Time Off to Count Cajuns!! Photo Fame Wears Lovely Shirts!!

This month is gonna be slow.  I'm driving all over southwest Louisiana taking head counts for Uncle Sam so the state can figure out how many Representatives it stands to lose because of all the hurricanes.  Assuming I don't fall into a swamp or get bitten by a rabid dog, everything should pick up come April.

The (badly reproduced) photo above is from Nasfic '85 in Austin Texas.  As explained in the recent post about Wicked City, a Nasfic is the consolation prize America gets when the World Science Fiction Convention is awarded to the furriners "somewheres else" in the world.  Suffice to say, it wasn't out of snobbery that I somehow managed to make both the Nasfics during the '80s while managing to miss every Worldcon, that's just the way it worked out.  Flanking yours truly are Karen Helmer and Tommie Dunnam from the late, lamented SDF-Fort Worth, although the SDF-Forth worth didn't actually exist when the photo was taken.  It was supposed to be an EDC (Earth Defense Command) panel on anime fandom, but none of the officers from Dallas could make it, so we pinch-hit for Derek, Meri and the rest.  We were all technically members at the time, so I guess that made it okay.

The SDF-1 Super Fortress toy on the table is the original Japanese release and not the Matchbox Robotech version that came out later in the decade. This one had the (gasp) dangerous missiles that could hunt down your young child and force themselves down his or her throat until the tyke choked to death so of course it became public enemy number one on the Japanese PTA hit list.  Or something. Anyway, there weren't a whole lot of them making the fan rounds on this side of the Pacific, so Tommy had to keep his eye on this puppy lest it find its way into some toy hoarder's collection and never be seen again. I don't think he ever let it out of arm's reach.  I dunno much about the Yamato toy, that's more Steve Harrison's department...

The picture itself was printed in an issue of the Japanese Animage monthy anime magazine sometime in either late '85 or early 1986 (actually March '87, per Jack Thielepape in the Comments below).  Fred Patten sent notes around to the various anime clubs letting us know that Animage was soliciting pictures for an article on American anime fandom and this was our contribution.  Well, my contribution.  The picture was taken by Jack Thielepape.  I don't even know if Karen or Tommie knew about it until the picture was printed in Japan.  Animage was hard to come by over here at the time, so I know I never got a copy myself, though I did see someone else's later, which is how I knew they actually used it. 

When looking at the picture, I couldn't help but notice I was wearing my Return of the Jedi tee.  Sigh.  What a way to be remembered, huh?  I had the chance to buy a Revenge of the Jedi tee at a convention in Houston in the early '80s but didn't want to spend the outrageous amount they were asking for a so-called "collector's item." For all of you young 'uns who weren't around back then, the scuttlebutt was that Lucas was really using the latter as a working title.  Well, you can see how creative George got, he just moved the "revenge" thing to the third film (which is actually the sixth) because "revenge" just isn't a jedi thing.  But before he changed the title, there were people out there who probably made a fortune on bootleg t-shirts with the red, Revenge of the Jedi logo on it.  Silly fanboys.

Anyway, I was still too young to care what the hell I looked like at comic book conventions back in the '80s, so I ran the gamut from geek to geekier to downright obnoxious.  Most of that shit is loooooong gone now, but I still have a few.

 

NERD CONVENTION FORMALWEAR, 1987


Now, normally, a sweatshirt is not something that immediately comes to mind when you think about stuff you wear at a convention.  Unless, of course, you ran all-night video rooms at cons back in the '80s. Let me tell you, it was really, REALLY difficult to track down hotel personnel capable of and willing to adjust a thermostat at 3am in the morning.  Luckily I had the Kasugi sisters to keep me warm.

Not to mention Kei and Yuri.

I remember when Mitsuyoshi sent me these.  The price wasn't bad and I'd worn sweatshirts like forever, but man, I really didn't want to get these puppies dirty, 'cause I knew the washing machine would cause havoc, especially on the small Catseye text synopsis on the back.  But there comes a time in every geek's life when you have to decide between the collector mentality and the sheer awesomeness that is walking into a room and having everyone try to read the microscopic crap on the back of your shirt without you catching them.

