Basic Info
So, what's this stuff all about? Well, first of all, allow me to introduce myself. My name is Dustin Holler, and I am 21 years old. I'm an Information Sciences & Technology major at Penn State University, where I'm actively involved in the Council of Commonwealth Student Governments as well as the ΠΛ Chapter of the Kappa Sigma Fraternity. Anything else you may wish to know can be found in my Facebook, so let's stop talking about me.
I started Shimatta! way back in December of 2005, when I was in my senior year of high school. It was during our lunch break that my friend Jeebes and I were sitting on the couch in the REACH (gifted program) room totally bored. We got to talking about the new Animal Crossing game for the Nintendo DS, when I decided to draw him in the AC style. I decided to give him an imaginary sweetheart, and thus Fran was born.
Over the next few days, a few more friends of mine got in on the stylization trend, and so the cast of Season 1 was completed. Originally, I had no intention of Shimatta! becoming any more than some basic Animal Crossing fanart, which is why I featured Tom Nook as a character; for those of you unfamiliar with AC, Tom Nook is the store owner in every version of the game, meaning he is a Nintendo character, not one of mine.
Froid was actually the last character of Season 1 to be finalized, and page 1 actually originally featured the Animal Crossing character Patches. Froid was drawn during an English class discussion on Sigmund Freud, which went all kinds of horribly wrong. The rest, as they say, was history.
The storyline of Season 1 was not planned at all, so each new page I made was more or less impromptu. Again, this is mostly because in the beginning, I wasn't planning on having a comic that anyone would actually, y'know, read. It was just me putting my boredom on paper.
I decided that Season 2 would need to go in a different direction stylistically, which is why characters suddenly sprout necks and the human characters no longer have jack-o-lantern triangle noses. In addition, I knew that Tom Nook had to go, so I could officially say that the comic and all of its characters were mine, not Nintendo's.
FAQ
Q: What does Shimatta mean?
A: Shimatta (しまった) is a Japanese expletive relatively equivalent to the English "dammit." This was chosen for the title of the series because it sounds and looks neat, its meaning is pertinent to the story ("Froid has a sword? Shimatta!"), and we couldn't come up with anything better.
Q: Will you make a character for me?
A: If I don't know you, I probably won't be willing to incorporate you into the comic in any way, shape, or form. If you're a friend of mine, however, I'll gladly work on a character for you, and even put you into the story, if you don't mind.
Q: What species is _______?
A: The character profiles list what each character is, just in case my art's so bad that it's not obvious.
Q: Can I use one of your images for my personal use?
A: You can use my images, just please do not edit them in any way, and please give me credit if you use anything on another site/blog/etc.
Q: Why do I see four boxes/question marks together on various parts of this site?
A: Your browser uses these symbols (boxes in IE, question marks in Firefox) in place of Japanese hiragana characters because Japanese language support is not installed on your computer. What you would see are the four symbols found in the site's main banner, as seen on every page. To download Japanese language support for Windows XP, click here.
More to come...
|
