Complete with the tape that held the badge onto the cover.

Ghost In The Shell was about to debut in the cinema, and so it gets the cover this month as part of the hype for that. Also it allows the magazine to indulge itself in all things “cyber” even more than usual. The four pages GITS gets is pretty dense, with the last two pages full of side bars packed with words in teeny tiny fonts.

Regular column Cyberdrome runs down other “cyber” films including The Net, Hackers, Johnny Mnemonic, Strange Days and Virtuosity. Only Hackers and Strange Days get the thumbs up. Similarly, the column Short Cuts covered various “cyber” anime and abused the word cyber something awful. Finally, replacing Dirty Pair, we get an Appleseed side story as the new comic this issue, alongside the continuing Akira and Striker (aka Spriggan).

On a less sci-fi note, there was also a feature on The Cockpit OAV based on Leiji Matsumoto’s Battlefield manga.

There was next to nothing anime related in the news, as the Xmas period was light on releases. Apparently a company called CD Vision had high hopes for VCDs and were going to put out Akira, Ninja Scroll, Appleseed and Streetfighter II. That was about it. Streetfighter II topped the Virgin Megastore anime charts.

The most interesting thing I found flicking through this issue was an advert for a Gerry Anderson’s Space Precinct comic, as I had totally forgotten that Space Precinct had existed, let alone that it had a comic. And a sticker album. And action figures.

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I remember hating Excalibur #18 when it came out in 1989. In general I wasn’t well disposed to any non-Alan Davis issue of the comic anyway, but the lengthy “Cross Time Caper” storyline had already shown signs of coming off the tracks and this issue was full of super ugly, off-model, inconsistent art.

At the time I did not realise that this issue, and to some extent issue 19, was intended as a parody of anime. In particular Speed Racer and Dirty Pair, actually only Speed Racer and Dirty Pair. What artist Dennis Jensen was apparently doing was portraying Kitty and Brian turning into anime characters the longer they stayed in the alternate Earth they’d ended up in. But only them, not the rest of Excalibur. And apparently only the “Lovely Pair” looked like anime characters in this world, as the evil anime Jamie Braddock looked like evil normal Jamie Braddock pre-lobotomy.

Nowadays I can appreciate the Cross Time Caper as a whole, as I’m not waiting a month between issues and getting annoyed the lack of plot movement. Nevertheless, Excalibur #18 is still a horrible comic.

When you had Bret Blevins working at Marvel at the time, having an artist who inked Carmine Infantino in the 70s draw your anime parody seems an odd choice. A clue to why it’s so sloppy and all over the place may lie in the inker credits “Dan Adkins & Co”. Never good sign when there are multiple inkers, even less of a good sign when there’s no space to list them all.

Ignoring the horrible, clunky art, the story is a mess too. There’s some barely comprehensible plot with Meggan’s powers behaving oddly around Rachel’s Phoenix powers. The whole “my powers are behaving strange” is one of my least favourite superhero plots and here it gets two issues worth of story.

And the villain is an alternate reality Jamie Braddock which means… Reality Altering. Claremont really likes that power, I wonder if him giving Jamie that power was another “can’t use Jim Jaspers” work around like the Adversary? Plus the comic is Claremont at his most verbose, possibly attempting to hide the art with as many speech bubbles as possible.

A rotten comic. Thankfully #19 had Rick Leonardi on it, who I hated when I was 14 years old, but what did I know, I was a teenager. Rick Leonardi is awesome. Go get his work on Cloak & Dagger, it’s pretty neat.

I’ll leave you with more of Claremont’s homage to the Dirty Pair from #18.

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(cover art by Wil Overton)

While Babel II is the cover story, and there’s a pretty good article on the OAV series, the big thing here is a Go Nagai interview. Conducted at the San Diego Comic Con, it’s a pretty good potted history of his career straight from the man himself. And of course, it being Manga Mania, somehow manages to get a mention of Buichi Terasawa’s CD-ROM in there.

The third article was on Sol Bianca, which only warranted a single page and kind of had the vibe of “well if you like these other things, you might like this. Maybe.”

