Hey everybody! c:

I’m honored to be the newest addition to RandomC’s staff of writers! The profile says Jig, but you can call me The Jig Man…or Jig Meister, Jiggy, McJiggerton, Andre Jiguodala, Jiggy Azalea—you get the idea.

Or Sweet Jesus. You can call me Sweet Jesus if you want to.

First and foremost, I stumbled into anime from a very early age. Having parents that worked as artists in the animation industry since before I was even born, I grew up around the medium in all of its forms—from Western to Japanese. I have thus grown to cherish animation as one of my most beloved modes of storytelling. Some of my favorite shows growing up ranged from programs I watched on the tube like Batman: TAS and Dexter’s Laboratory, to old tapes of stuff like Astro Boy, Mazinger, and Brave Command Dagwon that I would rent from the Asian video store.

My great love of anime stems from the Japanese’s very sincere regard for the storytelling possibilities and creative potential of the animated medium. Aside from a couple of rare exceptions (Avatar: The Last Airbender, Transformers: Prime, Pixar films, and the like) it’s really difficult to find many American animated productions which take the art form seriously (given the more Western consensus that animation should be reserved for kids’ cartoons or lo-fi mature comedy shows ala South Park and Family Guy. Not that I’m discounting these programs—they’re great for their own reasons). Anime, though, doesn’t play it safe—it dives headfirst into the absolutely insane levels of creative freedom and narrative possibilities which can be realized with animation, and it is so goddamn sweet.