Sketchy fanart~ some characters from Yamashita Kazumi's Land.
🌻🌻🌻

Okay, I'm going on a tangent.

Manben is a TV show where Urasawa Naoki (of Monster, 20th Century Boys, PLUTO, Billy Bat, etc) goes around and talks in-depth with other professional manga artists about their process and thoughts about making manga. It's very good.

Yamashita Kazumi was only was featured for half an episode, while she worked on a single page of an early chapter of Land. And it's probably my favorite episode.

I had never heard of her before watching her rethinking, re-drawing, physically trying the pose to try to understand it internally, giving up on beautifully drawn panels because they didn't feel right for the story... changing her mind and doing something completely different if it would better capture the feeling.... but by the end I related so much, and I wanted to see the page in context.

Anyway, that's how I first read Land. A mysterious story about a small area of land (heh) surrounded by mountains. At each cardinal direction stands one of the four gods, and beyond the mountains is the next world. At age 50, you die and are taken there as an ascended elder. If there are twins, one must be sacrificed. Oh, and don't go outside at night.

That's just stuff from the first chapter, I don't want to spoil more than that.

But every time I re-read it (the fan translation, no official english yet) I'm impressed all over again when I get to the page featured in the TV show and I remember her hard work. I want to keep trying harder to capture the right mood too.