zine-o-riffic

Two new old-media offerings deliver the classic anime goods in the so-unfashionable-they're-fashionable print medium, available not from whatever local business in your area still sells zines or from a begrudgingly-given “fan table” at a nearby anime con, but from the convenience of your own easy chair, thanks to modern electronic technology. 

Colony Drop, the opinionated collective enfant terrible of the anime blog scene, has been outraging the easily outraged and Telling It Like It Is on their blog since 2008; and as testament to their love of the traditional, so far they've released two print-on-demand anime fanzines. The second, THE LAST AMERICAN FANZINE #2, recently appeared and is both larger and pinker than the first; 74 perfect-bound pages of full color Japanese animation culture data. Contributors include Benjamin "Anipages" Ettinger, Patrick Macias, me, Mike Toole, and Daryl Surat, a veritable who's who of the charmingly obsessed, all discoursing on topics like VHS worship and basic-cable OAV appearances in the 1980s, the eye-opening adults-only Pop Chaser, and the real-life background to Patlabor.  The zine also features an enlightening discussion between two Japanese anime journalists, a behind-the-scenes look at animecon scandal with the mysterious "Director X”, and a sad photo essay of the otaku ghetto at New York Comic Con.

As a Kinko's-scarred veteran of the fanzine heyday, I've read a lot of anime zines, and it's my opinion that these CD zines are state of the art. The writing is confident and knowledgeable, the artwork is classy, the layout is uncluttered. It's as close to the Platonic ideal of 'anime zine' as you're ever going to get. 

Meanwhile a few fathoms down, Marine Boy is bravely and freely fighting evil beneath the sea, as he's done in various forms since 1967. If you watched Marine Boy as a boy or girl or if you only came across him on the UHF dial in hotel rooms in far-off cities, you need MARINE BOY: UNDERWATER ADVENTURE, the new book from Xenorama aka David McRobie.  Xenorama has been assembling this comprehensive guide to Marine Boy together for years, and his 40-page book features full episode guides to both the English and Japanese versions of the series, as well as an interview with the late Peter Fernandez, who produced the English version.  With the recent release of the first season on DVD by Warner Archive, interest in Marine Boy is at high tide, and dismay at the horrible pun I made there is also pretty high. Sorry. The UNDERSEA ADVENTURE trade paperback is produced by Amazon's print-on-demand service and can be yours with just a few splashes of your swim fins, or clicks, if you prefer. 

Spooks A'Poppin

Haints and ghostlies abound in Drawn And Quarterly’s new gigantic volume of Kitaro, the seminal yokai-busting horror-fantasy-folklore-adventure-comedy manga  by Japan’s one-armed manga master Shigeru Mizuki.  Kitaro started out as “Graveyard Kitaro”, but it wasn’t until a slight retooling as the less scary, more funny “Ge Ge Ge no Kitaro” that the series took off with a ten-year run in Weekly Shonen and five separate TV animated shows spread out over five decades, leaving an indelible mark on Japan’s popular culture landscape.  Supposedly manga-crazy North Americans spent most of the “manga boom” here in the West ignoring the hell out of Mizuki’s work – it’s more comforting to believe Japanese comics are nothing but high-tech adventures of sexy schoolgirl ninjas – but even the ignorance of Americans is no match for the spiritual power of Kitaro.

D+Q’s Kitaro collection is a big brick of  60s manga, nearly 400 pages of the best of Kitaro stories from 1967-69, with an enlightening introduction by yokai scholar Matt Alt, wonderful jacket design, and large pages - nearly twice the size of typical manga tankubon – to bring every bit of Mizuki’s yokai terror to life.

Kitaro, the mysterious one-eyed boy with the striped vest, comes out of nowhere to serve as diplomat between the human and the spirit world. When ignorant people tamper with forbidden mystical secrets, when yokai cross the line and menace humanity, Kitaro will keep the peace by any supernatural means necessary, whether it’s using his hair as yokai-detecting antennae, battling an army of possessed cats, or freezing himself to deal with the water monster lodged in his belly. Just wait ‘til you see how he deals with being turned into a tree! At first Kitaro wanders the earth dispensing lone justice, but bit by bit his world is fleshed out with supporting characters like the disreputable Nezumi Otoko and Kitaro’s eyeball father.  When you get to the part where Kitaro is injected with monster blood and becomes an enormous, hairy, Godzilla-sized whale monster that lumbers through Tokyo destroying landmarks, to be confronted by – what else?  - a giant robot, the off-kilter logic of Mizuki’s yokai world starts to make sense in its dreamlike matter-of-factness.

