Specials for Gary and Nada

These two sites swam across my ken in the past two days, one answering to Nada's expressions of nostalgia for Japan, the other sharing one word of the title of my blog (and first book of poems) but actually having something to do with the art of illustrated narrative as practiced by Gary (see blogroll at right if you don't know who the ty*dk I'm talking about).

The first is a site devoted to Japanese emoticons -- you know, these things: ; ) . According to the propaganda: "The Japanese set is read vertically, while the western ones are read horizontally. The Japanese ones also tend to be more complex, and therefore convey more nuances. The compiler of these icons speculates that the reason is that "while American (alphabet) letters in computer are 1 byte, Japanese letters in computer are 2 bytes, so Japanese letters can have more characters." Guaranteed several minutes of amusement.

The second is a single-artist run site that looks like the work of a team of specialists. I've been reading through these for a couple of minutes now, very well drawn and taking great advantage of browser screen space. The site is called Electric Sheep Comix, and it's all designed, written, drawn, etc., by one Patrick Farley. Ever heard of him? I prefer the science fiction ones the best, like Delta Thrives, even if the narratives are a bit cosmic. This is a high-bandwidth site, but there are several pieces, such as Rush Limbaugh Eats Everything, that work fine on a 56k modem.