I haven’t been there for a while, and look at how it has grown. AccessUp.com provides reviews and resources for anime and RPG computer games both old and new. There’s even a place where you can look at (poorly) translated reviews of a given product as seen by Japanese people with nothing better to do than review cartoons and video games. Outstanding!

I am pleased to announce that my collection now includes the entirety of Azumanga Daioh as currently available to the English-reading public. It’s one of the best situation comedies I’ve seen in a great long while, Japanese or otherwise. Bit fat thanks go out to the good people at Newlife Anime, A-F, and Ishin who brought this series to us rabid fanboy types free of charge.

With any luck the faceless corporate giants, US anime standbys, or up & coming freak-companies will start bringing entertainment of this caliber to the American public.

A lot of the puns require the Japanese language, but other than a handful of scenes I think that Azumanga Daioh is the kind of work that could turn things like Toonami around. Not that I have anything against DBZ, Transformers, and He-man, but… There’s not much to those shows that you can’t get from a whitebread American-cartoon cross-section.

Or maybe I’m just a freak. For your viewing pleasure, yet another sample strip.

Shockingly mundane? Disturbingly cute? Utterly lacking in sappy romance? Completely sans-villain? What’s the world coming to? Azumanga Daioh, that’s what. I’ve got almost all of the television episodes up to number 26, and a handful of the comic strips. Just a sampling of high school day-in-the-life comedy.

sample strip