 Mizuki’s pen work combines the mundane and the terrifying with his technique – eerie pointillist dots bring glowing spirit meteors to life and an almost inhuman mastery of cross-hatching showcases every wrinkle and hair and giant eyeball of his more repulsive monsters. The overgrown mountains and creaky, crumbling shacks of rural Japan are the background for his cartoony, sketchy characters, whose comical simplicity highlights our insignificance in the face of ultimate cosmic horror.

Kitaro’s mid 60s success echoed the monster boom that had the United States in its grasp, and while we had the Munsters, Weird-Oh kits and decals, Ghoulardi and Famous Monsters magazines to satisfy our lust for weird horror heroes, single-handedly brought Japan’s folkloric terror titans out of the musty past and into modern Japan, starting a yokai boom that’s still reverberating throughout the nation. Rightly regarded as one of Japan’s masters of comic art, it is high time the Western world got its chance to go monster crazy for Shigeru Mizuki and Kitaro; the thanks of the manga-reading world, as well as the spirit realms, go to D+Q for making this possible.

everything is sprouting hair.

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take you on a journey

I first saw Galaxy Express 999 on a bootleg VHS bought from one of Atlanta's hairier comic-con video pirates, sometime in the mid 1980s. The Kodak T-120, with the words "Galaxy Express" markered on its orange-yellow label, was a copy of the home video release of New World Pictures' version of the 999 film, which received an American theatrical release for about fifteen minutes before moving to HBO and video-rental shelves. I knew none of this. What I knew was that there was something called "Galaxy Express" that Leiji Matsumoto had created, and he was the guy behind Captain Harlock and half of Star Blazers and who knows what else? At that time, we knew Japanese animation as a weird neverland that existed only in the colorful hieroglyphs of Roman Album fold-out posters and My Anime cassette labels, glimpses caught on afternoon UHF stations between ads for Cookie Crisp and Fruit Roll-Ups, peering out at us in the form of model kits from something called "Gundam" that had suddenly appeared in the toy stores. 

Certainly Japanese animated films weren’t something you could just sit down and watch any old time you felt like it. Only now you could, provided you could get access to the family TV for a couple of hours. And in spite of the hacky dub, in spite of the comical name changes, in spite of the jarring edits (seriously, the New World version edits out all the cats), in spite of the fuzzy duplication of a copy of New World's less-than-stellar transfer, there's something about Galaxy Express 999 that shines. Recently, we got the chance to see the film, not on bootleg VHS or late night cable TV but as God and Rintaro intended, uncut and in a real theater.

There's a lot of good stuff in that late 70s-early 80s sweet spot of Japanese animation that some call the Yamato Boom and others refer to in terms of Gundam, when public interest, creative talent, and licensing cash all coincided to create a kaleidoscope of film and TV of every conceivable topic and level of quality. Out of that boom came many great projects, but I’ll always have a weakness for Galaxy Express 999.

999's pedigree is top-notch. It has Rintaro stretching his muscles in his first feature film and Yoshinori Kanada bringing his talent and his timing from dozens of the best TV animation. It has character designs by K. Kazuo and lush Tadao Kubota backgrounds featuring the crumbling, overbuilt Earth, the lurid jungles of Titan, the outer-space Wild West of Heavy Meldar, and the neon and black of the Mechanized Planet.

Thematically, the film works as space fantasy, as a childhood fairy tale, as a humanist polemic, as class-war fable. Sometimes, as when the giant death-skull of Harlock's Arcadia smashes the eternal-life headquarters on the Mechanized Planet, the film's subtext erupts out of theory and just sits there on the screen daring you to call its bluff. And as a condensation of a 113-episode TV series it gets us from Earth to the Andromeda Galaxy and back again in just over two hours, hitting the high notes, rearranging story elements but retaining the Bildungsroman of Tetsuro Hoshino, orphaned on a future world where the rich live forever in machine bodies while the poor scurry like rats to starve, freeze or be hunted. 

how many machine men will you see before you stop believing

To avenge the death of his mother at the hands of the feudal machine lord Count Mecha, Tetsuro finds himself on the Galaxy Express 999, the limited express space train that delivers people to the Mechanization Planet in Andromeda, where eternal machine bodies are distributed to the wealthy.  Accompanied by the mysterious beauty Maetel, Tetsuro meets his childhood heroes, satisfies his lust for revenge at Count Mecha’s Time Castle, and learns the terrible truth behind his traveling companion in a planet-destroying cataclysm that shakes the political and social structure of two galaxies.

