Family of Moonlight

Day 2 dawned nice and sunny. Like Ami in episode 97 of the anime, I started the day with a nice swim. Then later, I dived into (no pun intended) the day’s activities.

A main highlight of my day was getting to interview Gina Biggs, who I’d asked permission to interview beforehand. Sailor Moon fans will know her as the webmistress of the popular fansite Bunny’s Tour Through the Silver Millennium, as well as related sites like Before Awakening (a Codename wa Sailor V site) and Red Tattoo (a site about the Sailor Moon R movie). Today, she is primarily known for the webcomic Red String, a story about “love and growing up” (Gina’s words), and because of this, she was dubbed ALA’s Artist Guest of Honor this year and did her own panel, “The Artistic Stylings of Gina Biggs,” where she talked about her work. Later that same day, we met up and went to a random hotel floor to record the interview. The following, after many edits to deal with our off-topic digressions, is the result.

Gina Biggs Interview

Question 1 – Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Absolutely. I create a webcomic series; it’s called Red String, and you can find it at redstringcomic.com. It’s all about love and growing up. And I also run an all-female comics collective called Strawberry Comics, as well as an adult comic version called Filthyfigments.com.

Question 2 – What inspired you to create Bunny’s Tour Through the Silver Millennium?

Yeah, I ran the site for ten years. It was basically…you know, it was the height of the Sailor Moon popularity and I wanted to create one because I loved the story and the anime and the manga, and I wanted a site where it had all the information collected together. There just wasn’t very…everything had like very specific…they were like shrines at the time. So you had a Mercury, you had a Mars, you didn’t have something where it was all together really. And I felt like it would be really fun to do it in a tour theme, since the characters lived on different planets and stuff like that.

Question 3 – What do you like best about Sailor Moon? (I don’t know if you’re still into Sailor Moon…)

Oh yeah. Actually, when I’m relaxing from not working on comics, the one I end up drawing to relax is Sailor Moon fanart. So I still do it from time to time, just because it’s something that’s comfortable and it’s always a fun story to go back and reexplore. But, I think I like…I loved the romance aspect. I loved that, you know, it was a lot about friendship and “love conquers all” and “friendship conquers” and they always…they had themes of family and life and death, and on a very, very basic note, good versus evil. But it was just a really fun way to tell it. It had mythology, which always appeals to me – I love mythology from all different cultures. And the mixing of Japanese mythology with like Greek and Roman mythology was really fun.

Question 4 – Do you still follow the Sailor Moon fandom? What do you think of how it is now?

Well, when the live-action came out, I watched that and I had fun kind of rediscovering the story from a different point of view even. But since then I haven’t really seen much because not much has come out, not even out of the official site. They were doing new art with new…the calendars every month and stuff like that, and it was fun to see new work from Takeuchi, which we hadn’t seen in a while and, um, it was kind of a shame when that all kind of dropped off again. There hasn’t been much, and you know, I talk to people about Sailor Moon and they remember it in a nostalgic way when I talk to them at conventions But there was a time when everybody knew my website, and now I bring it up, and people look at me like I’ve got a third eye on my forehead. They’re like, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Question 5 – What do you think attracts people to Sailor Moon?

Well, I think that it’s one of the few anime that came over that had very empowered female characters. They were strong figures for girls to follow. Before that, it was very, very male-oriented shows on TV, and Sailor Moon came out and it’s just…it has those basic themes, those core themes that really appeal to people and you know, the love, the friendship, those strong bonds, the good versus evil, but also I think it became a huge hit because it was the first anime really to come over here that could appeal to a female audience that had strong female leads, which is something I always appreciate in anime or manga or even in American comics. The females, while there was romance…it was more about their friendship and it wasn’t as…you know, they chased boys, and that was great. But it always came down to their friendship. It wasn’t that they had to be involved with a male character. They weren’t…their character was not dependent on the male character in order to continue on. They had their own personalities and likes and dislikes and they were strong on their own.

Question/Discussion 6: Gina’s Thoughts on the Reissued Manga and PGSM

[This question was originally “How do you think the anniversary coming up is going to affect the fandom?” but somehow I never actually got that question out as written, and instead started talking about the 20th anniversary DVD’s as a way to set up the question, which eventually prompted discussion about Gina’s views on the changes to the reissued manga and changes between PGSM and the existing canon, which I feel I just can’t leave out].

[The following came after our discussion about the 20th Anniversary DVD’s and the cost of shipping them]

You know, when the new manga versions came out, I didn’t buy those. I’d seen that they changed things and that’s something that actually kinda bothers me. They took out references of Satan and all different sorts of things, and… She changed attack names, she had changed, she changed references to Satan and the devil and certain things like that, that you know, she was trying to make it like coincide a little bit more with, yeah, with the live-action, and I just, I like the originals. Which is fine, but it’s like, you know, we scold George Lucas all the time for “Stop reediting Star Wars. We liked it the way it was. Please stop changing it.” It’s fine if you do it in rough drafts before it goes live, but when you start changing it too much, something that’s so beloved and so popular, it’s kinda hard to [enjoy it].

