Recently, I participated in the comic book anthology project Otaku No Gaijin 2, a celebration of anime movies from 80s to 2000s, put together by The Kayfam and Power to the Panel. Each person picked an anime film from a list to make either a single piece of art or a page of a comic, and would have 48 hours to complete it.
I ended up picking Patlabor: The Movie. I was pretty familiar with the series, having watched a good amount of it previously, and even made a remix of the theme song from one of the series. So I felt I was in good shape to tackle this, so I decided to do a sort of “Grand Design” style comic page to condense the entire movie into a single page. What I got instead was a bigger challenge than I could have anticipated.
Unlike most movie from Sunrise animation that revolve around mechs, Mobile Suit Gundam being an example, Patlabor: The Movie is more of a police procedural where Tokyo Metropolitan Police Special Vehicle Section 2, Division 2, investigate some strange thing happening to labor mech that have been going berserk. There were really only two to three segments in the movie with mecha action, so I had to figure out how to get from the start of the movie to the end, starting with the first incident Division 2 responded to.
Starting with watching the movie a couple of times, I took notes on what were the key themes and pinpointed what were the most essential scenes of the film. From there, narrowed down my list of scenes to just 10 that became the 10 panels of my page. I wanted to emulate the look and feel of the anime, so I did direct studies of the movie, but with some panels I had to get creative so I could represent more of what was going on with each scene. After finishing up my pencils, I moved things over to the computer where I tightened up my pencils. Initially I was going to just do pretty flat colors and ink everything that I penciled, but I decided if I was going to emulate the anime, I was going to go all-in and make it look and feel just like the anime.
This is where I underestimated what I was in for…
By the end of 48 hours, I was only had three panels completed, so in my mind I thought I had completely failed the assignment. A lot of people had already banged out there pages, so I really felt like I was slacking. I was barely getting any sleep, and was taking 3 hour naps so I could keep pace to keep things done.
Thankfully those organizing gave some grace to me because I was in touch with them the whole time, and was able to toss them my layouts so they could get the lettering done. It also helped I didn’t have to worry about lettering since that was going to be taken care of by the team putting the pages together for print.
On the night of the 7th day, I was finished with my page and I enjoyed a solid 8 hours of sleep.
Shoutout to Bryan Moss for putting together The Kayfam and Power to the Panel, along with everyone else putting together Otaku No Gaijin 2 including SKILLO, Danny Nehme, Vero Stewart, Britton Sukys, and Bill H. Also, special shout out to Skeme Richards, The Nostalgia King, who suggested I do this in the first place. I’ll be sharing more about Skeme in the near future, so stay tuned!