For a while that bootleg Kodak was our only copy of 999.  Then somebody in the local anime club dug up an English-subtitled copy, not fansubs but typeset-on-the-35mm-print emulsion subtitles, and we found out about all the missing cats.  Later we’d pool our cash and get the Galaxy Express movie laserdisc set and fansub the sequel Adieu Galaxy Express, and then Viz released both films in subtitled and dubbed versions.  Now in the 21^st century, Discotek has released both films – and the third 999 film, Eternal Fantasy -  on DVD.

There’s nothing like seeing a movie with a crowd of strangers to force an objective evaluation, and the recent screening highlighted what may be the film’s weakest point; how well it works with people who don’t already know who Harlock and Emeraldas and Tochiro are. Japanese audiences in 1979 were likely familiar with the Captain Harlock and 999 television anime, or they’d read the Harlock manga in Play Comic or the Shonen King 999 manga serial.  To be fair, the 999 movie is quick to educate us – not five minutes in, we get a loving zoom of Harlock’s wanted poster on a crumbling Megalopolis wall, and elementary adventure-movie macguffin-hunting brings the three characters into the film with reasonable logic. 

While it’s still not really clear who Emeraldas is or what she does, top marks for strangeness must go to Tochiro Oyama’s bachelor digs in the guts of a ruined space battleship, a beautiful if confusing sequence for audiences who hadn’t had months of Captain Harlock on TV preparing us. You can actually see otaku-nerd culture seeping into popular culture with this scene – the idea that vital script elements can come from completely separate media, and if the viewer is confused as to why the squat little dude is having lightning shot into his body and as to why this film seems to think it’s important, tough darts, pal. 

 This might explain why the backstory so meaningful to Japanese audiences failed to impress execs at New World when the pic was readied for American release in 1980. Apart from editing out all the cats, New World made extensive cuts to many sequences, downplayed the Matsumotoverse callbacks to Tochiro’s mom, and left out tragic 999 waitress Crystal Claire’s end-of-film sacrifice (which, to be honest, feels superfluous).  Taken in context, New World’s decision to give Harlock a comedy John Wayne voice almost (almost) makes sense – without the necessary pop-culture preparation, audiences don’t know or care who Captain Harlock is; but give Americans a recognizable cultural signifier and suddenly his archetype fits neatly into our mental picture, as a manly hero who is at home, as Wayne was, both on the open range and on the bridge of a warship. 

I saw this in action last week in Toronto; you can feel the audience starting to get antsy somewhere out near the orbit of Pluto, not quite buying into this whole space-train thing, and then suddenly we’re on Heavy Meldar, the space-western zeitgeist clicks into place, and the crowd relaxes with an audible sigh of familiarity, able to finally place this film in their mental filmic landscape, even if they’re still fuzzy on who Harlock, Tochiro, and Emeraldas are. The screening at TIFF Bell Lightbox was part of the TAAFI’s yearly Toronto animation festival, in conjunction with the Japan Foundation, who provided the 35mm print from their library. The theater was pleasantly filled – we were informed this event had the largest crowd of any TAAFI event – and I found myself explaining the plot of Adieu Galaxy Express afterwards to anyone who would listen, having fallen in love with this movie all over again. The film had always been on the shortlist of titles I’ve sought out on the big screen; we finally got to see an uncut Nausicaa in North American cinemas with the recent Ghibli retrospective, and if they can ever get the Macross rights cleared up maybe I can cross that one off my bucket list, too. However, a pass on the Galaxy Express 999 was always my anime-cinema dream, now realized thanks to TAAFI, the Japan Foundation, the TIFF Bell Lightbox, and the boundless generosity of mysterious beauties from space.

-Dave Merrill

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true story swear to God

(This is a true story. All names, dates, and locations in this story have been changed to protect the innocent and the guilty. In the interests of decorum euphemisms have been used to replace some of story's more colorful language.)

Back in the 80s I was involved with an anime fan club in a large Southeastern city.  To this city came "Melvin", a charming and gregarious fellow who was a very talented artist.  Older, with more fan experience and contacts, he quickly became friend to all, host of many gatherings, a valuable club official, and participant in our various anime-fan projects, schemes, pranks, and other young-adult shenanigans.

