caricature looks.  She is too embarrassed to ask Jordan to redraw after telling him how she would never ask him to redraw.  She tries to like her caricature by tilting her head and bending her body looking at it from another angle.  It’s interesting how my characters develop in two separate languages.  I hope you can enjoy my strips in either language or both languages:)

I’m updating a little early tonight for change so I can go to bed.  “Vanity” is up and it’s continuing the same theme from the last comic strip “Self-Consciousness”.  It’s May’s turn to get her caricature drawn by Jordan.  How does she handle it?

It’s a mid-night update and “Self-consciousness” is added as the 10th strip of Reaching Alpha today.  It is exciting to hit the 10th strip and I would love to continue for more to come.  Maybe I’ll give out some T-shirts at the 20th strip who post comments on my Facebook page.  Stay tuned!!

It’s a new strip but it’s continued from the previous one.  Jay hires a monkey to work with the new tool since Ron mentions (jokingly) that the new tool is so easy to use that even a monkey can use it.  Jay does just that.  Here’s what happens in Working with George.

New Tool