 

You think I'm kidding when I say it was hard to get info on anime back in the day?  That little bitty text was gold 'cause it was in English. Pretty good English too.  Damn sad when the best description of a television show you can find comes from the back of a freakin' sweatshirt. But, that's just the way it was.  BTW, I used that text in at least two zine articles.  Hey, you do what you have to do.

One of the great joys of making a regular convention circuit was seeing familar faces every four or five months.  In Texas, we had regular groups from all the larger cities show up at most of the major cons. The group from Texas A&M/College Station/Bryan in the '80s mainly orbited around Alex Botello, who sold models and such and thus bought at least one dealer's table at most of Larry Lankford's conventions.  Since just about everyone from that area knew Alex (he'd been setting up at cons for years), they'd use his tables as kind of a "home base" to store their stuff and take a seat when tired of wandering around.  Among them was an exceptionally lovely woman named Margaret, who was majoring in marine geology at A&M, but also did some absolutely amazing t-shirt artwork on the side.  From talking to her at length, I discovered she loved Hokuto no Ken (gorgeous, smart, talented, AND with exquisite taste in anime - yes, boys, they ARE out there), and one con she totally surprised me with a white shirt with Kenshiro on it.  I can't exactly remember what I did to deserve them - seriously, I can't recall doing anything more for the folks at A&M than I did for anyone else back then - but she'd show up at just about every convention with another shirt.  Kumo no Juuza, Ein, and Kenshiro, from Hokuto no Ken.  Ai-chan, from Catseye.  And this beauty:

Man, these bring back memories.  I don't know or remember what I did to get on your good side and probably didn't thank you nearly enough, Margaret, but if you're reading this, you totally rock.

Of course, when I got the Captain Harlock gig at Eternity, they tried to launch the title with a big push at San Diego one year and part of that was printing up a lot of Tees with Ben Dunn's version on the back. I remember one day at the con, the entire Malibu Graphics gang was wearing 'em, though I dunno if that's exactly a good thing.  But the shirts themselves were really nice and after almost ten years of use, mine never totally wore out, though I retired it a decade back.

Again, because you simply can not get too much Emeraldas

San Antonio Attacks Phoenix with OVA!! Beware the Animation Cel with Teeth!!

CactusCon '87 (or "That Wicked City Con")

By the winter of 1987, C/FO-San Antonio was smack dab in the middle of organized anime fandom and I was right in the middle of C/FO-San.  Basically, I was a really busy guy.  In addition to being the center of the tape-trading part of the operation, I was in charge of most of the correspondence that didn't have to do with higher muckity-muck political stuff.  Which is just how I liked it, thankyouverymuch.  By that time, I had somewhat of a reputation as someone who was willing to bring a large part of my vidtape collection with me when I travelled to club meetings and conventions, which made for some interesting hotel stays. Sometimes I'd handle all that taping myself, sometimes I'd just hand off the tapes to whoever wanted them and I wouldn't see them again for days.  But, for conventions, I usually kept them with me because I'd developed somewhat of a rep because of my all-night vidrooms. 

I was a night owl back then (still true) who thrived on lack of sleep (definitely still NOT true), so, combined with the fact that I had a relatively huge anime vidtape collection, it made me the natural person to handle the overnight portions of the convention video rooms.  During the '80s, most of the comic book conventions in Texas were run by Larry Lankford's Bulldog Productions and he let the Earth Defense Command run the video rooms. Usually during this time period, that still meant one room that showed general fantasy/sf films and one that showed nothing but anime.  Sometimes, if the con was small, it would only have one video room that ran a combination of the two.  Generally, one room would shut down about midnight or early in the morning and I'd haul my box of tapes into the anime room and basically show pretty much whatever the majority of people wanted to see.  That allowed us to show newer stuff that wasn't available when the schedule was made, plus things that the con staff might not have (ahem) approved of.  Now, hentai vids had just started coming out in Japan a few years earlier, but I made it a point never to actually show them in the vidrooms proper because that would've been stretching things a bit more than would've been prudent.  Plus, I didn't want some parent complaining to the con staff about something Little Timmy saw even though it was five fucking hours past Little Timmy's bedtime.  I think I may have broken that rule once for Pop Chaser, but  it was only 'cause she asked really, really nicely.

