JW Kovell Posts

I feel that there’s no reason for birthday cakes to get more boring as you get older. If anything, they should get exponentially more absurd. I’m planning for my 40th birthday cake will be a 3-D goomba. This year, I received two awesome and fattening treats.

My friend Jessica, knowing that my favorite type of chocolate is “lots”, made a chocolate-chocolate-chocolate-chocolate cake (that’s a chocolate cake with chocolate chips, chocolate icing, and chocolate sprinkles). Sadly I did not have any chocolate milk on hand, but there’s always next year.

The second confectionery delight was made by aspiring pastry chef Frank Blakemore. Frank knows that the safest way to date my little sister is to distract me and my brothers with food – preferably the kind that will prevent us from moving for several hours.

The cake was inspired by Alex’s NNFB ninja star T-Shirt design and was the most delicious fanart we’ve ever received. Yes, that ninja star was edible.

Speaking of fanart. We have a wonderful creation by MiGo-Go who makes the Webcomic Gant. It’s not your typical Ina portrait. Check MiGo-Go’s Deviant art page for the whole story.

The Comic Creators Alliance Donations Drive is up and running! For the next two weeks, the donations gathered by CCA will be sent to Love146 and Gracehaven House – two organizations dedicated to the prevention of human trafficking and the rehabilitation of those victimized by it.

Donators will receive an awesome desktop featuring characters drawn by 85 webcomic artist, including a drawing of Ina by Alex!

Hikaru No Go is one of my favorite animes of all time. If you’ve never heard of it, the story is, get this, about a boy learning how to play Go, a seemingly simple board game. That’s pretty much it. The fate of the universe doesn’t hang in the balance over a victory or a defeat. There’s no mortal peril (I think there’s 1 sword in the whole show, and it’s a visual metaphor). It isn’t even a game that the average Westerner knows how to play. But when I first saw it, 5ish years ago, I was completely drawn in by the story.

The anime left a large impression on NNFB. At every opportunity Ina’s uncle, Yukizane, is depicted playing Go (he originally played Xiangqi – Chinese Chess). And we’ve made Go an integral part of Ina’s training as a strategist.

I know a lot of our readers already play Go (a fact that is made painfully clear every time it is depicted in the comic with less than 100% accuracy), So I was thrilled when I saw we were advertising VIZ Media / VIZ Anime, which offers online streaming of several anime series including Hikaru No Go.

If you’ve never watched it before, now is a great opportunity to check it out. In fact, I’ll make it even easier for ya:

Enjoy!