The Ghost In Shell movie’s UK screenings were announced. I went to see one of them at the Odeon West End cinema, it was not the greatest cinema experience, as it was not the greatest cinema. Also making the news was Koji Morimoto’s music video for Ken Ishii’s record Extra. Patlabor 2 was coming out on VHS, as was The Cockpit.

RecontamineTed 1995, a convention held at the Birmingham Grand Hotel, was mentioned in the news items. This is likely the first I had heard of it, and it would prove to be my first convention.  Angel Cop 5 was September’s best selling anime tape and there was another reader’s poll. I may have even sent one in, such was my fervour for anime at this point.

In the columns, Cyberdrome was mainly about ChibaMOO, where you could pretend to be a cyberpunk on the internet or something like that. Animatedly Yours covered the changes being made to Dragonball as it hit US TV screens, and Megabyte gave the SNES version of Doom 90%.

Julie Davis’ Manga Files covered Go Nagai & Kenichi Sonoda and Peter J Evans covered Astro Boy in his Screen Gems column.

Pretty good issue, certainly an improvement on a lot of the Manga era ones I’ve discussed so far.

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I really like Marvel’s Excalibur. Well, I really like bits of Marvel’s Excalibur. Namely any issues that have the involvement of either Alan Davis or Warren Ellis. There’s some real bleak periods, particular the section between the time when Davis was writing and Ellis took over. But the gap between Davis dropping out as artist and him returning to take over the comic contains a lot of odd stuff. Three of those odd issues are Claremont’s then swan song on the title – a story called Girls School From Heck.

It is possibly the most Chris Claremonty Chris Claremont comic in the career of Chris Claremont.

Part 1 alone contains the following:

• Nazis
• Gender-switched Heroes
• Margaret Thatcher being mind controlled by Mesmero
• The gender switching, bondage gear wearing Nigel Frobusher version of the Vixen.
• Teenage Kitty Pryde being held and kissed by the headmistress of the all girls private school she’s been enrolled in (this may be on artist Ron Wagner, as the dialogue doesn’t match the picture.).
• The School is a St Trinian’s parody.
• Courtney Ross (really her facist extra dimensional double Sat-Yr-9) spying on Kitty playing hockey. This is following up an old subplot where Kitty was being groomed by Courtney. For what, we never really found out. Of course it was full of lesbian subtext in Claremont’s hands, less so under Davis. Maybe someone realised it was coming across a little creepy having an adult appear to be trying to seduce a teenage superhero?
• Kitty’s clothes getting torn playing hockey.

Part 2 adds:

• Gratuitous swimwear scene with Nightcrawler and Rachel
• Excalibur being mind-controlled
• Kitty doing martial arts.
• Use of obscure Chris Claremont characters, here it is Major Debra Vavara Levin and a Russian spy who apparently we are supposed to recognise, but doesn’t get named (it’s Colonel Alexi Vazhin apparently). Also: they show up solely to foreshadow a story in a different comic.

Part 3 adds:

• The recurring Dr Who reference that is Brigadier Alysande Stuart.
• The creepy incestuous Nazi twins known as Fenris.
• Meggan transforming into a ludicrously jacked body builder version of herself. 
• People walking in on other people undressed (in this case Meggan and an American Football team).

I’d forgotten those last two were Claremontian tics until going through this again. The most obvious example of the jacked up transformation is the barely comprehensible Polaris loses her powers storyline that happened in Uncanny X-Men. 

These are pretty mediocre comic books, no where near the lows the book would reach, but following the initial Claremont/Davis run, they were not good enough.

Finally, if you want to check out a blog dedicated to investigating one specific tic/fetish of Claremont, I recommend Chris Claremont: Mindcontrol Central, where you can learn just how much Chris Claremont loves mind control. This post is amateur hour compared to what’s going on over there.

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There was a much longer version of this post but my blog ate it. Here’s what was going on in Issue 27 of Manga Mania, cover date October 1995.

This issue contained the most Manga Mania article in the history of Manga Mania, “CONFESSIONS OF A CYBER DUDE“. It was an interview with Tony Takezaki conducted by Tony Luke. There was also a huge news piece on all of Tony Luke’s projects. You’d be well and truly hammered if you were playing the Manga Mania drinking game with this issue, that’s for sure. Tony Luke.

