Welcome to Heidi Cullinan's Antisocial blog tour stop! Don't miss today's info and enter in the giveaway for a chance to win an Antisocial blog tour prize pack: a paperback copy of Antisocial, 11X17 art poster and 7 gods phone strap!
Xander Fairchild can’t stand people in general and frat boys in particular, so when he’s forced to spend his summer working on his senior project with Skylar Stone, a silver-tongued Delta Sig with a trust fund who wants to make Xander over into a shiny new image, Xander is determined to resist. He came to idyllic, Japanese culture-soaked Benten College to hide and make manga, not to be transformed into a corporate clone in the eleventh hour.
Skylar’s life has been laid out for him since before he was born, but all it takes is one look at Xander’s artwork, and the veneer around him begins to crack. Xander himself does plenty of damage too. There’s something about the antisocial artist’s refusal to yield that forces Skylar to acknowledge how much his own orchestrated future is killing him slowly…as is the truth about his gray-spectrum sexuality, which he hasn’t dared to speak aloud, even to himself.
Through a summer of art and friendship, Xander and Skylar learn more about each other, themselves, and their feelings for one another. But as their senior year begins, they must decide if they will part ways and return to the dull futures they had planned, or if they will take a risk and leap into a brightly colored future—together.
Price/ISBNS
Ebook: $5.99
978-1-945116-09-4
Print: $19.99
978-1-945116-10-0
Release Date: August 8
Spotify Playlist
https://open.spotify.com/user/12123422997/playlist/74SgTRzp6vwTId6Q3chN4Q
Thanks so much for having me here today!
I’m here to celebrate my newest release, Antisocial. Antisocial is a new adult gay and asexual romance set in a fictional college in upstate New York between a one-percenter fraternity boy and a highly antisocial artist. One encounter with Xander Fairchild’s artwork is enough to turn Skylar Stone’s carefully orchestrated life upside down, unlacing his secrets and inviting him into a secret anime-soaked world with a new set of friends. But will they be brave enough to embrace their fragile new relationship and let it last beyond the summer?
Xander is primarily an artist who works in oils as far as the college is concerned, but he’s also a skilled manga artist, and he’s a devoted student of the art and the Japanese artists who frame his work, so much so that he named his cats for them. His most influential manga artist is Hiromu Arakawa, the author and artist behind the manga series Fullmetal Alchemist. Today I want to tell you a little more about that manga series.
Fullmetal Alchemist is a shōnen manga series, which essentially means it’s aimed at a young male audience. It was published between 2001 and 2010 and is collected into 27 volumes, and it also comes with several art books. Two anime were made based on this manga series, one which ran congruent with the books’ release and deviated significantly from the printed story, and a more recent release (Fullmetal Alchemist:Brotherhood) which is more faithful to the original manga. It’s one of the best-selling manga series of all time and is beloved around the world.
The story is set in an alternate history and in a world where alchemy is a celebrated and commonplace science. It’s a part of the military, and for some people it’s everyday life. One of the most important themes in Fullmetal is one of the tenents of alchemy: the Law of Equivalent Exchange. To create something, you must provide something of equal value. And they’re not allowed to transmute humans or gold.
Of course, the story begins with young Edward and Alphonse, the Elric brothers, attempting to do just that, transmute their dead mother back to life using their absent father’s alchemy books and their not inconsiderable natural talent. This attempt goes terribly, horribly wrong: Edward loses an arm, and Alphonse is sucked into some kind of void. Whatever it is they brought back from the beyond isn’t their mother—it’s some kind of monster, nothing like the woman they’re missing so much. Eric goes after his brother, but he’s only able to bring back his soul, not his body, and he loses part of his leg to do it.
Eric seals Alphonse’s soul into a nearby suit of armor, their friend Winry and her grandmother help Eric get automail for his arm and leg, and at this point the state alchemists, which are basically the army, come to recruit the boys. They join, eager to travel the world and find a philosopher’s stone, the only thing that might be able to help them get their original bodies back. And so begins the tale, which takes them down many journeys—some wonderful, some heartbreaking, all of them exciting. The characters they meet are rich and varied, people who linger with you long after the pages turn.
If you want to give this manga a try, you might check your local library first, or you can check Amazon (here’s 1-3, a great deal) or RightStuff Anime. (They have the omnibus edition also.) If you want to go straight to the anime, you can watch it on Crunchyroll, Hulu, Amazon Strike, and is orderable as a DVD through Netflix. Your library might well have the DVDs as well—this is truly a popular anime.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this peek at Fullmetal Alchemist, and I hope you enjoy Antisocial too. Thanks for having me by today!
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This sounds like a great read! It's now in my TBR!
ReplyDeleteI certainly heard about this infamous anime. My friends were raving about it on the time when I wasn't interested in any kind of anime yet. (which is a pity if you would ask me.) It sounds like a badass anime, tho.
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