User blog comment:Kirbyddd/Changing Avatar/@comment-24177998-20171109174235/@comment-12360859-20171115003505

You pretty much summed up Helvetica Standard Bold perfectly. I read it a few weeks ago and it's now one of my top favorite books. It's like... concentrated Arawi. Because it's a bunch of self contained comics, sketches, and notes, it it can cover in one page what would take a manga a few chapters... So instead of gradually going through different themes, it has all of his humor, creativity, artfulness, reflectiveness, sentimentality, etc condensed into a single volume. It's like every reason I love his work crammed into one small book. And as always, his ramblings are as relatable as ever. I think everyone's minds drift in similar ways at one time or another, and artists probably get even more sentimental than most... Arawi tries to capture that in his notes, and does a great job of it. I'm reminded a bit of my work on the CITY Wiki too. I haven't written full manga summaries like you have, but I'm always leaving notes to myself in edit summaries and comments.

I noticed the same thing with the short story. It definitely seems like the kid holding the drawing is supposed to be Arawi, which is pretty rare. I think I once came across an old self portrait that he did back before he decided to go incognito... It was similar to the drawing in Helevetica Standard, though; stylized to the point that you couldn't figure out what he actually looked like. I think he had glasses, though.

My way of "scanning" involves taking a high res photo and messing with contrast and a bunch of other stuff I barely understand. With black and white panels you can usually remove the "noise" fairly easily, and color can be done as well, though you may have to manually recolor parts of it. I could write a quick tutorial if you're interested. Helvetica Standard, though... I tried to scan a few panels and I just couldn't get it to work. It's like a combination of the thick paper and heavy (I don't know if that's the right word) ink makes every photo super grainy regardless of lighting, and the colors get all messed up when you try to rebalance them. This is the best I could do with Helvetica Standard, compared to my best color scan from CITY, or even a half decent one.

Where'd you get the sticker? I've been looking for some good Nichijou/CITY stickers myself. I've actually got two official CITY stickers from Volumes 2 and 3, but they're fairly simple mascot stickers.

Actually, I'm experimenting with making more interesting CITY sticker designs on my own. I'm waiting to see how the first few turn out, but I've got high hopes.

The soba noodles at Makabe's  were delicious as ever  today.

