About Maiken2051

On this page you can find information about what cels are in the gallery, the content of recent updates, and (if you scroll down far enough) information about the gallery itself.

		Statistics
		Recent updates
		About the gallery
		Technology
		Legal
		Design
		Contact Me

Statistics

This table shows how many cels are currently in each gallery. To visit a particular gallery, click on its name.

Recent updates

This table shows what new cels were added during the last six updates to the gallery. You can click on a date to see the cels that were added on that day, a gallery name to visit that gallery, or a character name to see all cels containing a particular character that were added on that date.

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If you've visited the gallery before, cels that are new since your last visit should have a little blue star next to their titles, like this:

The Gallery

I started collecting animation art about 10 years ago. As a child I spent endless hours watching Warner Brothers cartoons, and one day I wandered into a store that had some Coyote & Roadrunner cels for sale.

It was a momentous moment. I had never imagined that I could own some of the art used to make the cartoons I loved. I bought the C&R cels on the spot, though they were expensive, and I've never looked back.

Eventually the supply of Warner cels more or less dried up. They are now very difficult to find, even if you can get past the sticker shock. Many Warner cels from the "classic" period I collect (prior to about 1970) were destroyed or wiped and reused, and those that remain are largely already in the hands of collectors.

Though I still wait patiently for Warner cels, their scarcity made cel collecting a fairly unexciting hobby. Months often go by without a good Warner cel coming on the market.

I stumbled into anime cel collecting when a dealer I'd purchased other cels from said, "I've got a Japanese animation cel here that I think you might like." It turned out to be an Ashitaka cel from Mononoke Hime, a movie I hadn't even seen at the time. Needless to say I bought that cel, and then many more anime cels since.

Until 2001 most of my cels sat in a hanging-file cabinet or framed on the walls of my house. After seeing some cel galleries online I began thinking about making a gallery of my own, and this site is the result. In building this gallery I wanted to share my love of animation art, and with luck inspire some of the same appreciation in others.

I hope you enjoy visiting Maiken2051!

Technology

The Web-heads among you (and you know who you are) will notice that this site was built with PHP and guess correctly that it runs against MySQL. This means that the pages are dynamically generated from a database, rather than existing as static HTML files.

I spent the time to create a database-driven site because I'm enough of a computer geek to enjoy doing it, and more fundamentally, because I'm lazy. My collection contains several hundred cels, with more constantly on the way, and I just couldn't see myself editing and re-editing zillions of HTML files to add new cels and arrange the existing cels.

Using PHP allows me to do things like change the look of the entire site by editing a few files; create thumbnails and cropped versions of the cel images by pointing and clicking, rather than using an image editor or other utility; arrange cels and galleries at will; change titles and captions easily; and so on. It's the old theory of Web development: spend a modicum of time now to save a lot of time later, or so we hope!

If you're interested in building a gallery based on similar technology and would like a copy of the source code, please don't hesitate to contact me at the email address below.

The web presence provider for Maiken2051.com is Hostway.

Legal

Anything on this site that's copyrightable is Copyright (C) 2002 Michael Newcomb, including the web site source code, graphics, etc. I own all the cels on this site, which I think and hope gives me some right to display them. The characters and their names, and the series logos, are doubtless owned by the animation studios that produced them, and if you're a lawyer for one of those studios, please don't hurt me . I derive no revenue from this site and intend only respect for the artists who created the animes I love.

Design

The stripped-down look of this site is a reaction (perhaps overreaction) to the designs used by many cel galleries on the Net. Shortly after I decided to start building a cel gallery I promised myself a total absence of animated GIFs, black backgrounds, sound effects, and other distracting knickknacks. My goal was for the site to "get out of the way" of the cels. I hope you think I've succeeded -- I'd appreciate any feedback, be it kudos or brickbats!

Contact Me

Send me mail