Boy, it's been a week since I've updated this thing!
Hmm, what to talk about...?
Oh! Last Saturday, Mom wanted to check out the back-to-school sale at J.C. Penney's, so we went to the mall. The sale itself was actually fairly disappointing -- all I got was a pretty purple shirt and an awesome ombre purse (kinda like this one (in silver), which I almost bought instead, but a different style) -- but we stopped by Waldenbooks while we were there so I could pick up the first volume of the skating manga Sugar Princess, which I've been eagerly waiting to come out.
Was it worth the wait? Oh, yeah! I think I'm actually going to like this series even better than The Cherry Project, and I love The Cherry Project. ^_^ It feels like Maya's journey to become a skater is going to be more realistic than Chieri's was. Chieri's talent was that she was really good at copying other skaters, including their difficult jumps. That made her kind of perfect for pairs skating, but I like how Maya's actually learning how to skate, instead of just copying. Granted, she's a bit unnaturally good at it -- she is scouted when a skating coach sees her (kinda) land a double axel without any kind of training at all, after all -- but it's not like she's landing triples and quads yet. Plus, I think Maya and Shun are more interesting leads than Chieri and Tsuzuki were. I'm rather enjoying how their relationship is progressing. I just hope the series will be finished, since according to Wikipedia, it's been on hiatus since December 2006 while the mangaka worked as an artist on a video game. :( Only two volumes have been completed so far.
What's also neat about this manga is that between the chapters, the mangaka (Nakajo Hisaya, of Hana-Kimi fame) has drawn beautiful portraits of real-life skaters, like Mao Asada and dance team Marina Anissina and Gwendal Peizerat. Some look more accurate than others -- Ilia Kulik looks like like a generic manga bishounen to me, but he is a real-life bishounen -- but they're all gorgeous, and you can bet I'll be make avatars out of them. I just wish they were colored. :( I suppose I could try coloring them myself, but some of the costumes are really detailed, and I'm not great at coloring on the computer. (I'm not great at coloring, period. :P) Oh, well.