“Family Guy” meets “Paradise Kiss”

The major characters of "Paradise Kiss" from left to right: Isabella Yamamoto (Dan Quagmire), George Koizumi (Glenn Quagmire), Yukari Hayasaka (Lois Griffin), Arashi Nagase (Brian Griffin), Miwako Sakurada (Stewie Griffin).

The Winter Charity Art Show of 2010 was the same as the previous year’s with no theme. I was on a “Paradise Kiss” kick at the time, and I thought it would be cool to see Lois as Yukari Hayasaka. So I grabbed an image of the major characters off the net, and put a “Family Guy” spin to it on a 5-inch square piece of animation paper. What a mistake that was! I should’ve drawn it within a comic panel with some white space around it or something because when it was placed perfectly in the middle of the frame I bought for it, part of the title was cropped out by the matte. What the heck? The frame’s supposed to fit a photo of that size, so what’s with the cropping!? Of course, I solved the problem by moving the drawing a little to the right until the title was no longer cropped, but that didn’t make it any less annoying to me. Not only that, the cardboard backing was barely keeping the drawing up against the matte; several times, the drawing would fall out of its place within the frame!

Luckily, my piece displayed without a hitch the day of the show on Friday, December 10. But I was so bothered by all the imperfections with the frame that I ended up slapping a “Not For Sale” sign on it. I just felt like it would be such a gyp for the potential winning bidder to deal with that mess.