Weekly Web Picks: 10/13/97

Scott Frazier is the president of Renegade Brain, an international animation/graphics production and consulting firm and consults for companies like Cambridge Animation Systems and Production I.G. He has worked in the Japanese animation industry for over ten years, founded five animation companies and has worked on such shows as Bubblegum Crash, Genocyber, Ghost in the Shell, Doomed Megalopolis and Moldiver. He is also the author of TRANSCENDENCE, a digital graphic novel originally published in Comic ON and writes a regular column in EX: the Online World of Anime and Manga.

There are a lot of interesting sites out there and it was difficult to distill them down to five choices but I think these are some sites that are representative of what I like to see out there and what I find interesting. Everyone can put up images and say, "I like this show" and that's OK but a large majority of the sites out there consist of only this and it gets pretty repetitive after awhile.

I looked for sites with original, interesting content or that had good information in a very readable format and without a lot of frills that just slow the page loading time down. Because of very negative industry sentiment (which is now moving past passive anger and disgust into going-to-take-legal-action in some cases) about such things I had to stay away from sites with fansubs, MPEG music collections, large image galleries of scanned stuff, sites with scanned manga pages, and other flagrant copyright violations. It doesn't matter what I think of such things, the companies I work with have their own feelings which I must respect.