Let's Flashback 1993

 

By popular demand, another long-suppressed issue of the print Let's Anime is up at the Otaku Archive portion of the Internet Archive, complete with all the attitude, factual errors and translation mistakes you've come to expect from 90s zines! It's sure to be a fascinating look at what it took to put a fanzine out back in the days when Japanese translation was difficult, reliable raw information was hard to come by, and desktop publishing meant putting actual pieces of paper onto the top of a desk, trimming images and text by hand using scissors or an X-Acto blade, and pasting everything down with the old reliable UHU Glue Stick. 

You can easily see exactly where I pasted things into the layout thanks to those harsh shadows. I still have the original pasteups for this issue, which is not a thing I can say about several other issues of the print Let's Anime. The process of putting together an issue was labor-intensive. For this particular issue I found myself blessed with a variety of submissions - Wilfredo Segarra sent me a terrific long-form Mazinger Z piece, Darius Washington wrote about Macross II, and Matt and CB delivered a rant about both the depressing state of then-current anime and the dismissive attitude the American fan sphere held towards the classics. Lloyd Carter gave me an installment of his long-running anime column "Beer Can Missiles," fake advice columnist The Beast offered yet more fake advice to fake correspondents, and I managed to throw in pieces about Giant Robo, a top ten robot anime list, scene reports, fanzine reviews, and because it's the 1990s, an article about Shonen Knife. The Nausicaa drone article came from an aviation magazine, the title of which has vanished into obscurity. Rounding out the issue were flyers for Project A-Kon 4, Anime America's Dojinshi contest, and I-Con's anime experiment "Chibi-Con"

 

All this text was keyboarded into a desktop publishing program, the name of which I cannot remember; all I know is it worked on our Windows 3.0 box. All the headlines, page numbers, and text blocks were printed out on our home inkjet printer. Illustrations were provided by hauling a load of manga, magazines, and books up to the Kinko's Copy at Windy Hill & 41, which was open all night and had free coffee, and I'd photocopy whatever I thought I was going to need for that particular issue.

Raw materials in hand, the next step was putting it all together and pasting it all up, one page at a time, trimming illustrations to fit and building collages of different images as necessary. This is kind of the fun part, as long as you keep a supply of sharp X-Acto blades handy. The pasted-up 8.5x11 pages would then be assembled into 11x17 signatures - a 28 page zine would require 7 signatures - and then that 11x17 mockup would be brought back to the Kinkos, or maybe the self-service copiers at Office Depot. That's where the actual printing of the book would be done. Then I'd take the pages home, assemble the books, staple the books with my long booklet stapler, and fold them. All by hand.  

 

This stack of finished Let's Anime zines would be sold to the general public at anime club meetings, at anime fan tables at local conventions, and at the artist alley/promotional tables at Project A-Kon, which at the time was the only anime convention we were making it out to. And of course I sold issues through the mail via the PO box; anime zine publishers would swap zines and promote each other's publications, and there was a slow but steady amount of letters coming into that PO box from people who'd read about Let's Anime in another fanzine, picked up a flyer at a convention, or heard about us at a club meeting somewhere. 

Did an issue of Let's Anime ever get a print run of more than 100 copies? I don't think so. I quit doing print issues of Let's Anime in 1999 for a multitude of reasons, mostly because on top of all the actual zine writing and layout work is all the extra work of simply getting that zine into the hands of readers. Distribution is the key word here, it's a job in and of itself, and one that I simply did not have time for.  I enjoy making fanzines, I enjoy creating physical printed books, and as we sometimes see decades of internet work vanish in an instant, the permanence of ink on paper has become surprisingly valuable. But self-distribution requires a self dedicated to that and only that, and, well, I have other things to do. In the meantime, my writing about classic Japanese animation can reach an audience tens, hundreds, thousands of times wider than it ever could when it was limited to whatever I could print, staple, and fold one at a time.  

-Dave Merrill

 

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write 'em, cowboy

I was there in the 90s and let me tell you, things were pretty grim. For us anime nerds, I mean. There we were, sitting around our anime clubs and cons, looking at the fandom we’d built around the science-fiction anime-boom giants of the late 70s and the 80s, realizing that those shows were gone. The Macrosses and Yamatos and Dirty Pairs had vanished, the Cobras and Captain Harlocks and Bubblegum Crisises had all popped along with the bubble economy, and as much as the retailers wished it wasn’t so, there was only one Akira. Sure, there was still plenty of anime to watch, but Japan had moved on from space opera; now everything was either high-school this or fantasy sorcerer-elf that, or somebody cooking something tasty in the middle of a forest in the middle of a Ghibli film, which, it’s fine, but there’s a specific itch that wasn’t getting scratched. 

