Out of Character 1

Introduction
The Out of Character, Vol 1 (OOC1) project was a fan produced hentai doujinshi (adult-rated, fan-made comic book) released in June 2003. It is the first doujinshi produced by Ranma Hentai Books (formerly Ranma Hentai Gallery).

Storyline and Contents
The Story: The “actors” from Ranma ½, some years after the series has finished, have lowered their standards a lot in the search for acting gigs, due to their declining popularity and character typecasting, resulting in mostly having to survive on cheesy sex romps in dojin and fanfiction. Jaded and bitter, they participate in this one with widely mixed degrees of reluctance and professionalism. The spend a fair amount of time between the all-lesbian sex arguing with the narrator, and occasionally each other, instead of just following the script. OOC1, and in fact the whole trilogy, broke as many standard Doujinshi conventions as possible, intentionally, and with hilarious results. This would include plot conventions. The storyline continues immediately in Out of Character 2

Cast & Activities:

Featured Characters (those who have sex in this issue)

Akane

Ranma-chan

Nabiki

Kasumi

Other Characters (not sexually active in this issue)

Kodachi

Ranma-kun

Character combinations (in order of screen-time):

Ranma-chan + Akane,

Nabiki + Kasumi,

Akane +Nabiki

Sexual practices:

Lesbian sex (including sisters),

Toys.

Semi-forced sex (with zero resistance and only token reluctance)

Background
It was a volunteer project, begun with the hope of kick-re-starting the popularity of Ranma-based hentai in the western world. The series, Ranma ½, had completed its release in the west, and had finished in Japan many years before that. The related amount of interest in producing (and viewing) Ranma hentai was measurable by the steadily dropping number of monthly art submissions to the Ranma Hentai Gallery.

Conceived by SHADE, OOC1 was the biggest project anyone in the western hemisphere had attempted to do with Ranma hentai or doujinshi to the then-date. It showcased the art styles of several different artists, each of whom worked on different sections. The goal was to create something even better than the low-res, badly scanned, (poorly, or not at all) translated doujinshi fan-comics made in Japan, (which were themselves dwindling in number). By selling OOC1, SHADE hoped to gain funding for future projects, so that Ranma hentai art and manga would not fade away into undeserved obscurity.



Production
Written and Produced By:

SHADE

Art (in general) by:

SHADE and a vast host of volunteers, including, but not necessarily limited to: Dunno, Dangbat, Michael Teh, ChunkStyle, Anneliese, Shameless-Onna, Magami, Boxie.

OOC1 combined full-colour art, higher resolution graphical effects, an original story written in English for an English audience, that kept the same wacky, fast-paced comedy elements that played a large part in making Ranma ½ such a globally popular anime series to begin with. It boasted complete, high-detail backgrounds and CG visual effects (which would eventually be much improved upon in later book releases).

Which is not to say it did not have its lesser problems and issues. There was no system or precedent in place for such production, and from conception to completion took SHADE a full 5 years. While having multiple artists showcase their styles in different sections was certainly interesting, it made the transition between one artist's section and another's quite jarring and distracting, and also practically forced the reader to make an unfair comparison as to which artistic style they preferred or regarded as “better” than the others, in their opinion. Many of the visual effects can come across as overdone, or an attempt to show off the graphic artist's photoshopping skills at the expense of making a scene actually look good as a whole. The counter-viewpoint to this would be that the book's own story was intentionally over-the-top to begin with, and the overdone graphics merely did their own part in adding to the comical melodrama.

In the end, OOC1 taught SHADE and his team a lot about what they could accomplish, and what they could improve upon for their next project and sequel, Out of Character 2. It may have been a leap ahead into the modern era of computer-assisted manga making, but for the RHB Team, it was merely a first, unsteady step compared to what they would accomplish in later years.

