First of all, I have to thank everyone who participated in this year's Holiday Review Giveaway. I've never gotten so many responses in the 8 1/2 years I've been running this blog, and it was interesting seeing all of your responses. Still, I had to pick a winner and this year the winner of the $25 RightStuf gift certificate is....Ahavah22!Witch Hat Atelier has been absolutely fantastic--the art is gorgeous, the characters are interesting, and the fantasy world has been slowly but surely getting more complex. Highly recommended!Congratulations! Please send me a DM at the Manga Test Drive Twitter account and we'll get that gift certificate to you as soon as possible. Also I am in perfect agreement with this comment - Witch Hat Atelier was one of the best manga I read last year, and my love and admiration for it has only grown with each new volume. It absolutely deserved all the awards it won this year.____________________________________________________________Like most people, I'm more than ready to put this accursed year behind me. It was a year where a lot of personal plans got put on hold, if not outright cancelled. It was a lonely year. It was a distracting year, something a lot of you probably noticed with how frequently I failed to finish theme months. Still, there were positives to be found. The manga market as a whole managed to thrive even in the face of a terrible economy and extended shutdowns, and these days it's hard to keep up with all the titles getting licensed. I too managed to thrive, at least as much as anyone could under such circumstances. I did a couple of podcasts, my Disaster Report on Weiss Kreuz got a lot of views and positive feedback, and I got a panel into Otakon Online (and thus made my first video ever). I even managed to finally hit my first monetary goal on Patreon (at least, for a little while) and gave the site a long-needed make-over.It's hard to say at this point what 2021 and the 9th year of the Manga Test Drive will look like. I want to hope that will be a productive one. I'd certainly like to keep my Patreon income growing. There is one thing that I do know for certain: so long as you keep reading them, I'll keep writing reviews and more.
Dec 31, 2020 • Subscribe
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