Sadly, Melvin developed wanderlust and he moved to, oh, let's say, Frostbite Falls, Minnesota.  He hooked up with the fan community in a nearby large city and, as an extrovert among introverts, quickly became an integral part of that community as well. Club meetings, conventions, newsletters, gaming sessions, tape swapping; he was in the thick of it.

But all was not well.  Jealousy and suspicion lurked in the hearts of some of his new-found compatriots.  Melvin became the target of an anonymous hate-letter campaign, which sent letters to anime clubs across the country decrying this newcomer, casting doubt as to his motives and his morals, and begging for information as to his previous nefarious deeds in other cities.  I received one of these letters and immediately got on the telephone to Melvin and asked him what in the Wide World Of Sports was going on?

What was going on was nothing more than the dumbest-ass kind of dumb-ass fan politicking BS.  Some of the local fans in the Frostbite Falls region resented Melvin's outgoing demeanor, his "why bother" attitude towards persnickity fandom rules and regulations, and in general the concept that this brash outsider could waltz in and take over THEIR anime club. In turn, Melvin found himself exasperated at the childish attitude of those who would vote him into the club's leadership cadre, appoint him librarian in charge of the club's videotape library, and at the same time start an anonymous smear campaign behind his back.

Right around this time, one of the club's founding members... let's call him Fred Mertz - Fred got transferred out of town.  Way out of town.  Fred was the local tape god and had lots and lots of old-time anime tapes - 13th gen VHS copies of movies, TV shows and OVAs, gathered from wherever and whoever. As was the custom of beneficent tape deities, Fred would duplicate items from this collection for the benefit of club members and whoever could send blanks and return postage.  However, Fred wasn't going to take hundreds of VHS tapes with him on his trip, so the collection was donated to the club's library. The club agreed that our friend Melvin, as tape librarian, should have the cheerful duty of copying all these tapes onto other tapes that would be loaned out to club members at meetings.  That's right, the same club members who felt Melvin's presence was as odious as to require an anonymous smear campaign, also felt Melvin should spend his free time duplicating anime video tapes for their benefit.

And that's just what happened; Melvin copied tapes and brought them to the meetings and club members borrowed them.  Until one day when Melvin's house was robbed.  Robbed in broad daylight by people who knew what they were after - the Fred Mertz collection.  Nothing else was touched.  Just the tapes were gone.  Not a trace of them was found, no copies were unearthed that seemed to come from the collection - and what would be the point of stealing these tapes if you couldn't brag about having them, or show them to anybody?  Remember, this was in the days before torrenting, before Amazon, before DVD box sets.  A collection like Fred’s was fairly unique, and its appearance among any gathering of anime fans would cause a stir.  

The tapes remained gone.  Melvin soon left Frostbite Falls for greener pastures.  The anime club disintegrated, as many of them do.  Years passed.  I caught up with Melvin at an anime convention in a completely different part of the country, and soon we were relaxing in the hot tub catching up.  But there was one thing I had to know.

"Melvin," I asked.  "Melvin - I just gotta know.  What REALLY happened to the Fred Mertz tapes?"

Melvin laughed.  "Dave, I'll tell you the truth.  You want to know what happened to the tapes? I’ll tell you what happened to the tapes.  I SET THE MOTHER SCRATCHERS ON FIRE."

"I went out to the back yard and I opened up the grill, and I got the lighter fluid, and I carried the boxes of tapes out there and I just TORCHED THE WHOLE JUMP-ROPING LOT OF THEM.  They all went up in smoke.  If those jump-roping mother-scratchers in that anime club thought I was going to take their back-stabbing and their anonymous abuse without FIGHTING BACK, they were WRONG.  JUMP-ROPING WRONG, DAVE. "

I was horrified.  And yet at the same time I was amazed at the brilliance of the act, at the theatrical, Biblical proportions of what he'd done.  He'd taken the most holy objects of anime fandom - VHS tapes of Japanese cartoons  - and destroyed them in a ritual that both punished the sinful AND freed them from the object of their desire, ALL AT ONCE.

Was he right or wrong?  Should we condemn or applaud this act?  I don't know.  Certainly in the greater scheme of things, a tape collection isn't much to get worked up about, and the club, certain members of it anyway, well, they certainly deserved punishment.  On the other hand, it was, let's face it, destruction of somebody else's property.  I can't say what I'd do in that situation, and before anybody is quick to cast judgment, I would remind them of the Indian proverb that says not to judge a man until you've walked a mile in his moccasins, or copied Project A-Ko or the Macross movie a few hundred times.

