When there was an idea to bring back the BL con in the Philippines, my first suggestion was that we should have a fan anthology.
It seems to be the thing nowadays. At tumblr, there’s countless of fan anthologies going up: from Avengers to Sherlock, and even some for original works.
We know that there are a lot of artists and writers out there who are looking for spaces where they can write BL as they imagined. The best that we can offer is this fan anthology and at the very least, we can set some guidelines and direction. Together, we were hoping to make this dream come true. And we did! \o/
After all the anxious waiting, printing, and all that jazz, we managed to print this beautiful baby filled with fantastic surprises! Seriously, never have I been so anxious about BL until this. While I was waiting for contributions to come in, I understood the anxieties of an editor — Â will our contributors make it in time, will we even have contributors, what if the contributions sucked eggs!?!
It’s crazy but this turned out to be quite fun and unexpected. I discovered new artists I didn’t think were even drawing BL. I discovered that a lot of our contributors were interested in musicians thus a good number of the stories had musicians in it. It was a fun first venture into making a fanzine and now, I’m hoping is you guys get to read it and tell us what you think.
It’s hard for me to put up an objective review for this since I’m the editor. If anything, I’m impressed with the contributors. I really enjoyed all of them! The cuteness that came with Hanaoka’s It was June was balanced by the madness of Cinnamon Rub’s Screwballs. They’re all awesome. I should stop saying that they all are. I may also be biased as an editor but I’m hoping that those who have been reading my blog would probably think that maybe I used my manga sense here and did something right.
We’ve sold out on our copies of the anthology so we’re putting it up online until the next reprint. We’re also thinking up of putting a quarterly web-only fanzine to invite more contributors and have a growing community of BL artists, writers, and fans.
The Blush Anthology made me realize that it’s possible to come up with something quite fantastic as this even for a something fan-based that over the past few days, I’ve been entertaining a development of a similar fan anthology, but this time, for the josei genre. But I’ll leave that for another post! For now, I’m happy to present to you our baby, the Blush Anthology.