Titles covered in the news included Babel II – The Beginning, Street Fighter II The Animated Movie, Madox-01 and SD Double Feature. Only one of these would turn out to be a massive hit.

As well as the “Cyber Dude”, there were features on Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat and other fighting games turned into TV/Film, plus a profile of Ironfist Chin Mi creator Takeshi Maekawa.

Kekko Kamen was number 3 in the Top 20 anime charts, behind Akira and a volume of Angel Cop.

The Megabyte and Cyberdrome columns seem especially out of date with news of the Virtual Boy, the Apple Bandai Pippin, Iomega Zip Drives and Virtual IO I-Glasses.

Trish Ledoux weighed in again on the sub vs dub debate. Thank goodness that never rears its head anymore and there never arose a subset of fanatical dub fans that out-nutter anything sub fans did in the 90s. (Pretty sure I made that joke last time it came up in one of these recaps).

And finally Peter J Evans continued to taunt the readership with shows he’d seen and you hadn’t – this time it was Captain Harlock.

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NEWS

Upcoming Releases (titles that got a news feature in bold)

Anime Projects – Oh My Goddess 4, Bubblegum Crisis 5 (dub)

East2West – Kekkou Kamen 2

Manga Video – Heroic Legend of Arslan 3, Project A-Ko 3, Angel Cop 5, New Dominion Tank Police 6

Japan News

Captain Tylor OAVs

Virgin Megastores Anime Top 20 

Top three were Space Adventure Cobra, New Dominion 8, Angel Cop 3

Reader Survey Results

It was a different time.

COMICS

Akira – Part 26

Striker – Part 2 (aka Spriggan)

Dirty Pair: Sim Hell – Part 2

FEATURES

Flesh and Blood – Julie Davis on Tokyo – The Last Metropolis and Zeiram.

Fist vs Freeman – Dave Hughes on the live action adaptations of Crying Freeman and Fist of the North Star.

COLUMNS

Cyberdrome – Lots on Doom, less on Descent, Hewlett Packard’s invisible toner and Spider-Man Cartoon Maker CD-ROM.

Animatedly Yours – Sailor Moon and Dragonball on their way to US television.

Get Animated – The final letter from future shading curmudgeon Paul “Otaking” Johnson, only he was using a different nickname in 1995…

MegaByte – Sega Saturn had arrived in the UK, and Playstation was due along shortly. Gundam on the Playstation got 70%.

Short Cuts – A robot size chart. Pretty sure they have done this already.

REVIEWS

One anime review. Arslan got 3 stars. This issue clearly came out during one of periodic stalls the UK anime market suffered.

In conclusion, if it wasn’t for the comics, this issue would have been pretty bad.

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NEWS

Upcoming Releases (titles that got a news feature in bold)

Manga Video – Tokyo – The Last Megalopolis, Macross Plus 3, Angel Cop 4, New Dominion Tank Police 5

Kiseki – Fly Peek – Peek The Baby Whale

East To West – 8 Man After 2

Anime Projects – Oh My Goddess 3, Bubblegum Crisis 4 (dub)

Upcoming Japan Releases

Dirty Pair Flash II

El Hazard

Legend of Christiana

Slayers The Motion Picture

“New Century Evangelion” – a city under threat from the mysterious Apostles organisation is protected by a young girl and her robot! Sometimes these previews of Japanese releases are like a window into an alternate dimension.

Virgin Megastores Anime Top 20 

Top three were the Patlabor movie, New Dominion 7, Angel Cop 2

Other News

Channel Four to air Cyber City Oedo 808, Tokyo Babylon, Devilman and Doomed Megalopolis. I taped every single one off the telly at the time. Anecdotally it seems to have been a key point in growing the UK anime fandom at this point in time.

COMICS

Akira – Part 25

Striker – Part 1 (aka Spriggan)

Dirty Pair: Sim Hell – Part 1

FEATURES

First Love – Cathy Sterling on Love City. Mainly comparing it to Akira, which leads into the next feature…

Deja Views – A one page feature comparing KO Century Beast Warriors to Ladius, then losing it’s theme totally with some Macross vagaries before a flippant Guyver remark.

