Anime News Nina!

Special Edition Part I

Welcome to the first installment of Anime News Nina: Special Edition!

The strip is on hiatus for a while, so we asked creator Robin Sevakis to go through the archive and pick out some of her most memorable strips and do a little commentary on each to give us some insight into her creative process.

Click the image for a full-size version of this strip.

Robin's Comments

"The story arc of trying to calm down Myoopi and coaxing him out from under the bed was originally going to be extremely grandiose... until I messed it up. Once he was under the bed in this strip, I thought, ooh, Nina and the gang should have to do some really crazy Japanese ritual. My thoughts turned to Japanese mythology, remembering vaguely the story of how the sun goddess Amaterasu plunged the world into darkness by locking herself away in a cave, and how the other gods then had to somehow coax her out. I thought, "Oh man, I am going to reference the myth in this comic and be a super nerd!" But when I looked up the myth online to recall how the other gods actually got Amaterasu to leave the cave, I found out that they basically did a "lewd dance" to peak her curiosity. So basically, they did a butt dance, which I had already had the gang try. And thus, I unknowingly screwed myself out of being all mythological, because I underestimated mythology's ability to include butt dances."