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There’s not much to say about myself. True to my screen name, I’m a teacher, a college professor to be specific. I’ve taught on the college level since 1973, mostly entry-level writing courses, but I offer as many courses in folklore and world mythology as my (very small) campus can justify. I’ve written some books and lots of scholarly articles on fairy tales, legends ,and superstitions, as well as doing a soporific critical edition of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s business letters. In preparation for retirement, my wife and I recently moved house from the area of the Northeast US where I’ve lived for nearly a quarter of a century to a development so remote from the rest of the world that we simply call it “Cephiro.”
I became interested in Japanese anime in 1999-2000 thanks to the enthusiasm my teenage daughter had for adventure-oriented series like Gundam Wing and Slayers. To her amusement, while she developed interests in Cowboy Bebop and similar series, I became much more interested in mahou shoujo plots, because I could see the strong influence of folklore in these story lines.
My first cel (from Cardcaptor Sakura ) came to me from eBay in July 2000, and for several years I specialized in art from this wonderful series almost exclusively. As I learned more about anime and art, though, my tastes broadened, and, starting in 2004, I started collecting from a wider range of shows. However, I’d have to say that I remain committed to the mahou shoujo genre, while adding to it art from other series that are strongly influenced by legend or folktale.
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And, as I’ve become more interested in the details of the animation process, I’ve begun to collect sketches as avidly as cels. The cels are the final product, I admit, and they are the most immediately compelling art objects in the field. But the sketches record the actual moment when these images were created, and in the very strokes of the pencil held by a master artist at the moment of creation. As series moved from cel-based to CGI, these sketches become still more important, and so I’ve tended to collect these sometimes creased and stained work drawings rather than opt for the more brilliant custom-made rilezu cels that have appeared for some CGI series.
You’ll see that I like to provide some kind of background when I scan cels. When I can get the matching background, of course, I use it. When I can’t, l play with art paper mats that I tend to pick up in the framing or scrapbooking sections of crafts stores I go to. First of all, it’s fun to see what kind of background the cel “likes” (often they seem to change expression subtly when I hit on just the right color or texture). Second, I often feel that a colored background shows off the cel, which was after all designed to fit a colored setting better than a white scanner lid. Some visitors think it looks like “wrapping paper,” but actually all of it is archival in quality (and the cels of course are always stored in bags separate from these mats).
Some other collectors Photoshop their own digital backgrounds, which does the same trick, often brilliantly. I love seeing these galleries, but am more stubborn in sticking to an actual paper mat, mainly because I want scans to represent what the object would really look like if you saw it in my cel book, rather than upload a heavily manipulated image that suggests a screen capture. For that reason, you’ll see that I sometimes give a complete scan of the cel sheet, including the ragged or partially painted edges, as they really appear on the cel.
My scholarly tendency is, I guess, pretty obvious in my approach to annotating the items I collect. When I can, I identify the context of the image and say a bit about what is going on at this moment. I admit that some people would say this provides plot spoilers, but on the other hand, I feel that since animation art essentially presents images in motion, it’s impossible to appreciate a single “frozen” picture without knowing something of what came before and what’s to come next. In addition, when I’m aware of a sequence-mate held in another online gallery, I try to include links whenever I can.
I’m also very prone to include a lot of “extras” with the art that I display: not just dougas for cels, but (when I can) also screen caps, parallel images from manga, layouts, rough sketches, alternative versions, and so on. You’ll see this approach most visibly with the sketch-based series, where I nearly always include two “extras” for every sketch that I “feature.”
When I know that I’m going off on a tangent, I’ll normally use one of two icons:
SENSEI CHECK!
This adds cultural background or added plot information, or sometimes explains some oddity that I’ve found in the artwork. When I really indulge my scholarly instincts, then watch out for:
Caution! Fussy Notes
This is where I get into some of the real minutia of animation details that would interest other obsessive collectors but (probably) not the casual visitor.
Overall, I feel that my collecting activities have been one of the most involving learning experiences of my lifetime, and I enjoy sharing it whenever I can. By coincidence [But in this world there is no coincidence . . . . ] I share the same birthday as (Cardcaptor) Sakura’s sensei-father Kinomoto Fujitaka, He gives his motto in one episode: “Rather than keeping something you enjoy to yourself, it's more fun to let everyone know about it, right?”
Right.
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8.61/10 
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