@desa:
I thought for a moment it was a member I didn't know. Why did you change the usual dog-theme avatar?
Geez, catch up already loser! If you must know, its because…
@CCC:
Pretty sure it's because we all realized that the player character in Pokemon X/Y essentially is Gary Motherfucking Oak- wrecking rivals and making them lick his boots afterwards.
Yeah, that.
@redon:
I sent the letter in the name of our spanish website Pirateking.es. We worked in the project a few weeks (our translator H-Samba did the job with Greg, CCC and Aohige help) and we sent the letter in June ^^
[qimg]http://thumbnails103.imagebam.com/25879/eac5e1258789966.jpg[/qimg]
Very cool. Wonder if this is what Greg was talking about…
@Al!naJames:
It's the shittiest excuse to never have any dark-skinned characters anywhere, ever. Not even in the background. Oda has assistents, they could do that. Drawing complicated backgrounds and even patterns on clothes is much harder and way more time-consuming, but that never stopped Oda form making his artwork complex.
Because once you start down the road of adding an extra shade to indicate one dark thing, where do you stop? Some clothes? Hair? Pools of water? Do you add lighting and shading effects consistently or just use a flat tone? Do you use 20% or 40% grey on that character? When you want to push them to the foreground how do you approach that, two layers of tone? How do you keep that one character from looking jarring every time they show up?
Its a slippery slope. Hell, Oda decided between shanks and Nami that red hair shouldn't be toned… because thats a bitch to keep up with.
And... it makes the one character look weird and different from the rest, UNLESS there's already heavy toning going on. Its distracting.
In a color series, no big deal. In a manga, you are doubling the amount of work that goes into toning a page every time the dark skinned character shows up. A page that might have taken 15 minutes to drop a single tone onto a separate the foreground, now takes 30 minutes. or a big group shot where lots of characters appear on a page with no tone, that would have taken 0 minutes to tone, now by default has to take an hour.
Every single time the character appears.
I've toned hundreds of pages. I always end up hating the dark skinned characters. Sure, it looks cool, but it adds an extra step. EVERY SINGLE PAGE. It adds up. (And "pass it off to to the assistants" isn't an excuse either... they have to make time for that detail then as well. SOMEONE is spending extra time on someething that doesn't add much... not compared to extra building or clothing detail.)
Aside from that, its black and white and Oda uses heavy blacks and crosshatch shading. Right now he drops tone on characters and leaves their eyes and mouths white occasionally, and it always looks weird. There are certainly characters he draws with features more inclined towards darker skin, you can assume them to be darker skinned if you want, just without the extra screentone step.
Hell, Jinbe is blue and he doesn't get tone either.