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Another Monday, another page! For those caught unawares, there was also an extra update on Friday, this page having continued the previous page’s conversation. As a ninja, Matrix is pretty cavalier about removing her mask, but how else is she gonna get her smokes!

So a couple notes:

The kickstarter is OVER 7k!!!! There’s a little less than 3 days to go, so if you want a piece of this rad book we’re making, time is getting short!

We started posting the reworked Volume 2 pages in the archive, which mean’s we’re totally George Lucasing this thing. The original versions of the pages will cease to exist! Some people may be nostalgic for the lost memories. I, for one, welcome our reworked pages into the NN4B canon, because, unlike the Star Wars Special Editions, we’re very confident these new pages far surpass the originals in the quality of their writing and layout. So far the first ten pages of Volume 2, starting at page 111, have been added into the archive, and we intend to add five reworked pages every day from this point forward until all 225 have been uploaded! We also have an extra purpose for doing this, we’d like you, THE READERS, to help us spot any grammatical errors we may have missed! So please check these pages out, let us know if there’s any glaring issues that need correcting!

Also wanted to mention (or re-mention) that Joe and I were on the The Canned Air podcast! Even though Joe and I consider our opinions and thoughts on pop culture of no actual value, maybe you’ll find some amusement in them.

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I said we’d have an extra update this week and WE DO! It’s a day later than I promised, but seeing as how it’s been a hectic two weeks of holidays, I’m hoping we can all forgive and forget. And look at all the SASS goin’ on in this page! I love drawing sassy ladies being sassy.

Also, HAPPY 2015! Here’s what I’m most looking forward to:

NN4B Volume 2 printed and in my hands!!

STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS!!

Star Wars Rebels’ continuation!

Too many video games to list, but I’ll try!

Adrift, Axiom Verge, Arkham Knight, Bloodborne, Firewatch, Hyper Light Drifter, Zelda WiiU, Starfox WiiU, Life is Strange, Phantom Pain, Mighty Number 9’s soundtrack (more excited for that than the game itself), No Man’s Sky, Rime, Uncharted 4 (which I will play through once and then never again like all the others), The Witness, Xenoblade Chronicles X (GIANT ROBOTSSSS!!!), a new Metroid and/or Metroid Prime Trilogy HD collection (Hey, it could happen!), Star Citizen (wait, does that not come out until 2016?? I guess I’ll just play Elite Dangerous then).

Actually, I doubt I’ll play even a quarter of all those considering how busy I usually am. But a man can dream the impossible dream, why not!

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Of course Ken isn’t happy about this whole peace thing, but he doesn’t have much faith in it anyway!

Check out that Kickstarter! We’re approaching 7k, which makes me warm in the guts. There will be an extra page on Thursday, and ANOTHER extra page next Thursday! If we do hit that 7k, we’ll have three two pages update weeks in a row!

I hope everyone had a great Christmas. I ended up with a handful of new amiibos, which helped sate me collection addiction. I also received the Avatar The Last Airbender graphic novel ‘The Search‘. Lemme just say, it’s excellent, I stayed up late into the night reading it in one go. I was surprised by the creator commentary that Micheal and Bryan had not actually developed the back story behind Zuko’s mother beyond a couple basic concepts, but the narrative that was weaved together for The Search is an emotional fleshing out of Zuko’s parents’ relationship that adds some great, perhaps ESSENTIAL, context to their family dynamic. Gonna highly recommend that.

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OH HO Ina’s gettin’ all up in dad’s FACE!

And LO, the Kickstarter has achieved full fundage! I’d like to thank all the backers who have made this possible, we are really looking forward to getting the printed books into your hands! From this point on, every $500 we make beyond the original $6k goal will result in an extra weekly NN4B comic page! So expect another page THIS WEEK, and if we hit $6500 before Thursday, expect another one next week, too! EDIT: The holiday weekend requires we push the first of the extra page updates back until next week.

Now I’m going to talk negatively about a movie! Don’t worry, it’s spoiler free.

I saw Da Hobbit: Battle of CG Monsters. It’s OKAY I guess. I wish we’d just gotten a really great single movie, all from Bilbo’s perspective, with the three major acts being the troll confrontation, the Gollum riddles, and the dragon’s lair thievery. I mean they cast the most perfectest human actor to play Bilbo, and poor Martin Freeman’s barely in these films! Also, the Hobbit films are a tonally inconsistent mess. It’s hard to invest in the drama of a movie where a character can respond to “there’s about a hundred more goblins heading this way,” with “we’ve got this!” I did not realize Thorin was the Middle Earth equivalent of Lu Bu from Dynasty Warriors. He might as well have said “Two musou attacks should take them out. I charged my special meter on the way up the hill!”

Having said all that, I did enjoy the third Hobbit movie more than the first two. although the Gollum scene in the first film is the highlight scene of this trilogy. Hobbit 3 was also the shortest of the films, which is a plus in my book! Granted they’ll certainly release an extended edition with an extra half hour of footage that I will absolutely watch. I want to find out what the deal was with the cross dressing unibrow guy. I kept expecting him to find some courage or die, but in the end he was just some incompetent bumbling idiot that did did nothing, so he probably had a cut scene! Also, funeral scene? Gotta be on the cutting room floor.

