From the Artist:

Updated : 08-13-06

About a year ago, Richard and I were fortunate enough to be interviewed for Excite! Japan. This net-based article was posted on the Japanese site, and never fully translated to English. The author was a very sweet girl by the name of Tomoko, who really did make me feel very good about our job, and she seemed to enjoy our comic.

Tonight I decided to poke around Google under my pen name. Oh come on, we all do it sometimes. It’s fascinating to see what kind of crap your name pulls up. Try it sometime. Anyway, I saw some Japanese site come up with this particular web article listed. Well not speaking much Japanese other than what I affectionately call “otaku speak” (or in other words, I can screech things in an annoyingly high voice that would normally only be heard in a hentai or something lame like that), curiosity got the better of me and I decided to go one step further than squinting at the kanji on my screen.

Enter Alta Vista’s Bablefish.

I was both amused and somewhat surprised to see that most of the comments were VERY negative. They were somewhat accusatory and made me seem like a silly American who is just capitalizing on the popularity of the Anime and Manga style. One of the comments even went so far as to say that drawing ‘large eyes and big boobs’ doesn’t make it Anime.

I’m sort of on a line on this one. I am both offended, and yet I can’t argue. It sort of hurts my feelings. Granted, I’m American. I know my audience is mostly here in the states. Remember, Otaku –no- Yen is not meant for really anyone but English speaking Anime and Manga fans who have specifically grown up in the U.S.A. That’s what I know, so that’s what we do. We get a fairly large readership from Japan, but now I’m wondering if we were really fairly represented in this article. Anyway, if you are from Japan, and you read the comic, I’d love to hear some commentary. You can always email me at guardiansun@gmail.com.

I just want everyone to remember something. I don’t do this art style because it is popular, or to make a buck. I’ve been doing this for nearly 6 years, because I love the style of it, and our comic isn’t trying to masquerade as anything but American. So if for some god forsaken reason we offended someone along the way, please don’t lynch me. I’m kind of fond of living. =P

From the Author:

Updated : 06-04-06

God I am horrible at updating this thing.

The website is now back up (As you can see if you are reading this) I do appologize for the few days of downtime. It was unfortunatly unavoidable. Our previous webhosting service was charging us too much for our hosting package. When we first started Otaku -no- Yen, it was plenty of space and bandwidth. As the months went on, we started getting more and more readers. Due to the inlux, we needed to look into a Higher bandwidth provider for our site. We informed the original host that we wished to extend our contract for 1 month. When we received a billing statement for a full year renewal, we were livid. We contacted the webhost, and they claimed to have never gotten the request. Back and forth the emails went about how we wanted our money back, and they would not do it. During this time, I was scrambling to get the site up on our new web host. The result of our email war with our previous webhost was that they kept the money, and shut down our website. We have finally come to a comprimise with our previous webhost, and sadly, we have to eat the contract extention and the money we have lost. We now have 2 hosts for the next year.

On a much happier note, I would like to state that the FANGIRL ARMY has grown by leaps and bounds. What's that? you don't know about the FGA? well get your butt onto our forums and sign up!

On the convention front, things are looking great for us in the future. We will be guesting at a couple of conventions in the future (although I cannot say which ones till they announce it).

Well, thats all for now. Time to get cranking on the next O-n-Y update!

~Drazz