Release
OOC1 was completed and released for sale to the public in early summer, 2003. It began being sold using PayPal, until PayPal suspended their service for the RHG due to restrictions over adult digital media sales, forcing RHG to fall back upon sending money through the mail. Distribution was also a difficult issue. RHG did not at the time have any system in place for purchasing Ebooks or similar. OOC1, (along with all its massive library of extra art and production-stage bonus features) was sent out to those who purchased it on a standard CD-ROM through the mail. The cumbersomeness and unreliability of this delivery method, ensured that SHADE would be seeking out a more efficient method for their next book.

Reception
The original forum where RHG kept its reviews and commentary no longer exists as such. However, SHADE collected a large number of the OOC1 reviews, which can be found on this book's entry of the Original Projects page of the RHB main site.

Trivia
•The cover of OOC 1 is a deliberate collection of characters behaving completely WRONG for who they are in the series. Kasumi is dressed in sexy lingerie, Nabiki is beating Akane in a fight, Ranma-chan is a crybaby, and Ranma-kun is intimate with Kodachi.

•The cover of OOC 1 is one of the very few instances of an RHB comic using a coloring technique SHADE dubbed "hyper hair". It's a soft-stranded effect to give additional detail to the character's hair.

The hyper hair technique was abandoned subsequently because it was difficult, time consuming, and didn't match the traditional appearance for those characters.

One other spot this technique can be seen on is Page 04, which was drawn by DangBat. It was DangBat who taught SHADE the "hyper hair" technique.

•OOC 1 is the only book in the RHB collection to predate all use of 3D backgrounds. Everything is totally hand drawn in 2D. This also explains why so many of the backgrounds are abstract.

•OOC was started as a fan project experiment. It was an offshoot of the The New Ranma Project (NRP) translation group that banded together to fan translate the 2nd half of the Ranma manga.

The NRP project worked sufficiently well that SHADE tried to use the same fan-volunteer model to make hentai comicc.

The results of this initiative were unsatisfactory. It took over 2 years to complete OOC 1 using this model.

•On page 15: The extreme close-up of Akane when she's arguing with Ye Olde Writer's Box, and her tugging on the panel frames, are an homage to the classic Looney Tunes cartoon Duck Amock.

•Because of the fan project nature of this first book, more different artists worked on it than any other book by far. At least 10 different people contributed to the book in one way or another, and dozens more volunteered who never managed to complete anything.

•The phenomenon of people volunteering to help but never actually getting anything done seems common to fan projects. During The New Ranma Project translations, the ratio of people who got things done to those who volunteered but never followed through was about 1 in 3 good volunteers. For OOC 1, the ratio was 1 in 8.

•The entire OOC trilogy was originally conceived to be one single story. Due to the RHB's (then RHG) inexperience with making comics, nobody realized how LONG it would have to be to do the entire original concept. The decision was then made to chop the larger story in into three smaller, more manageable pieces.

•Lessons the production team learned from this original book:

A) Original comics are too complex and time consuming to be fan-based. After this the RHB switched to hiring full time artists to do the artwork. Money apparently is a great motivator as comics were now being completed within months, not years.

B) WRITE OUT A COMPLETE SCRIPT! The original script for ALL THREE PARTS of OOC was only 15 pages long. It was more a treatment and a plan than a script. Nobody realized when when the project started how much those simple ideas would chew up comic pages to actually show it all. A 15 page treatment became 115 total comic pages!

From this point onward, the RHB started writing all scripts out panel by panel.

C) Because of the full color nature of character art, leaving backgrounds white was never a good option. But trying to hand draw all the necessary backgrounds was clearly impossible as well. For all of OOC 1, SHADE only had 5 different backgrounds of the interior of the dojo to work with. If character art didn't fit any of them, the background had to be abstract.

This was so unsatisfying that it sparked the beginning of SHADE's experiments with 3D backgrounds.

•This is the only RHB project that Deep Star did not participate in. However, Deep Star ultimately provided crucial funding which allowed the subsequent two volumes, and thus OOC itself, to be completed.