With the distance of miles and years, I believe we can look back on the events and draw a few conclusions.  First off, if you have a problem with a club or with a club officer, air your grievances publicly through healthy and constructive criticism.  And secondly, if you DO mount an anonymous smear campaign against somebody, DON'T LOAN THEM YOUR VIDEOTAPES.

Royal Space Fanzine

I first saw Royal Space Force: Wings Of Honneamise on somebody’s laserdisc in his dorm room in what I believe is Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College in Tifton, GA, while en route to a wedding in Florida.  In those pre-Akira days we were always on the lookout for something to impact North America’s cultural radar and show everybody that these Japanese cartoons weren’t merely transforming robot toy ads or cutesy children’s distractions, but art with a capital A. Was Honneamise going to be that movie? We sure thought so.  It’s a unique beast, fitting neither into the narrow confines of toy-driven anime clichés nor the shiny metal militarism of 80s science fiction; a thoughtful, introspective film set in a obsessively realized fictional world, asking fundamental questions about man’s relation to man and his environment, the director’s only film and the first movie from a studio that would never make anything else quite like it.  

Then; Akira, a game-changer if there ever was one. Here we are a quarter-century later in a world where anime films win Oscars and highlight film festivals, and who remembers Wings Of Honneamise? Carl Gustav Horn does. He took time out from his professional work editing manga for Dark Horse and put together this gorgeous, challenging magazine celebrating the 25^th anniversary of Wings Of Honneamise, or as Carl prefers to call it, Royal Space Force. RSF for short. 

Yeah, a fanzine, an actual printed fanzine that you can hold in your hand and roll up and hit your sullen kid sister with, produced courtesy HP’s print on demand service Magcloud; filled with essays and analysis about RSF and its place in the world by Carl G. Horn and by AWO’s Gerald Rathkolb, Ninja Consultant Erin Finnegan, TOR.COM’sTim Maughan, analoghousou’s wildarmsheero, and Brian “Answerman” Hanson. Beautifully designed in full color, the zine is filled with photos of model kits and shrines to Miyazaki and Yamaga and a Bandai Monopoly set (“merge with Popy; 14,227,000 shares”), Jack Chick tracts, photo-collages, old zines, theater tickets, TDK HD-X PRO T-120 video tape, postcards, 45 singles, Kenichi Sonoda sketches,  and vinyl of Noriko Takaya from Gunbuster.

It’s a tremendously dense ‘zine. Not a lot of films can stand up to this kind of scrutiny. RSF carries the weight, though; an ambitious movie produced by people who had grown up otaku, would in fact make the very term “otaku” a household word worldwide, and now would move heaven and earth and 800 million yen to drag the art of Japanese animation forward at 24 frames a second, to break out of the ever-amplifying feedback loop of increasingly cooler robots and increasingly cuter girls, to move anime from “pop culture” to just plain “culture”. 

Whether or not they succeeded is another story; not even this zine achieves consensus, with some contributors taking the film to task for... well, let’s face it, it’s a stunningly well-realized world that we see an awful lot of, and just like our world, interesting things are not always happening. Several contributors explore the film’s mirror-image relation to our own cold war and concomitant space programs, and Horn takes a close look at 1985’s Plaza Accord, which increased the value of the yen versus the dollar and suddenly made imports of Japanese goods prohibitively expensive, as well as the film’s strange worldwide premiere at what is now the TCL Chinese Theater in Hollywood as a rewritten, English-dubbed curiosity titled “Star Quest”. It is a remarkable film in nearly every aspect and like any other challenging, multifaceted project, some parts are more successful than others. 

Even if you aren’t a fan of the film – there is that out-of-left-field rape scene, after all – you’ll find this zine an essential snapshot of the anime industry circa 1987, with more data about Gainax’s corporate trajectory, the Miyazaki/Yamaga connection, the incredible pedigree of talent assembled for the film, which included Oscar-winning composer Ryuichi Sakamoto and future Evangelion director Hideaki Anno, who ditched working on 1984’s Macross movie to get back to making the Daicon IV film. Filled with these kind of priceless anecdotal tidbits, this RSF fanzine is an exploration of both high art and shameless commerce; the lofty ideals and the brutal reality of animated filmmaking. Gainax would move forward from the less-than-blockbuster reception of RSF and re-make the anime world in its image, but even at their most fanservicey or successful, they still aren’t afraid of a little failure in the pursuit of innovation. 

