They'll Give You The Clap

I figured since I had Fullmetal Alchemist character profiles on my screen, I might as well fart out the other idea I had for fanart. This joke is old…like, when this show was still airing! I always put it off, because I was afraid I didn’t have the technical skills to pull off Al’s body position. Luckily, it seems in a past life I was an animator for the anime, and am pretty impressed with myself.

I can’t be the only one here that whenever Ed clapped his hands my brain kicked in the song “If you’re happy and you know it, clap yer hands!”
Clap, clap.

Also, unlike 80% of people that do fanart, I managed to spell “you’re” correctly! I am amazed at the sheer quantity of people who fail to use Spell Check, especially if you’re doing the art on your comp and Microsoft Word is one icon away. How can people pump hours into a comic, and managed to misspell every third word?

Of course, some of my art buddies have English as a second, third, or fifteenth language. And that’s just fine, but you can ask someone to proofread before you flub a piece of hard work forever. Heck, send me a note! I’ll make sure your comic passes a college English course!

Hmm, maybe I need to clarify the spell check comment. Like I said, many people—believe it or not—aren’t fluent in English. Hey, there’s nothing wrong with that, in fact most of the art buddies I have who aren’t fluent usually are better spellers than most. Heck, I’m fluent in English and am STILL trying to figure out most of the syntax. And if you’re drawing just for the heck of it, then there’s no reason to care. Many artists, however, put a lot of effort into making comic series or want to break into the art industry and have works littered with grammatical spelling errors.

People seem to forget, at least with American comics, there are several people working on it. There’s the inker, colorist, and a person whose sole job is to do lettering. There’s nothing wrong with getting assistance, in fact it’s quite common. Example: there was a very talented artist I used to watch (kinda got tired of every art description reading “my art sucks sooo bad than other artists!). She was pretty dyslexic, and successfully misspelled almost every word of her comics. She was trying to get published, and she wasn’t understanding why no one would hire her. She finally caught on, and has a person who writes out the correct dialogue.

She’s actually been published, but she still suffers her martyr complex with “why would you buy my book, my art is horrrrrible!” and she wonders why people won’t purchase her work. But that’s a whole nother issue.

Fullmetal Alchemist review:
I will first validate your fan rage with the giant middle finger SquarEnix gave you with the ending of the series. There’s three minutes left, how’re they gonna wrap up all the loose ends?!
WE AIN’T GONNA MWAHAHA STUPID WEEABOO GO BUY OUR MOVIES!!!!!
Despite the resounding “FU**” that could be heard from space station Sputnik on the day Cartoon Network ran the final episode, everything in between was grade A television.

I’ve been an anti-anime fan for many years now; I only show interest in anime if it isn’t stereotypical like one-guy-seven-girls-who-wanna-jump-him, I-wanna-be-the-best-ninja/pirate/children’s card game player-and-fight-a-featured-villain-each-week!

Fullmetal Alchemist had me hooked from the beginning; I was honestly concerned with the wellbeing of most of the characters (especially Al).

Now on to criticism. That’s right, I can be objective and point out negative crap; it’s not like I’m Gamespot and get paid to speak only how things are awesome on a bun. I seem to have everyone and their aunt against me, but I keep arguing that the animation was pretty mediocre. I mean, granted the fight scenes were well done, but about 60% of the series had the characters just talking to progress the buttload of plot along. If you take away the fascinating story, then the art is just really boring. I didn’t buy the series on DVD for that very reason; a show like Avatar The Last Airbender can have a fascinating story AND punch your eyes into the back of your skull with quality animation.

I really liked Al in the series, but had a creepy vibe coming off of the relationship between the bros. “Oh big brother, let me sleep in your sensual arms tonight!”
Wuh duh fuh?
And, if you’ll recall when the show was in syndication on Cartoon Network, every day the Deviant Art front page was clogged featuring the blood relations HAVING relations! The day I learned the term ‘elricest’, I realized that underage girls are capable of inflicting a pain that not even the Book Of Revelations could have predicted.

Despite those snags, it was an above average series…above average enough for me to devote hours of my life drawing a picture about it.

I think Fullmetal Alchemist is one of those shows that earns some of its hype. Unlike Naruto, with girls tuning in only to see the upcoming yaoi pairing for their fanfic. And DEFINITELY unlike Neon Genesis Evangelion , which perfected the “screw you” series ending.

Evangelion was like having a stoner attempt to explain the human psychology class he took last semester. It had one good premise of “this is the way the world works…OR IS IT?!?!?!? USE YOUR MIND AND CONTROL CHICKS TO TAKE OF THEIR BRAS!!” Unfortunately, that was the only premise, topped off with an emotionally dead cast of characters that you kinda wanted a meteor to strike and wipe angst from the world. The plot was so full of psychobabble that every fifth episode was a recap episode to retell you its super 3dgy plot and who was being a douche to the main character at the moment.

The ending to Evangelion was like three episodes of NOTHING BUT TEXT, and it ended with all the characters you thought died, surrounding the effeminate hero all Julius Caesar style and say “Congratulations, this whole retarded thing was a test!”

Understandably, this pissed off the fanbase so much, the animation studio actually created two movies to help quell the blind rage people had for investing so much time into a copout. The movies were, of course, the first movie YET ANOTHER RECAP with the other being a stereotypical “the trippy aliens with biblical connotations? Oh, they’re just people who evolved!” and the explanation for most of the trippy stuff was because the main character was molesting his crotch so much that his orgasm killed humanity or something.

Fullmetal Alchemist’s looking pretty good now, huh?
-The “Oh Snap, This Picture Is Hot! Get It…Cuz Mustang Would Snap His Fingers To…” Cappy

For the copycats: micron pigma pen 05 (linework), prismacolor markers, colored pencils, pencil blended with shading stump.
References: quick google search to find character sheets. Amazingly no porn results!