 

That is, not until Cowboy Bebop showed up. Crashing into our eyeballs like, yeah, like a tank, this Sunrise show absolutely changed the game, flipped the table, set the rule book on fire and ignited a series of demolition charges around the perimeter of the stadium in which the game had been played. There it was, there was the rocket sock-’em space adventure we’d been missing, built around a framework of Tarantino and John Woo, with characters that looked like human beings instead of candy packaging mascots, backed by a soundtrack of… is that jazz? Is this music for grownups? Is this that rare, almost mythical beast, a Japanese animated TV show that isn’t childish or embarrassing or pandering, a show you can show your parents? Your roommates? Your girlfriend?

 

It's no surprise that a stylish, action-packed anime series wearing its global pop cultural influences on its sleeve would fit perfectly into a media landscape filled with maturing cartoon fans ready for the next big thing, primed by decades of TV syndication culminating in an American cable network seemingly built just for this show. At least that's what it felt like when Cowboy Bebop premiered here in North America; like the show had been custom-built for kids who four or five years back had been hypnotized by Sailor Moon, Teknoman and Ronin Warriors, who might be growing up and away from primary-colored justice fighters, who were ready for something starring grownups with jobs and nicotine habits, ready for a Japanese animated TV series that, for once, was going to impress the hell out of their friends and relatives who might still be mocking the concept of "animation for adults." 

Telos Publishing’s release of Satoru Stevenson’s Three, Two, One: Let’s Jam! The Unofficial And Unauthorised Guide To The Original Cowboy Bebop is also not a surprise, it’s more a case of the series finally getting the kind of exhaustively comprehensive guide it’s always deserved. And let me just say when I use the terms “exhaustive” and “comprehensive” I am not kidding, this book is more than six hundred pages long and it is all meat, no filler, filled with details about the creative staff, animation production, musical composition, the live action shows Bebop creator Shinichiro Watanabe used as creative signposts, the Buddhist parables that inspired storylines, the episodes that came a little too close to current (1990s) events for the Japanese TV networks, and facts about every episode, the world of 2071, the PS1 game, the Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door film, the PS2 game… in short, if it’s not in this book then you don’t need to know it, at least when it comes to Spike, Faye, Jet, Edward, and Ein The Wonder Dog. 

 
What is kinda surprising is that a Bebop book like this hasn’t appeared sooner, and that other series haven’t had similar treatments. I'd love to see a comprehensive English-language book about, say, Astro Boy or Mazinger Z, or Gatchaman, Space Battleship Yamato, Mobile Suit Gundam, or Macross, you name it, there's a cherished cultural icon deserving of a long-form print edition overview. Somebody get busy, because Three, Two, One: Let’s Jam! is more than a book, it’s a call to action for everyone who’s filled hours, shelf space and valuable mental real estate obsessing over their favorite anime shows, a challenge to start working on your own resource guide for your own icons.

If you're hoping Three, Two, One: Let’s Jam! dissects the live-action Netflix Cowboy Bebop, well, keep hoping. While the streamer's perhaps ill-advised remake did bring the original to Netflix for the first time, Stevenson’s book deflects with the deft sidestep "coverage of such an adaptation is beyond this book's remit," a sensible position, and anyway, the book’s already six hundred and thirty nine pages long, spending more pages to discuss a Netflix version nobody liked is probably foolish.

Fans of Movie International's 80s cult super robot drama Galactic Gale Baxinger and it's ending credits song "Asteroid Blues" will be fascinated to learn, as we do in Stevenson's book, that Bebop creator Watanabe denies any connection between the Baxinger tune and the title of Bebop's first episode, a claim I simply don’t buy. Look buddy, you made an anime about outer space bounty hunters, Baxinger is an anime about outer space bounty hunters, part of a series of anime shows about outer space bounty hunters known collectively as the J9 series, which was a reference to the Sony SL-J9 Betamax... a Betamax that itself shows up in an episode of Cowboy Bebop. You say you weren’t thinking about J9 at all, huh? Sure you weren’t.

But enough about merciless J9. The fact is that Three, Two, One: Let’s Jam! is an awe-inspiring chunk of scholarship that is unique in the annals of English-language anime research, a singular achievement that is a worthy addition to any library on Earth, Mars, the asteroid belt, anywhere in the Solar System, really. Cowboy Bebop fans will be consulting this book for the details on whichever episode Adult Swim’s airing tonight, up until 2071 and beyond.

Thanks to Satoru and Telos!

-Dave Merrill

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