By Neale Van Fleet on July 17th, 2023
Like many houses with preteens, my house has been increasingly inundated with more and more manga. One of my 10 year old son’s favourite activities is going to the library or manga store and reading for hours.
The New York Times has a beautifully rendered take on how manga are translated for western audiences. There are many subtle aspects, line onomatopoeia being different, and non-subtle ones like the structure of the books, which read right-to-left. Earlier books like Akira, pictured above, were flipped for Western audiences.
Since manga was first introduced to the U.S. in the 1980s, American companies have wrestled with how to adapt the genre for their readers. It requires taking into account not only art and visual concepts that are unique to Japanese, but also an entirely different system of reading.
Today manga is enormously popular in the U.S. and is published in something close to its original form: in black and white, on inexpensive paper stock, to be read in the Japanese style. But this wasn’t always the case.
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By Neale Van Fleet on July 16th, 2023
I can’t find the artist, but I’ve always liked this sculpture of car parts along a bike path that runs between Montréal’s Mile End and Little Italy neighbourhoods.
By Neale Van Fleet on July 15th, 2023
By Neale Van Fleet on July 14th, 2023
One more take on Fabre Metro, shot through an arriving train.
By Neale Van Fleet on July 14th, 2023
Today I learned about the existence of ‘Coning’ which is when you disable a self-driving taxi by attaching a traffic cone to its hood.
[T]hey found that a cone on a hood renders the vehicles little more than a multi-ton hunk of useless metal.
Let’s mark this as the official start of the Great War between humanity and robots.
Read More at One Foot Tsunami →
By Neale Van Fleet on July 13th, 2023
A (last?) piece from my trip to NYC a few months ago. I always like pieces which cross different mediums together, and I really like how this outfit becomes a chart when accompanied by a legend. From the the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum.
By Neale Van Fleet on July 12th, 2023
A piece on thee ground by Gabadingdom.
By Neale Van Fleet on July 12th, 2023
My longest and most elaborate abstract video so far, at well over 5 minutes. This one is an experiment with colour. Strobe warning.
By Neale Van Fleet on July 11th, 2023
Found this paste up of Patti Smith in the entryway to an accountant’s office in Montréal’s Mile End.
Advice from Patti:
Make your interactions with people transformational, not just transactional.
By Neale Van Fleet on July 11th, 2023
Friend of Elsewhat Rosemary Mosco wrote and illustrated a beautiful but very concerning story about Ottawa’s Rideau Canal skating rink which didn’t freeze enough for skating this past winter. This is unprecedented.
As well as the environmental message, this comic captures the feeling of growing up in Ottawa and skating on the canal and eating Beaver Tails, referred to as “pastry” in the comic, which I have to imagine was done to avoid having to clarify that a ‘Beaver Tail’ is a flat donut-like pancake-like treat and not a hunk of leathery rodent appendage.
I lived near the canal for years, and had friends who would skate or cross country ski to school on the canal. This story hits hard.
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