Short Cuts – A one page “comedy” feature about anime hair cuts from Dave Jerrom. Totally filler in the proud tradition of UK publishing.

Renaissance Man – Julie Davis on Yuji Moriyama, and the Project A-Ko sequels in particular. This probably helped cement Yuji Moriyama in my brain as the earliest Japanese animator I was familar with.

COLUMNS

Get Animated – Letters include complaining about a dearth of robot shows available in the UK, dumb questions and people saying how great the magazine is.

Cyberdrome – A guide to getting on the internet and what to do once you are there.

Mega Byte – Here’s your regulation reference to Buichi Terasawa’s Apple, as Hudson Soft were apparently planning to release Space Adventure Cobra Digital Comic in the UK. Anyone know if that happened? Panzer Dragoon got 89% in the review.

Animatedly Yours - More on versioning manga for the US market.

REVIEWS

Top rated release was Ushio & Tora Comical Deformed Theatre with 4 stars. Of course it was. Starting to see harsher anime reviews now too, with nothing else getting more than 3 stars.

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Cover this month was by Metin Salih

NEWS

Upcoming Releases (titles that got news feature in bold)

Manga Video – Project A-Ko 2, Patlabor the Movie, Wings of Honneamise (sub version), Space Adventure Cobra, Angel Cop 3, New Dominion Tank Police 4, Orguss 02 2, Legend of the Four Kings 11 & 12

Western Connection – Love City, Ushio & Tora 6

Anime Projects – Oh My Goddess 5, Bubblegum Crisis 5 (dub)

East To West – 8 Man After 3, The Adventures of Kekko Kamen 3

Upcoming Conventions

Anime Expo ’95 – 30 June – 2 July, Los Angeles – Guests announced were Koichi Ohata and Satoshi Urushibara. 

Anime America – 6 -9 July, Anaheim – Guest announced was Megumi Hayashibara.

Robocon 10 – 6 – 8 October, San Jose – Guests included Carl Macek and Arlon Ober.

Minami Anime – 22 July, Portsmouth – One day con at Portsmouth Hilton, two video rooms, a traders hall, a fan artshow room and a video programme that ran 10am to 10pm!

Japan News

Fire Emblem OAV

Shin Megami Tensei OAV

Virgin Megastores Top 20 Anime

Top three were New Dominion 6, Angel Cop 1 and Akira.

COMICS

Akira – Part 24

Silent Mobius – Part 5

Firetripper – Part 3

FEATURES

Speed – Yes that is the title of this Julie Davis piece on 8 Man After. There’s also a side bar on the 1994 live action 8 Man film

How to draw the manga way part 3 – No mention of Buichi Terasawa’s Apple this time! Instead some instruction on cel painting and animation.

Yeah, that was it, six pages of features total. I think they wanted to burn off two of the strips so they could launch two more with the price hike next month.

COLUMNS

MegaByte - Ultra 64 was on it’s way with a promised November launch in Japan and the US, no mention of the Europe release date of course. This was the way of things in 1995. The Story of Thor on the Megadrive got 86%

Cyber Drome – Yes, the fastly dated tech column was back. With a big piece on digital actors, no mention of Avatar yet, I think we have to wait until Cameron is linked with Battle Angel Alita before we start to see Avatar mentioned in the magazine.

Get Animated - Hey it’s the eternal when will we get some Ranma anime released in the UK question. There’s also a weird letter justifying next months price hike announced in this issues editorial. 

Animated Yours – Trish Ledoux talks “versioning” manga.

REVIEWS

Top release was Patlabor the Movie with five stars. Though bear in mind Kekko Kamen got four stars, as did every other anime reviewed release this month.

ADVERTS

In the inside front cover was this beauty of a time capsule of UK anime fandom…

Did anyone actually join this thing? If so, please elaborate in the comments below. I am curious about the Japanese cartoon fueled decadence depicted in the photos in this advert that could attract the presence of grinning, greedy, poisonous, bearded balloonist Branson.

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That’s a Kev Walker (ABC Warriors, Thunderbolts) cover up there.

