2017 - My year of fullfilling dreams

So, um... Every year, I make New Year's resolutions for what to accomplish the upcoming year. It has previously helped me to keep myself on trackwith plans and fullfill my dreams.

But...

The last year or two, you can see (if you track my ersolutions back in time) I have started to fail miserably. I'm not sure why. If I would guess, either the plans I put up for myself is not important enough for me, or they just get pushed aside by more urging/interesting/financially motivated stuff I do.

Let's check the New Year's resolutions I did för 2016: 
I will make an animation!
Aah, perfect example. I actually had this plan for 2015 as well, and gave myself a second chance by aiming to do it in 2016 instead. But no, that was not what happened. Don't get me wrong, I truly want to make animation, and I did do some few cuts during 2016, but in the end of Spring I got several more urging and financially motivated projects (like the Sword Princess RPG-book I'm about to release with Saga Games in April, and the full color Mermaid manga I'm making with Rabén & Sjögren, to be released this Fall). Also, Nosebleed Studio started working on our "how to draw manga"-guidebook, which is actually going to be out in stores next month! All this made me quite preocupied during the mid and end of 2016. I'm not regretting them, so I guess the animation project need to stay on the shelf a little longer.

I keep practicing my animation skills~ 😎 Sorry for the superbad video quality, Instagram has made it impossible to upload videos that you havn't made in their crappy app. #mjaumanga #mjauanime #animation #anime #makinganime #kitten

A video posted by Natalia Batista, mangaka (@nataliasmanga) on May 1, 2016 at 7:43am PDT

My second resolution was:
I will go to Japan again!
Well, yeah, no. That didn't happen. See all excuses above for explanation. I did however visit Lucca Comics & Games in Italy, which I think helped me alot both in my creativity and my career. This is not me finding excuses, but I actually truly think this trip helped me a lot more than a trip to Japan would. I have realized from several years of looking to Japan and studying (and even attempting to enter) their comic market, that it is perhaps not the working environment I wish to subject myself to. I like having spare time and a chance to do other projects than draw all the time.

Previous years, I have put a grade on my performance of these resolutions, but I'll not do that this year. It won't do me any good.

And I also usually make new ones, on the New Years Eve, but to be honest I don't even remember if I did any or what it was this year. So this year, I think I will just let my spirit and dreams take me whereever, and not focus so much on the bigger picture. Also, I do have personal plans I want to achieve this year, but since I still feel it's a little too early to tell the whole world about them, I'll keep the mystery a little longer. Hopefully, I'll make a longer blog entry about it this year. *mysterious smile*


Next, I want to address my travel plans for 2017!

23-26 of February: NärCon Vinter in Linköping, Sweden
4 of March: Scifi-mässan in Malmö, Sweden
1-2 of April: Malmö Seriefest in Malmö, Sweden
14-16 of April: GothCon in Gothenburg, Sweden
21-23 of April: J-popCon in Copenhagen, Denmark

26-27 of May: Nordsken in Skellefteå, Sweden

27-30 of July: NärCon in Linköping, Sweden

September: Göteborg Book Fair in Gothenburg, Sweden
October: Maybe London ComicCon MCM in London, UK

November: Maybe Comic Con Gamex in Stockholm, Sweden

As you can see, the event for the Fall of 2017 is quite vague, so I'm still keeping it open for changes.

I will mostly be selling with Nosebleed Studio in the Artist Alley, except on the following events:
Scifi-mässan: I'll be in the booth of the publisher Apart förlag, signing Sword Princess Amaltea.
GothCon: I'll be selling my books next to Saga Games, who will sell my RPG-book Sword Princess.
Nordsken: I'm invited as their official guest, so I'll be selling and signing my books on certain times, more about that in a later blog entry.
Göteborg Book Fair: I will be signing in the booth of Kolik förlag (Sword Princess Amaltea) and Rabén & Sjögren (Sjöjungfrun Minna).

A small preview of two of the pages of my mermaid manga, work in progress:

My plans this year is to draw, draw, draw all through February - June, making both my 70 page mermaid manga in water colors, and my 42 page historical manga for Nosebleed Studio's next anthology (to be released at NärCon in July). In June and July, I have some game design projects (exciting, but right now secret!). In the Fall, I don't have any plans more than just working at Serieskolan (teaching, my day job) and perhaps take up the animation project if I have time. We'll see...

Wow, this was supposed to be a short blog entry, but as always I just keep babbling about my life. Since this is kind of like my personal diary, I usually just write what I think I need to document.

★★ Thanks for reading! ★★

My next big project: Mjau! The Anime

I'll do this in English, so my international readers may follow the process of my next big project as well as my Swedish readers.

I have been doing comics and manga for 10 years now (professionally since 2006, but finished my first comic in 2005), and at some point you might want to change things a little or try something new. I feel I'm there right now.
So... I'm going to level up and try to do my own anime!

Yes, yes, I know what you're thinking: "But Natalia, anime is made by an animation studio! Will you be able to make anime on your own?"
And I can only give you a short and simple answer: I don't know. But I'll damn well try it!

So I'm going to [try] make my kitten manga Mjau! into anime.
Mjau! has so far been my best selling manga, and has been published in Sweden and Portugal.
In Sweden, it has sold over 10 000 copies, which is s lot in a country with only 9 million people, and most comic books sell only about 500-1000 copies.

This has actually been a bigger project in the making for about a year now, and not something I decided yesterday.
About a year or two ago, I started daydreaming about making my own anime, but I kinda thought it was impossible. But at last year's NärCon (Swedish manga convention) I met Eric Bradford, one of the creators behind Senpai Club, a hilarious anime parody made for youtube. He's a young and ambitious animator that started the project together with his fiend Olivia Bergström and together they make a full anime, without any huge anime studio.

He really made me believe that my dream was possible!
It felt like destiny, I needed that moment of clarity. He showed me how they work, which was great and made me understand the process.

Also, more destiny:
About that time, a guy called Richard "Ahturo s" contacted me because he saw my trailer for Sword Princess Amaltea on youtube and wanted to make a dubbed manga video of it, together with his gang of awesome Swedish dubbers (yes, they are awesome!). Sadly, I was super busy at that time with making the manga, but I always felt I wanted to do something with them...
And so this project formed in my head. It WAS destiny.

And some othe destiny things:
I posted a question on a facebook group for Swedish animators asking what payment and contract I should give my voice actors, and some days later Johan C.B., a comic making colleague came by my table at a comvention and started asking about it. He's into making animation too, and knows a lot of good people to know in the business. In speaking with him, I learnt even more vital stuff that could make or break a project like this, and now he and his friend Tobias are kind of mentoring me in this project.

So is Eric Bradford, and Richard is helping me find voice actors right now, sending his best group members to me.

✩✩✩THIS IS GOING TO BE AWESOME!!✩✩✩
I'm so hyped!! (as you probably can tell)

I have started working on the anime bit by bit. Most of it is not for show at this point, except for this:

Character Sheets for the first episode (chapter 1 of the manga).

My plan so far is to make 5-10 min episodes of each chapter. And look for sponsors and funding. But one step at a time, and right now I just want to animate!

I'll keep you posted. Oh, and please follow the Mjau Manga facebook page or my instagram nataliasmanga for more progress updates!
✩ Thanks for reading! ✩