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Look at that Tanaka face, what a dour dude! But even he will follow a leader like Masuhiro! Very authoritative, much commanding, so maroon.

Look down. For serious, look right underneath this! 91% (as of this moment) on the Kickstarter, friends! We’re doing an extra page update for the week that we reach 100%, and an extra weekly update for every $500 beyond our goal, because I want to have an excuse to update twice a week! I have plenty of excuses not to, you see (namely time, but I will MAKE TIME for this!).

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Ken, you could’ve been her cove toy forever and now you’re totally ruining it! There may be some serious angst incoming, I’m not gonna lie.

How ’bout that kickstarter, eh? It’s no small statement to say Joe and I are working crazy hard on this book! We posted an update comparing one of the older pages (namely one using the photo backgrounds) to the newly edited version. Since I’m basically drawing and recoloring those pages, I’ve essentially finished five comic pages this week instead of the usual ONE. It’s definitely been a lot of work, but we’re  obsessed with making an end product that looks great! So contribute, tell your friends, tell your friends’ friends, and tell their friends. They’ll probably be like “who are you and I don’t read comics because I’m not as cool as you, Kickstarter supporter person,” but hey, it’s worth a shot. I mean look how close we are to 50%!!!

AND HOW CAN I NOT TALK ABOUT THAT STAR WARS TRAILER??  I can’t not talk about that Star Wars trailer!! And, well… It certainly looks like a J. J. Abrams film!! Plenty of shaky cam and close ups. Still, my favorite part of Star Trek Into Darkness (A film I generally detest for its stupidity) was the part where Kirk, Spock, and Uhura dressed up as Han Solo and went on their commando mission on Kronos, which felt very Star Wars to me. So for what little this trailer shows, it looks fun, super fun.

The voice over is wonderfully cheesey and perfectly in line with the OT, the broadsword lightsaber is totally acceptable, considering how I’m willing to accept the Inquisitor’s frisbee saber in SW Rebels. I definitely appreciate the look of the tech; a bit warn out and/or cobbled together.

I also like that all the characters shown in the trailer are new! No silly “look, It’s old Han Solo!” moment. And nothing in this trailer goes against the the plot rumors I’ve read about. That’s okay, too, because the rumored plot sounds just fine to me. I just hope Luke hasn’t actually been a hermit since the end of ROTJ, seems like a waste of a lot of Luke spinoff stories that could be told now that they’ve tossed out the EU.

So I bought my ticket for the Star Wars hype train, ALL ABOARD, PEOPLE!!

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Kickstarter is A GO!!

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The Kickstarter for NN4B Volume 2: Kyoto Chaos is live! For anyone wanting to help us spread the news, we have a little banner that you can use! For those too <enter excuse here> to follow the link, I’m just gonna embed Joe’s great pitch video below:

 

 

 

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Don’t mess with her stuff, Ken! Geez, that’s like girlfriend etiquette 101.

Friends! Our Kickstarter for Volume 2 is LIVE. Fingers crossed it makes its (we think pretty reasonable) goal, and perhaps far beyond! I’ll not go over all the details of the campaign, since that’s laid out on our actual Kickstarter page. Check it out! Joe put a lot of time into the video, and I think he really sells it, and that’s coming from a totally unbiased point of view!

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Volume 2 Kickstarter Progress

We’re rapidly approaching the launch of our Volume 2 Kickstarter! Joe’s working out the financial details to determine our ideal monetary goal, but we’ll have an exact number soon enough. We’re intending to launch the kickstarter NEXT WEEK, fingers crossed. Tell your friends! We’re currently editing together our video pitch, which is going to have a rad semi-animated opening bit, and I have some completed Volume 2 cover art to show! I tried to incorporate characters from most of the big scenes that will be in in the book. I realize the bandits are conspicuously absent, but I’m sure they’ll be prominently displayed on Volume 3.  I also included our new logo logo designs, which I think really pop much better than the old version.

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This page was pretty background intensive! I think it came out alright though. I like how Yumiko almost looks shy showing Ken her private room full of Daisuke clan paraphernalia. Maybe she’s not a stoic ninja badass 100% of the time! And maybe Ken’s not a psychopathic jerk 100% of the time. Or maybe I’m wrong on both counts and they’re perfect for each other!

I picked up Pikmin 3 for the WiiU. I haven’t played it much because I’m still obsessed with unlocking all the things in Hyrule Warriors, but from what I have played, I can see it becoming an equally time consuming addiction. For such a light, happy go lucky game, there’s a high level of stress that comes with the sunset time limit on each level. I don’t like time limits! Also, the Pikmin controls are awkward as heck. Maybe they’ll feel better once I spend more time with them and figure out how to lock on to bosses. And what’s the deal with this planet you’re on? It’s full of weird aliens creatures, but then there’s also sorts of terrestrial fruit and vegetation, and at least one cell phone that looks like what I owned in college. Maybe the Pikmin games take place thousands or more years in the future after Earth colonized other planets, but the human race died off, leaving an assortment of artifacts and transplanted agriculture across the galaxy. Or maybe it’s just a coincidence.

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