Weekend Lounge ~ Strange Journey into Forgotten Lands!

Find the rare dub at the Internet Archive!

Welcome to the weekend! I hope your week has been as wild as mine has been. Starting a Kickstarter campaign and having it fund in 24 hours is exciting stuff. It wasn't quite what I expected to happen, but I can't say it's not a pleasant experience.

Nonetheless, it's the weekend. Time to unwind!

Today, I wanted to go over two things in particular, but before we get to the update on the Kickstarter, I wanted to share a rare find I recently stumbled across.

Years ago, back during Japan's bubble economy, the anime landscape was known for wild and weird OVAs unlike anything you had ever seen before. From weird projects like California Crisis to Megazone 23, it looked as if the sky was the limit. I want to share one of these with you today. Once such anime was known as Leda: the Fantastic Adventures of Yohko, one of the most influential OVAs of its time. This is an older portal story in the vein of A Princess of Mars or Escaflowne, meant to reach a more classic state of wonder. This OVA is not very much like a modern Isekai as we know them today, and that is much of what makes it great.

In Leda, a young woman writes a song for boy she likes, and her love transports her to a new world where an evil sorcerer wishes to use her talents for his own ends. It is her love that is the true power in this anime. Our main character must don the sword of the goddess and cross the land to put an end to this evil so she can get home and present her true feelings to the one she loves the most. It is the sort of romance one does not see too much in anime anymore, never mind one with this much wonder.

Some have complained that her crush isn't well defined or that there isn't any heavy worldbuilding on this one, but both miss the point of the OVA. It is love that transcends time and space and gives us the power to be the best we can be, no matter who we are. The particulars are not the point of this influential anime.

What you might not know about Leda is that, while it was popular and well respected in its day, is fairly unknown in the west even back when it released. However, there was a very rare, infamous dub that was once thought lost to time. That is, until it was put up on the Internet Archive. Now you can see this influential OVA and the rare dub in the same place since no one knows if it'll ever get released again. Rights issues with old OVAs are kind of dicey these days, never mind ones like this that never had much presence over here to begin with.

Nonetheless, Leda is a good watch and holds up well today, especially in a post-Pulp Revolution era where old OVAs are getting more attention in the west than they have in years. You'll have a good time with this one.

You can find the rare dub version of Leda: The Fantastic Adventure of Yohko here. Better check it out before the archive gets gutted thanks to certain OldPub authors scrounging for pennies to give to their masters. We might soon lose preservation efforts like this forever if such folks get their way. No legitimate artist should be for such things.

But that is just one of the things I wanted to mention today.

In other news, here is a new update on the Gemini Man Kickstarter! We funded within the first 24 hours and are now looking towards extras, including new stories and art to be included in the overall package. The initial campaign was to fund cover art for the big magazine-style omnibus release of the trilogy, and that will be commissioned once the campaign has ended. This is all thanks to the generous backers who jumped in so early.

The artist for the cover will be Manuel Guzman, the man who did the cover for Book 3, Gemini Outsider! He went above and beyond on that one. You can see the cover art process for Book 3 below. He did great work on this and I can't wait to see his work on the full trilogy cover! It's been a long time coming and we're so close to the end.

As for the final release, I just got my pre-release copy (without a cover or bonus content) of the paperback copy in the mail recently to look it over, and this thing is a behemoth! We're talking three novels and over 200,000 words and 300 wide pages. This thing is unwieldy, but that is how you want a full trilogy to be. It's definitely stuffed to the brim, though should we hit the stretch goals it will be even more packed.

That's a bit hard to believe from my perspective, but it's been a wild campaign so far. Let us see just how wild it will get be the end! There is plenty of time left to go!

Like I said, this is one huge project. That is why I wanted the readers to be a part of the process and help shape the final project. A full trilogy release like this is an undertaking unlike any I've done before. It's been a real strange journey.

But we have even more of the campaign to look forward to. We still have a month left and I have other surprises to share with you before we get to the end. Check out the campaign page and back today! You're going to love this one.

Wild times are just ahead!

Back today for more fun stories and more cool art!