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NEWS

Upcoming Releases (titles that got a news feature in bold)

East2West – 8 Man After, Kekko Kamen and The Wicked City (not that one, this one)

Bloomsbury Publishing – Ironfist Chinmi

Manga VIdeo – Angel Cop 1, New Dominion Tank Police 2, Macross Plus 2, Legend of the 4 Kings 4, Godzilla vs Mothra, Tokyo Drifter

Columbia TriStar – Street Fighter (the live action film)

Western Connection – Dancougar, Hummingbirds, Ushio & Tora 4, Slow Step 2

Anime Projects – Oh My Goddess 3, Bubblegum Crisis 3 (dub)

Kiseki Films – Robotech 5, Star Blazers 6

Pioneer Video – Kishin Heidan 1 & 2, Green Legend Ran 3

Japan News

Lupin III Get Lost Nostradamus was airing

The X movie was announced.

Virgin Megastores Top 20 Anime Chart

Top three were The Guyver Volume 12, Ninja Scroll and Macross Plus Volume 1

COMICS

Akira – Part 22

Silent Mobius – Part 3

Firetripper – Part 1

FEATURES

Hard Labor - Peter J Evans gives a history of the Patlabor franchise. While the article mentions the first film is out in May, no mention of it is in the news pages. Looking it up, it actually came out in June, so I guess this was a case of articles not synching up with release dates. As good as this article is, I think the mainstream coverage the release got (I remember NME covering it) brought it more to my attention. Interesting to read about how special the idea of leaping from OAV to TV was still thought of here, in three years time that specialness would be dead and buried.

Fanimania – Dave Hughes reviews five UK fanzines, Animace, Animejin, Animenia, JAMM and Tales of the Cajun Sushi Bar.

Animejin leapt from print to web and for a while was the source for UK anime news in the absence of print publicaitons. I have a few issues of JAMM, a pretty great Belgian zine that filled a niche that barely exists now (episode and series summaries of shows you might never see). Animenia was the product of “Gaijin Press” that would lead to the launch of a magazine called ANIMEX at the end of 1996, that promptly evaporated into thin air. They were based in Grimsby, as I was at the time, but I don’t think I ever knowingly encountered them. Cajun Sushi Bar was a fanfic fanzine that was inexplicably popular among people who wrote reviews of fanzines, but that might be just be because I don’t understand people getting excited about fanfic unless it’s Shakespeare Hemingway.

Idol Worship - Simon Taylor on the concept of idol singers and the UK release of Hummingbirds in particular.

Branded To Thrill – David Chute on the director Seijun Sezuki. What is this doing in an anime magazine? Well the magazine was owned by Manga Video now and they were putting out two of his films with the ICA.

How To Draw The Manga Way - Wil Overton with a three part guide to how to draw in the Manga Way. There is no practical advice whatsoever in this first part, instead it is two pages of vague history & terms and two more pages of discussion of CG art. Because it was the nineties and CG art was THE FUTURE. We would all be Buichi Terasawa in the glorious world of Apples and comics.

COLUMNS

Get Animated - STANDARD LETTERS PAGE. Which is to say – one letter addressing a “controversy”, in this case subs vs dubs, one letter asking questions and a final letter rating each part of the magazine bit by bit.

Megabyte - Apparently the Saturn and Playstation might not take off in the West as we don’t like to change systems that often, so why not buy a 32X for your Megadrive instead. And apparently Nintendo might come out on top with their mystery Ultra 64 project. Also: Mega Man X2 gets 75%.

Cyberdrome - NANOMACHINES ARE GOING TO EAT US ALL. A wireless gamepad. Wristwatch telephone. 

Animatedly Yours - Trish Ledoux talks about voice acting, and it all gets confusing at the end when it starts contradicting itself. I blame the editor.

Sumo Family - Robots fear can openers.

REVIEWS

The first two volumes of the Maison Ikkoku manga get 5 stars.

Anime picks this month include Kishin Heidan, New Dominion, Green Legend Ran and Plastic Little(!) with 4 stars each. Bottom of the pile was Legend of the Four Kings with 2 stars.

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