What is Binchotan? Oddly enough it refers to a kind of charcoal used in Japan… and for whatever reason, at some point someone decided to make a mascot for it to promote its use, I suppose.
The character that resulted from this campaign is an orphaned girl who lives alone after the passing of her grandmother. A series of animated shorts was made around her story and a few other charcoal mascots a few years back.
This gashapon actually accompanied a little comic book released a few years ago. It’s exceptionally well made and is adapted from a scene in that animated series whereby the little girl takes on an odd job in a school pushing around the food cart. Here she puts the uneaten food back in the slop bucket, but the sad irony is that the disposed food is far better than what she normally eats.
Anyways, love this completely bizarre character because she’s simple, kind, pitiable and orphaned. It’s also an interesting story where mascot becomes anime and toy after the fact. This isn’t unlike what happened with Vocaloids and is a very interesting model overall in terms of creating “looks” before “story.” I’d like to take this approach someday with a few projects and characters of mine.
For more information on Binchotan, you can check out http://www.charcoalhead.com/about/
In 2009 I decided to stop mucking about in fanstuff. I loved drawing it, but I lost someone important to me in 2009. She was, oddly enough, my doppelganger in a way. We shared similar histories, Asian parentage, similar career paths, and such. But she was way more confident about tossing that path for what she determined was the one she loved more.
She was a person of immense integrity, even more so in the artistic sphere. I miss her terribly and miss her inspiration.
But she kicked me in the butt before she moved on from this world, and she and I said we’d be mostly playing with our own toys from now on, not those of others.
And the odd thing was when I was a kid, my sister and didn’t really have a lot of TV or popular media to draw our entertainment from. We were largely fine as kids inventing Dallas-type melodramas of our own with whatever poor toys happened to be handy. We were masters of story and puppetry as well as making up the most ridiculous sagas one can create for armies of bears and rabbits.
I didn’t need fandom. I never even cared much about pop stars, movie stars, music stars, whatever… our stories were way cooler. And somehow I had gotten way too immersed in it and caring about what was popular, and in light of everything that happened in 2009, it was stupid.
But all this doesn’t really excuse the lack of art you know. I think I doodled more, but painted far less. I think most of my pictures in 2011 came from sketches I did at conventions. What happened?