This 25^th Anniversary Fanzine for Royal Space Force is, as I see it, nothing less than a challenge thrown in the face of everything we call ‘fandom’. It says, what’s your excuse? Why aren’t you making a zine this good about a film YOU love?  Can’t you imagine dozens of big, strikingly designed print-on-demand magazines about, say, Patlabor or Ghost In The Shell, Evangelion,  or even Galaxy Express, Sailor Moon or Mazinger Z? I can. Let’s get to work, people. That rocket isn’t going to launch itself.

ROYAL SPACE FORCE 25TH ANNIVERSARY FANZINE is available from HP Magcloud right this very minute, go get it.  

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it's anime north time

What's that? It's May? That means it's time for Anime North!  Sorry, weekend admission tix are sold out, but you can still buy single-day passes. What will I be up to?  Let's find out.

I believe this is the 9th year I've done Anime Hell at Anime North. I had no idea how well the event would go over in 2005, but so far it's filled whatever event room it gets put in. We are following it up at midnight with a special screening of MESSAGE FROM SPACE, the 1978 Toei Star Wars-inspired space opera, so stick around!

 Saturday at 2 is the annual meeting of the Dead Format Society, a gathering of hoarders and junk hounds who can't bring themselves to get rid of any of that old technology that allows them to experience anime the way it was meant to be experienced; which is to say, on a CRT screen, untranslated, and suffering from "laser rot".

Sunday at 1pm join Shaindle Minuk and myself as Mister Kitty takes a look at the wonderful world of Stupid Comics. We've spent years finding hilariously bad gems of comic book art and now we're taking this show TO THE STREETS!!1! Or to the hotel function rooms, whichever.

Then at 2, Ric Zerrano and I will be taking a look at Yusei Shonen Papi otherwise known as Prince Planet! If you enjoyed the show as a kid or are just now finding out about this strange black and white space adventure show that sold candy to millions of Japanese children, you owe it to yourself to not miss this presentation.

See you at the show!

property is theft is property

Hook-Ups, the extreme sports fashion brand that made its name with big-eyed busty anime girls – what, you don’t remember Hook-Ups? Too many extreme concussions while snowboarding, drinking clear Pepsi and eating your Arch Deluxe at Lollapalooza?  Well, it was kind of a 90s thing, vaguely anime-style sexy gal stickers you could put on your skateboard so that it looked cool while you were carrying it to and from places. What, ride that thing? Are you nuts?  From a distance we’d see the decals and think we were seeing an actual anime character, and then realize it was a Hook-Ups sticker, appropriating the Japanese animation aesthetic for its own edgy, Thrasher Magazine-reading purposes. 

Is it "Burn-Up" or an amazing Hook-Ups simulation?

 

The general aesthetic wasn’t the only thing that got appropriated, though. Lots of Hook-Ups art went beyond merely “working in the anime style” and right into using the actual production art of actual Japanese animation productions. We’re not talking a Roy Lichtenstein giant-canvas reworking either, we’re talking full on, don’t care, cut and paste stealin’. 

Bubblegum Crisis and Gatchaman get the treatment

Brought to my attention recently on a message board, the extent of Hook-Ups’ cribbing is a thing of wonder. Properties both obscure and world-renowned found themselves repurposed as branded merchandise in wholesale image theft on a scale usually only present in flea markets and swap meets.   

Iczer-Two and Iria find exciting new life as skater stickers

  

Hook-Ups wasn’t alone in their anime pilfering. It was the 90s, everybody from album cover designers to comic-con video pirates knew Japanese cartoons would never get any sort of legitimate release, nobody’s using it here, why not take it? None of us figured Sailor Moon and Pokemon would take “anime” up from underground and into the mass media world of Happy Meals and Toys “R” Us. 

just put your own name on it, no one will know the difference

 

Unfortunately for the subcultural tastemakers, Japanese animation eventually went mainstream in a big way and lost every bit of counter-culture cache it might have had.  The big-eyed anime gal became a staple of Blockbuster and Fox Kids, hardly emblematic of the underground skater mindset.

Like other 90s icons AOL and Bill Clinton, Hook-Ups is still around, currently mining a supercute Junko Mizuno-esque motif.  Why waste money on original designs when so much artwork is out there free for the asking?  See also: Hot Topic.

-Dave Merrill

Special thanks to “Usamimi” for locating these images.  

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