Obscure Adventures in Geek and Nerd Culture

Known primarily as a long-standing icon of American teen girl magazines, Tiger Beat has had its day as a teen idol magazine in the USA, because it’s been rotten by both horrible mismanagement and not much changing with the times. Bop is a fellow idol magazine for a slightly younger audience, but it’s had only a 30 year run from 1983 to 2014.  I believe the main reason why they need a new distributor is that there are lots of non-anglophone oldie works which haven’t been fully completed, in both abridged and unabridged forms, since their authors’ deaths, with a particularly famous example being Sōji Yamakawa’s Tiger Boy. Unfortunately, even in the best case scenario, the distributor will be something like Square Enix America.  Despite Squeenix America also being run by insanely incompetent management, it’s not too late to reinvent Bop for young fans of light novels. Also, will Bop evolve into something different?  Even if so, Bop will only survive in the best case scenario...

The certainty that Kodansha’s Weekly Shōnen Magazine began life with of all things - a classy Tetsujin 28 competitor - is a frankly unknown curio amongst super robot fans outside Japan. Amongst his works besides Kuro Obi Kun and the less popular Tokyo Tarzan, No. 13 Take Off is a creation of Yoshiteru Takano, an unsung manga author turned camera store pioneer.  Despite its more hokey design, it’s much unlike the remote controlled and ugly-cute Tetsujin 28, who likely has the interesting title of being ‘the first robot character of what’s now considered the unlikely but true first Mon-themed work ever’. Although indirectly inspired by Manoel Messias de Mello’s Audaz the Demolisher, the first piloted non-American super robot with its own eponymous comic, Ken Ishikawa’s Getter Robos have more famous exploits. Frankly, the Getter Robos also have another stylistic predecessor in Leonel Guillermo Prieto’s similar but lesser known Invictus from Mexico.  While also inspired by Invictu...

Although Back Arrow is not for everyone’s taste of casual mech anime fandom, its character designs aren’t just fucking good while retaining their distinctiveness, they oddly blend in Go Nagai’s otherwise inconsistent group of art styles rather too well.  The character designs of Back Arrow are more than frigging pretty designs, they’ve captured Go Nagai’s Manga Vibes more nigh accurately than anything before and/or since. Due to being inspired by the way their designer animated DBZ characters in his time at Toei Animation, those of Toshiyuki san have only slight similarities to that of Shinobu Ohtaka’s prototypes for them all and tend to look slightly more like Camilla D’Errico’s cute illustrations instead.  In other words, it’s rather more likely that Toshiyuki Kanno is such an engaging animation director that nearly everyone involved in making post-mid 1990s Mazinger variations may owe him some degree of indirect respect.  As for Go Nagai himself, not many human beings ...

Sometimes people are still waiting for a canonical overseas version of a single classic epic. Corazón Salvaje is one such example, beginning its life as not only a novel trilogy, but also a partly lost Cuban radionovela and a degraded Mexican film. Although the trilogy was likely conceived first, the Cuban radionovela was the earliest version available to the public in 1954, with the Mexican film arriving 2 years later by starring the amazing Martha Roth. But it’s thanks to the successes of both the first radionovela and film versions that the trilogy was saved from development hell in 1957.  The actual first telenovela of the trilogy was made by an unspeakably awful committee at RCTV, which still has made a single cringeworthy mashup (the 2009 show) look good (in comparison) decades later. Since its shit-show of a short airing life bored even its media-illiterate audience, it might’ve stunk so hard that it’s practically forgotten lost media ever since.  It’s also one of only ...