After two months of dealing with a China Seller trying to get the SEGA Series Figure of Yor from SPYxFAMILY and getting absolutely NOTHING for my efforts, I'm starting all over again, making yet another attempt with a different dealer, and I’m crossing fingers that THIS time it goes through.
But while I wait for that fateful shipment to arrive, I was able to bide my time by happily getting my hands on two OTHER anime characters I really love,, the svelte and savvy ESPER SISTERS of ONE-PUNCH MAN fame,Tatsumaki and Fubuki!!
And ta-daa! The Esper Sisters in ALL their Glory!!
While I’ve always known more or less the story of One-Punch Man and seen the popular clips going round (the one of Saitama vs Genos is a classic), the thing that really interested me into actually sitting down and watching the show was the back-story of creator ONE and the journey it went thru to become one of the most popular series on right now!
Seems that while ONE had some great ideas for a funny comic( about a guy whose single punch is so strong that he’s bored to death as he fights evil), he lacked the artistic talent to draw it.
Nonetheless, with webcomics being a thing he could do for fun, he began drawing his own series of Saitama the “One Punch-Man”. True, the art was crude, but the ideas in his head, the pacing of his stories, and the wonderful, colorful characters made his web series a hit!
It garnered the attention of manga artist Yusuke Murata, a fan of the web series who approached ONE with a novel idea- to have him re-draw the entire series and them publish them together as a manga! That Manga they collaborated on became famously popular and spawned the succesful ANIME series which produced two wonderful seasons so far!
I saw a video where they compared some of ONE’s original artwork from his webseries, and paired it up with Murata’s professional, hyper slick and cool artwork, and it was wonderful to see ONE’s original ideas fully blooming into the stories we read now:
In particular, it was this side by side illustration of character Tatsumaki that made me sit up and take notice-It was simply AMAZING how Murata took the germination of her character in ONE’s drawings and really fleshed her out into a fully realized personality!
Below: ONE's original depiction of Tatsumaki, and then Murata's version. Love how Murata took the idea of Tatsu's "curls" and gave them a wildly original and dashing look to them!
As you can see, when they eventually made the manga into anime, Murata’s work was so perfect that it’s virtually identical!
All the sass and contempt of a character in one picture
I told myself, I HAVE to watch this show ‘cause I GOTTA see who this chick IS! And, as OPM fans know full well, she turned out to be one of the baddest chicks EVER! A tinier figure in the big, bad world of super-hero and monster slugfests, this gal with her super psychic ESP powers is one of the toughest members of the hero association, one that no one in their right mind would mess with! Naturally I fell in love with her and the whole show in general, and I ended up devouring both seasons!!!
Along the way, I was introduced to Tatsumaki’s more svelte sister Fubuki, and the stories built around the siblings fierce rivalry between each other are some of the best!
Below: ONE's original drawings of Fubuki side by side Murata's manga version.
And her beauty is easily carried over into the anime!
The One Punch Man anime series is as of yet only up to season two with tons of backstory yet to come, thankfully for us, the manga is all easily available online to read (and all translated besides!) and so I’ve been busy catching up!
