2021 In the Rear View Mirror (and Holiday Giveaway Winner!)

 First of all, let's announce this year's Holiday Giveaway winner: A Sea of Reads, with some very diverse selections:

Two of my favourite new-to-me series were Summit of the Gods and Birds of Shangri-la.

Congratulations!  Please reach out to us via our Twitter DMs so that we can get that $25 RightStuf gift certificate to you right away.

While overall this year remained as dour and confused as the last one, this year was personally a rather productive one.  Obviously I kept things going here at the Manga Test Drive, but it also a big year for our side blog Renaissance Josei.  The biggest part of it was working on the Story of Animerama series, in which I turned a bunch of panel research into a six-part essay series exploring how these three films fit into the careers of their directors and the history of Mushi Productions.  These got a lot of views - in fact, the first installment recently became the most viewed piece on that blog - along with a lot of praise from both friends and AniTwitter figures that I respect.

Another popular essay was my Disaster Report on the sappy, tedious, and odd 2001 harem series Angel Tales.  While the show itself was a bore, writing this review (and live-tweeting the show as I watched it) was an absolute delight.  My other Disaster Report on the bizarre 2009 promotional show Miracle Train was not quite as popular, but it was interesting to revisit and memorialize this show shortly before it disappeared from legal streaming forever.

I also kept busy with convention panels, in both virtual and in-person form.  This year not only marked my first (and likely only) appearance at a virtual Fanime, but also my first appearance in everyone's favorite virtual anime con: Anime Lockdown.  Virtual Fanime not only marked the debut of the Story of Animerama panel (albeit in a safe-for-streaming form), but also provided an opportunity to retool The Fabulous Forty-Niners after its previous appearance at Otakon Online 2020.  Meanwhile, Shojo Manga's Lost Generation went over splendidly with the Anime Lockdown audience and has since become one of the most viewed panels on the channel.  It might be the only place where one of my panels could have a larger audience than that for multiple Mike Toole panels.

This year also marked my return to in-person conventions.  It began with my return to Anime Iowa, which coincided with its return to Coralville.  It was kind of weird to come back to such a comparatively small con after attending major cons like Sakuracon or Otakon, but I felt like I did my part to bring some higher quality panel material to what tends to be a rather basic line-up.  This year also proved to be the third year in a row where I served as a panelist at Otakon, and the first where more than one of my panels was approved.  Neither my old-school manga recommendation panel nor my retrospective on Yoshikazu "Yas" Yasuhiko had the greatest time-slots, but both of them went off with nary a hitch to appreciative audience.  After all, I can't complain when said Yas panel got a couple of shout-outs on Anime World Order of all things.

I was also finally able to do something with the folks over at the DubTalk podcast, many of which are old friends from an old anime forum (D2 Brigade for life, y'all).  In particular, I got to participate in their Retro sub-series, where I got to discuss the dubs for both A Thousand and One Nights and Nutcracker Fantasy (which maaaaaay have coincided with research I had done for both past and future panels).

So what does 2022 hold in store for me and my blogs?  Well, other than the continued hope for the end of this wretched pandemic, next year will mark a major milestone for The Manga Test Drive: its 10th anniversary.  I won't go into depth on that just yet - I need to save some material for the actual anniversary in May - but in a world where anime and manga blogging has gone through a lot of changes it feels like a big deal to me.  It holds the promise for more projects: another podcast appearance that will be going live on New Year's Day, my first commissioned Disaster Report, some potential new panels on the history of Sanrio Films and Japanese stop-motion, and trying to complete all of my anime backlog resolutions.  It will include not just another trip to Otakon, but also (hopefully) my long-delayed debut at Anime Boston.  Beyond that it's all a bit up-in-the-air, but I hope that all of y'all reading this will continue to join me in all of my ventures in 2022 and beyond.