Angel's Anime Rating Guide

Last month, I went to the Wizard World Comic Con in Philadelphia . Highlights of this year's Comic Con in Philadelphia include: Chuck Norris, WALKER TEXAS RANGER, Gene Simmons, KISS, Nichelle Nichols, STAR TREK, Famke Janssen, X-MEN There were, of course, many, many other people of note in attendance and a whole list of panels and other events included in the cost of admission and a great many paid events that we could go to if that was the sort of thing we wanted to do. Last year, parking was an issue, so, this time around, Mom offered her services for transportation to and from the venue. This year, I would be going with Tony, Amanda and Anthony. We arrived in Center City around 10:30am. There was a longer line of people waiting to get in this year, due to increased security measures in the wake of recent violence at other public events elsewhere. Although, slightly inconvenient, the extra security was welcome just the same. Like last year, a small area had been set a

Over the weekend, I saw the theatrical release of Wonder Woman ... An Amazon princess (Gal Gadot) finds her idyllic life on an island occupied only by female warriors interrupted when a pilot (Chris Pine) crash-lands nearby. After rescuing him, she learns that World War I is engulfing the planet, and vows to use her superpowers to restore peace. Wonder Woman  follows Diana's growth from a young girl to adulthood and her fateful meeting with Steve. Trapped on Diana's island home, Steve wants to return to his people to complete his mission and Diana wants to venture out into the world beyond her island home, to go to the front lines of a conflict that has embroiled the entire world and threatens humanity itself. So, Steve and Diana head out into the battlefields of World War I on an epic quest to save humanity. There is some violence, but, the feature is not particularly gory. Overall, Wonder Woman was very entertaining. Even Mom, who doesn't usually get excited about mo

A few months ago, Blogger rolled out new templates. The popular posts gadget is a new feature of the Contempo template which displays a handful of snippets for the most popular posts. For the popular posts, I didn't necessarily want full blown snippets, but, rather just a handful of links. So, I adapted a custom  Related Posts  gadget to create the following compact popular post gadget: <script type="text/javascript"> var d=document; var divs; var articles; var popularposts; var popularpostsDivs; var popular_posts_content=''; divs=d.getElementsByTagName('div'); for (var i=0;i<divs.length;i++){ if (divs[i].className=='widget PopularPosts'){ popularposts=divs[i]; articles=popularposts.getElementsByTagName('article'); for (var j=0;j<articles.length;j++){ var pageURL=new String(articles[j].getElementsByTagName('a')[0].getAttribute('href')); var imgURL=new String(articles[j].getElementsByTagName('img')[0]

I wasn't sure what to make of Skull Man when it appeared on store shelves a few years ago, but, I picked it up anyway... Otomo City: where freedom and justice have atrophied to the bone; where conspiracy rules the day and death stalks the night... Death in the form of the Skull Man, a literal Grim Reaper whose skeletal grin presages grisly mayhem and murder, even to the monstrous mutants that haunt the city's underworlds! To investigate a bizarre slaying, journalist Minagami Hayato and photographer Kiriko Mamiya must stalk this ultimate predator, through a festering cadaver of a city where the corruption flows in rivers as deep and foul as the sins of the reigning elite, and unearth a secret so shocking that an entire city has been turned into a tomb to contain! In a nightmarish necropolis where nothing is as it seems, vengeance comes in the form of a living Death's-Head! Recently, I took the opportunity to see Skull Man . The series centers around a mysterious vigila

Severing Crime Edge  involves a group of people who wield cursed objects and their efforts to kill the Hair Queen... Kiri Haimura loves cutting hair. Actually, he doesn't just love cutting hair, he obsesses over it and even has a special set of scissors he delights in using. But when his mane obsession for a bit of trim draws him to Iwai Mushanokoji, whose long hair has never been cut, he finds himself entangled in a situation no shears can hack him out of. You see, Iwai is heir to a strange curse that makes her hair impossible to cut. Or at least, it was until Kiri's clippers take off a lock, thereby revealing that his scissors are cursed as well! But now that she's shorn free, Iwai has a slew of murderers after her, each armed with their own cursed implements and eager for the chance to kill the Hair Queen. And if that's not enough to make Kiri wig out, it seems that many of them actually attend his own school! Will this evil crew cut in on Kiri's Hair Queen,

Brick and Mortar Retailers... This is a brief primer for those of us who still enjoy anime on archival media and who happen to be in the Philadelphia area. With the demise of the major retail outlets (i.e.: FYE, Suncoast and Tower Records) in Center City, Philadelphia, it's become much harder to find anime in Philadelphia and I felt it was time to mention the subject. The last vestiges of some of the major retail outlets (most notably FYE) still exist in the suburban malls such as Franklin Mills Mall -- which, for some reason that defies description, now wants to be called Philadelphia Mills Mall even though the mall itself sits on the border with Bucks County and is a whopping fifteen miles from Center City. Unfortunately, without the higher volume of foot traffic that would be available in Center City, anime isn't as much of a priority in the suburbs as it was in Center City. So, with this in mind, although there is still a decent selection of anime to choose from, on

A few years ago, I reached a milestone when We Without Wings came home with me -- it was the 4000th DVD in my archive. Based on the description on the back of the box, We Without Wings seemed like something I might enjoy, so, I picked it up... Timid Takashi wants to escape to an alternate world where he is a heralded knight, but is held back by thoughts of his younger sister and his girlfriend. Part-timer and all-around upbeat guy Shuusuke has a disastrous first encounter with a woman who turns out to be his new co-worker. Handyman Hayato is a hard-boiled loner who has random encounters with two gangs and a girl with a uniform fetish. Throw in plenty of fan-service, random humor, an alternate medieval world, and your narrator DJ Condor, and you get We Without Wings - Under the Innocent Sky. According to Carlos Santos on Anime New Network ... Imagine a parallel universe where We, Without Wings is actually a good anime. Imagine that the story, with its surprise twists and intens

The new themes from Blogger , brought some new features, but, also changed some existing features. The new themes allow one to navigate to older post snippets and to the home page, but, once you've moved past the first few pages of post snippets, there is no way to get back to a previous set of post snippets, except by returning to the home page and navigating through the older post snippets again. After poking around on the Blogger Help Forum , the official advice seems to be, if you want the newer and older navigation links, then you should use a theme that provides that functionality rather than the newly released themes. Well, I really like the new themes and I wasn't willing to go back to my previous theme just for the navigation, so, after a bit of experimentation with the HTML, I came up with a solution. To enable the newer post links in Contempo , you'll need to edit the theme HTML. As it happens, there are placeholders for both the newer post links and the prev