Normally, there were very few souls strong enough to stay awake all night, so most of the time my programming consisted of things that would help keep me awake.  Or things fellow members of the con staff or EDC wanted to see.  Generally, that meant several hours of newer Hokuto no Ken episodes Jeff Blend hadn't seen yet, or episodes of Dirty Pair or more obscure OVAs like Birth or Greed or Legend of Fabulous Battle Windaria - stuff that wasn't popular enough to make the regular video schedules.  Because I was basically the boss, I could choose to simply step in and change programs if no one was watching. 

Mitsuyoshi the cel salesman!

Also about this time, I was itching to finally get out of Texas and actually go about actually MEETING some of these people I wrote letters to and spent hour talking to on the phone.  Mitsuyoshi had decided that he'd like to maybe make money selling animation cels and was likewise itching to, as they say, come to America, it only for a visit. So we started looking at the upcoming convention schedule to see what might work best for both of us, since San Antonio would never be mistaken for a major sf/comic book convention kind of destination.  About this time, Randy Stukey was thinking along the same lines because he was also developing some long-distance friendships, and being an sf fan first and foremost, his first thought was a Worldcon.  I'd never attended a Worldcon per se, but Ray Elliot was nice enough to let me use his Nasfic '85 membership for the con in Austin when he couldn't make it, so I wasn't exactly unfamiliar with it either.  It just so happened that year's Worldcon was in England, so Phoenix, Arizona was awarded the Nasfic for '87. This seemed pretty doable for all of us, so I sat down and shot off a letter to the con staff and asked about the availability for volunteer positions on the videoroom staff, not realizing I was ALREADY in contact with the guy who was in charge of the videoroom via my tape trading networking.

Just the way things seem to work back then.  It was like a Seven Degrees of Kevin Bacon thing, with letters and phone calls instead of movie credits.

A few months go by and we all make necessary arrangements to meet up in Phoenix in September for the con.  Mitsuyoshi sends me an absolutely gorgeous Misa Hayase cel from Macross: DYRL that I manage to auction off and it pays for my flight.  There and back.  God Bless Carl Macek.  Yeah, I'm easy.  Turns out I get put in charge of the overnight shift in the vidroom and they'll let me pretty much run it however I want to, except with equipment that I've never ever had access to before and probably never will again.  Life is sweet.

So the weekend of the con finally rolls around and Randy and I head for the airport.  We get on the plane and THEN he informs me he hates flying.  Is absolutely scared to death of airplanes. Great. I'm not so keen on flying myself, not having flown in about a decade, but I end up having to be the rational one, which (if you knew either of us) happened maybe once a year.  The armrest between us somehow manages to survive the flight to Dallas and then there's enough downtime in Dallas to recuperate before flying to Phoenix. I pass the time pointing out all of the landforms between Texas and Arizona 'cause I lived half my life in West Texas and New Mexico and it's a cheaper way of staying sane than drinking airplane booze.  White Sands looks absolutely fabulous from 20,000 feet, btw.

By the time we get to the hotel, it's almost time to go BACK to the airport to get Mitsuyoshi, who was flying America West.  Luckily for me, my con staff contact whom I'm staying with (and I'm really blanking on his name, here and it really bothers me) agrees to take me to go pick him up while Randy checks into his room.  We get back to the airport and I finally meet Mitsuyoshi face to face.  He's tall.  As in, really, really tall.  As in, over six foot tall. And distracted.  In general, it's true that the Japanese I've met have been reserved when compared to Americans, but you could tell immediately that something was bothering him.  Turns out, the airline had misplaces his luggage. Including the suitcase full of animation cels he was hoping to sell at the convention.  Now, I'd later have a career in the hospitality industry, so I would become accustomed to airlines and lost luggage, but it's still hard to imagine what goes through someone's head when they're in a foreign country and at the mercy of  baggage handlers.  Considering the flight had originated in Japan, even if he got it all back, he couldn't even be certain it would be in time (or condition) to do him much good. All in all, the airline was lucky he was so "reserved." I think I'd have been yelling and screaming. But that's just me.

