The Oakenhearted - Teaser

In addition to stuff like Ragnarok Wisdom and the Legend of Key-Fu, I've got a lot of irons I've left lying around in the fire. I've got ideas that are almost a decade old which I've wanted to follow through on but never did for one reason or another. One of these days I need to go through and start doing something with it all—and there's nowhere better to start than with this!

Back in the summer of 2012, I started putting together ideas for random personifications of military ships and vehicles after being inspired by a few Taiwanese artists like acea4, as well as art from a now-defunct decade-old Japanese image BBS (I wouldn't know how to render its name in English, but Google Translate called it the Logistics Office) where artists submitted pictures of what they call mecha musume—which I THINK would translate to "machine girl/daughter/maiden" in English). Initially, I was playing around with some ideas for designs and the possibility of making a few comics and pictures, mainly involving the battleship USS Missouri, but I started gravitating toward personifications of oldschool sailing ships like USS Constitution (who is depicted here) since I noticed there weren't many artists who'd done stuff with those. WWII-era personifications are a dime a dozen, but I think I've seen only one, maybe two artists try their hand at Connie here.

So, I figured focusing on the Age of Sail (and earlier maritime history—Age of Oars, maybe?) would be a relatively novel approach to something which has already been done quite a bit. As I'd implicated earlier, personifying ships and other vehicles isn't anything new—the web game Kantai Collection, which launched late last spring, is now a smash hit. It's looking to displace Touhou in terms of popularity and is set to have its own anime series. Because of that, it's what most people will think of when they think of "ships as people," but the manga Arpeggio of Blue Steel has been running since 2009 and there's a webcomic I've heard of called Japanisches Kaiserreich Mitternacht Marine which I think is just as old. You can find some artists on Pixiv who've been doing this sort of thing for decades, in fact.

Given all that happened in 2013 I didn't do much with what I had until Christmas break, and then put it aside again during the spring semester this year. Over the summer, though, I've been doing a lot of reading on naval history, and it's given me a lot of ideas on what to do and where to go with this. So I've been putting some effort to get this actually out on the Internet somewhere, and to gauge everyone's interest in a series like this.

What do you guys think? Are you interested? I'd appreciate some feedback!