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The Star-Advertiser welcomes a new comic strip today on its Sunday puzzles pages: "nemu*nemu: Blue Hawaii," by the husband-and-wife team of Scott Yoshinaga and Audra Furuichi.
The strip is an offshoot of the couple’s "nemu*nemu" Web comic, which follows the misadventures of Kana and Anise and their magical stuffed toy pups, Nemu and Anpan.
The Sunday strip introduces another toy puppy, named Blue.
"He lives in a lost-and-found box (in an office), an abandoned stuffed animal," said Furuichi. "But he does have friends, like other toys in that office space, a fish in an aquarium, ornamental statues, desktop doodads and whatnot.
"He may come across humans, but they won’t interact with each other. It’s like ‘Toy Story.’"
The new strip will appear every third week, in rotation with two other local-themed strips: Jon J. Murakami’s "Calabash" and Deb Aoki’s "Bento Box." (Veteran cartoonist Dave Thorne and his gag-driven "Thorney’s Zoo" is on hiatus.)
Yoshinaga and Furuichi’s work is influenced by the kawaii (cute) style of Japanese manga. They created "nemu*nemu" in 2006.
Yoshinaga, 41, is a graduate of Hawaii Baptist Academy, and Furuichi, 33, graduated from St. Andrew’s Priory. Both are alumni of the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where they did comic strips for the campus newspaper Ka Leo o Hawaii, and where Furuichi won the prestigious Charles M. Schulz Award for best college cartoonist in 1999.
"We met in late 2004 at a manga workshop," Yoshinaga said. "Our parents know each other, and Audra had just moved back to Hawaii" after working for two years in Irvine, Calif., doing comic-coloring contract work.
The couple married in 2007.
Their first hardcover collection of "nemu*nemu" strips from their website is expected to be available in March.
On the Net » nemu-nemu.com
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