[After a short Star Wars-related digression, I guided the interview back to Sailor Moon by mentioning the differences between PGSM and the anime and manga]

The first, like five episodes are extremely close [to the manga] and then it starts to splinter into its own world, which was fine, because adaptations are one thing, but changing the original source to something else to edit what was originally what you knew is different. It’s not reinterpreting, it’s not making it for a different medium, it’s changing something that was already there and had already been accepted as canon and changing it to be something else is just a little bit…different.

Question 7 – What would you think about Funimation doing a new dub of Sailor Moon?

I have a two-fold answer to that. One, I, you know, admittedly I got into Sailor Moon originally through the dub. Then, when it didn’t end, I sought out the fansubs, and then when they became distributed for real I bought them that way, but the…going back and seeing what they had done with the dub, I was very, very disappointed. If they could do a real translation, with the actual original names and not trying to over-Americanize it…because, you know, the things they did didn’t make sense and it just didn’t work really. There were just too many problems I had. Personally, I’m the type of person that at this point, I will not watch a dubbed anime no matter what. If they released it subtitled and it was a good translation, I would buy it. But I would not buy anything just for the dub. I don’t.

Just in general, I like to hear it [anime] how the original creators intended for it to be heard. I don’t mind reading the screen to watch and understand something, because this is what they wanted it to sound like. This is what they wanted it to be. This is the presentation they made. I don’t want someone else’s reinterpretation of it at that point. I want it as close to the original version as I can possibly get to get the director or the author’s original vision. So, for me a dub just messes with what the original was.

Question 8 – At your panel, you talked a little bit about what Red String is about, but, just for the people reading this, could you tell us a little about that series and what it’s about?

Sure. It’s a webcomic series, and it’s all about love and growing up. It follows three high school students and their adventures into adulthood. And it takes the whole “red string” concept from Japanese and Chinese mythology where the two people destined to be together are joined by a red string of fate at birth, and as they go through life the string gets shorter and shorter until the day they meet. And, it pretty much has an ensemble cast and there’s usually at least one character you can relate to in the story. It’s definitely influenced by manga but it’s also influenced by years of growing up reading X-Men and Conan and other types of indie comics. So, you can see that my paneling is more American-style rather than manga-style and certain things I do with text and word bubbles…it’s definitely more of an American feel than Japanese.

Question 9 – I know that you haven’t done anything with Bunny’s Tour Through the Silver Millennium for several years. Do you plan on doing anything with it at this point?

I keep looking back and hoping but I just, I don’t have time. I do comics for a living now; I run to conventions all the time and it’s really kinda hard to go and run a fansite that huge, especially when I look at it and go, “I’d love to revamp it to make it more up-to-date” and I just don’t have the time, to be honest.

Question 10 – Do you have any last words for the people who will be reading this interview?

Oh my. Well, I would definitely say, don’t be afraid to read shoujo manga. It’s always awesome. And always be willing to try new things. And, you know, rock on and love long!

****

Later the same evening was the Masquerade. This was my first time seeing a Masquerade live, since I’ve never been able to attend the one at Comic-Con. There were about 30 entries, in three divisions – Novice, Open, and Exhibition (there was only one Exhibition entry though) – and they were all entertaining to watch.

Having not seen much Sailor Moon representation at this con, I was pleasantly surprised to see a Sailor Moon entry in the masquerade bunch. Entitled “Sequin Moon,” the masquerade entry consisted of a trio of cosplayers, dressed as Human Luna, Princess Serenity, and Tuxedo Kamen, who sang and danced to “Moonlight Densetsu,” using the arm movements created for the song’s performance at SeraMyu live events. These three weren’t actually singing live, since ALA requires all masquerade audio to be pre-recorded (due to a shortage of mikes, I think), but the result was still really cool. Here’s a video of them, courtesy of AC Paradise, who filmed the whole masquerade:

Cool, huh? Sequin Moon even went on to win two awards – Honorable Mention in Workmanship for Stage Effects Through Use of Materials (must be the sequins) and Best Song/Tune, both in Open Division. Congrats Sequin Moon!

The nearly four-hour masquerade brought day 2 to a close. Thanks so much to Gina Biggs for letting me interview her! Please support Gina’s current project Red String, as well as her other endeavors, including an in-development comic that retells the lesser-known Brothers Grimm tales (which she mentioned at her panel). Also check out the Gina-related scans below: the ALA program book cover and my con badge (both of which Gina did the art for), one of Gina’s Red String business cards, and Gina’s autograph in the autograph area at the back of my program book.

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