fishuu

hexarchate stories (yoon ha lee): finally finished reading this collection this year. who else is doing it like yoon ha lee when it comes to creating novel new ways to constantly torture his favorite little meow meow? glass cannon has to be hands down one of the funniest novellas and epilogues i've ever seen. highly recommend checking out his machineries of empire trilogy and then coming back to pick up hexarchate stories just so this particular line can also snipe you the way it sniped me.

the journey to the west, vol 1 (anthony c. yu translation): i grew up with sun wukong embedded in the pop culture but never actually read the original text. turns out it's funny as fuck??? the portion of vol 1 that begins with two random npcs freestyling long strings of poetry to outdo each other, then goes through a series of truly baffling plot dominoes tipping over until you reach "...and that's why sanzang ended up embarking on this journey to the west 😊" and you realize that was the actual point of it all ... my god. literature! i only wish the poetry sections were a little less tedious to get through bc of translation decisions (there's a lot of poetry), and that annotations were placed as footnotes on the page rather than all the way in the back of the book.

say nothing (patrick radden keefe): well-researched, well-written, and bleak as hell.

exordia (seth dickinson): book that is lowkey beating you up in the alley the entire time you're reading it. exordia is not about hot evil snake aliens, the trolley problem spun out to over 500 pages, or the countless ways the global military industrial complex spearheaded by the united states fucked over kurdistan, it's actually about how modern fighter jets are the coolest and sickest things ever engineered. and the comedy of math. i do have some problems with it, but overall, if you're a sicko for seth dickinson's stylistic and narrative tendencies, it's worth checking out.

king in limbo (ai tanaka): really fun character-driven scifi drama, with some beautiful inks and paneling. great protagonist (i always appreciate a perfectly normal guy with something wrong with him who knows when to be goofy and when to be competent), great dynamic between him and yet another innovation in the field of world's most tortured white-haired anime guys. this isn't really a romance story, and yet the writing draws connections between adam and rune's dead wife multiple times - so who could say! who could say! i had a great time with it.

oblivion battery (mikawa eko): this starts as pure gag comedy, which it was already pretty good at, before moving smoothly into a really interesting character study about the psychological toll of high-pressure youth sports, which it is also very good at!! the baseball games are genuinely fun to keep up with, they're pretty accessible if you know the basic rules and aren't overly long, and it's been really nice to see the mangaka's technique improve over time. an extremely solid sports series.

3:10 to yuma (2010): i really enjoyed watching this, and should probably see it again sometime on something nicer than a tiny airplane seat screen, but the only note i have for it is "russell crowe spends the entire thing looking like matt berry in garth marenghi's darkplace (not a diss, just a fact)." and i'm right.

hackers: hell yeah. they should make a movie with costume design this sick again. they should have a sleazeball weirdo skateboard out of the fog while holding onto the side of a limousine again. my only complaint is that jonny lee miller should have worn a dress at the end of the movie too.

rise of the teenage mutant ninja turtles: in january i said "sure, i'll watch the turt show" in response to my friend trying to turtpill any other friends, and did indeed get turtpilled myself. making each guy a different species of turtle is such a strong and distinctive idea i wish all tmnt media did this now. great nonstop riffs, great turtle sakuga, great scenes of raph crying under the pressure of being the big brother. turtle power.

hiii maybe one of my funniest years in fandom in a while *pointing to october*

actually i lied i did draw something in august. my fucking woes.

What fonts do you use for the dialogue? It meshes so well with your art--I always struggle to source good fonts that "feel" correct (if that makes sense).

Do you also use fonts for the SFX, or do you draw them in? If you draw them, what brush do you typically use for that?

(I guess really just general tips on sourcing fonts for comics would be helpful ^^;)

sorry this is so late, i was out of town at the time and wanted to wait till i could screenshot some examples and track down some links!

first of all, GAHHHHH, i'm so touched. thank you SO much 😭

to answer your questions - for SFX, i draw it in. i work in clip studio paint v2 and use the calligraphy pen that should be included in their brush pack, default settings, and add a border effect for SFX. if for whatever reason it's not included in their more recent versions, you can probably find it for free as a legacy asset in the CS library.

as for fonts used, i'll include some examples with links to where i got them.

most of my pre-2025 stuff uses joe mad! i was just given the font by my friend when we were working on battery acid together lol, but it's available for purchase here.

these use ready for more from blambot. orin's dialogue is not a comic font, i bought it elsewhere. for these, i used a sentence case font for specific reasons (with the paralive one, it was to contrast with satsuki yelling in all caps, and with the destiny one, it was because orin's lines were set in sentence case and i wanted drifter's to match).

lately my go to has been victory speech from comiccraft, i like that it has fewer quirks and feels relatively neutral (to me anyway). i got this one when it was on sale, so hopefully they'll run another big one again.

you may also find this manga font directory helpful, it shows examples of different fonts used in localized manga so you can maybe get a feel for what fonts look good with what kinds of comics. it also has links to where you can get each of them.

omg YAY another omitai fan. man i want to hit the emotional high of watching the stage version of stranger for the first time again and being like oh my god they're really going for it here.