Here is my shoddy assemblage of cliches. Now buy my stuff!

There's still some weird mucky liquid at the bottom of the cup of delight that is Demented Dragon, so here we go with A Steel Wing Shattered by Chris Hazelton. First, the story in their own words:

In an average town a three hundred year unseen war is about to come to a head. Leona, a girl with no past must uncover the key to a place no living being has ever been, and secure humanity's place in the struggle to unlock the secrets of the universe itself. Her only clue is the mysterious woman known only as "Alsatia".

Because reading these things takes 1d4 SAN a shot, let's sum it up in brief. If your comic looks like it was lettered in Zapf Chancery, stop. You fail. Oh, and fellas--I know you love the boob size stuff, but it's not an adequate substitute for actual characterization and/or dialogue that suggests the women you know best all have little yellow subtitles when they talk. Nor is having characters walk in on each other naked novel or entertaining, but it does suggest you learned everything you know about writing by parroting anime and manga instead of developing talent, creativity, and an individual voice. And if your series is set in the modern day but it looks like it barely made it out of colonial Williamsburg, well, that's on you.

Here's the bottom line for all you would-be manga-ka out there: if you don't care enough to attempt even a bare modicum of professionalism and effort, maybe you shouldn't be doing this at all. Sure, we can't all be great artists or writers. But if you don't even try to do your best? If you're content to do half-assed work and call it good enough for print? That's an insult. Get the fuck out.

Are we done? I think we're done. Oh wait, he did some other stuff? Crap. Okay.

Chris also has another webcomic, a gender switcher called Misfile, and there's bras and recycled boob humor and cars and shit and more cars and he still hasn't figured out how to use a decent font. Right, now we're done.

Wow, New York guests at a New York convention!

Okay, but seriously, New York Anime Festival. When are you going to announce the good guests? Co-director for the new Evangelion money grabs, that's nice, but your guest list is about as vigorously vetted as a stray dog with three legs and most of the kind folks on it are only marginally harder to get than genital herpes.

Admittedly, exhibitor participation is probably the biggest feature of the New York Anime Festival--which underlines the impression that there simply doesn't appear to be much at the Festival that you couldn't find anywhere else, the Festival just has collected more of it in one place for your mechanical consumption. But with a month still to go, there's still a chance for some genuine excitement to develop...