Have absolutely no clue what show this is from.  I just needed a pic of one of his cels.

We convinced him that sticking around the airport wouldn't be productive, so he agreed to come back to the hotel with us and check in.  To make a long story short, the bags showed up later that night (they'd just missed the connecting flight in LA), and he was happily showing his wares to interested customers in his hotel room the next day.  Unfortunately for him, this WAS a Nasfic and not a comic book or anime convention, so there wasn't nearly the audience or money there could've been but word eventually got out and he managed to sell enough to pay for most of his trip.  Or that was the impression I got.  You know, that "reserved" thing again.

In any case, the con started that next day.  Randy and I split up - he went off with Pat Munson-Siter and his sf/anime friends and I palled around with Mitsuyoshi and a few guys I'd met through Phoenix anime fandom.  There was only one anime fandom panel scheduled during the entire con, but I finally met Fred Patten in person, among various other people I'd only read about through newsletters.  We went out for lunch and stopped by a Church's Fried Chicken and bought a box to go.  Mitsuyoshi's eyes went wide and he kept repeating something like "It's so cheap" over and over again, which reminded me to cut back on my meat consumption if I ever decided to visit Japan. 

Back at the con, I stopped by the video room to see what I'd be dealing with later that night.  I'd never seen anything like it.  One of the local Phoenix anime buffs had lent his equipment to the room for the con and it was an absolutely amazing experience for this low-budget anime bum.  A box of commercial vids and laser discs straight from Japan - full of really good stuff, mixed together with turkeys not worth it at a quarter of the price.  The place was set up like a home video theater, except with cheap hotel chairs.  Six speakers.  A projected screen television.  Someone certainly had a lot of money to spend on his hobby.  For 1987, it was quite a sight.

Mentally, I'm thinking all through the day about what I'm gonna show.  When I see the arrangements, half of the possibilities go straight out the window - hell, I'm not going to insult all this nice equipment by showing third generation, tracking-challenged TV episodes of anything, no matter how rare the material is.  Luckily, I'd brought a good number of the tapes Mitsuyoshi'd sent me that he'd copied right off his television set, so there wasn't any chance of running out of material, just that it was rather limited.  As fate would have it, he'd also brought a few more new ones with him to give me and some of them had OVAs he'd managed to record just recently. I dunno if they still have this service currently in Japan, but back in the day, there were apparently video stores that would copy videos for you and charge you a fee depending on the number of minutes in the productions.  I always assumed that they were set up this way legally, but never really asked.

In any case, among the videos that he'd copied for us was one labelled "Yoju Toshi" and all I knew about it was that Mitsuyoshi said it was just released and that it was good.  I'd neither heard nor read anything about it, which wasn't unusual in the least.  OVAs were coming out right and left during that time period and unless we got a certain recommendation from someone who knew what they were talking about or it got heavy play in the monthly anime mags, we were flying blind. Such it was with this one.  What the hell, I figured, it was new, so at least it wasn't gonna ruin the equipment.   If it turned out to be boring, I could always stop the sucker and pop in something else before too many people evacuated the room.

Not that clearing the room would've been difficult.  I took over about midnight and there were, by my count, a whole seven people in the room, five of whom seemed to be using it as a place to crash.  That probably wasn't all that unusual for the time period - it was a sf convention, after all.  So I turned the lights up a bit, introduced myself and spelled out the way I liked to do things, gave them the usual speech about if they wanted to see anything in particular to come up and talk to me, then mangled the name of the new video I was gonna pop in, turned down the lights and started the show.

Now, I'd looked over the schedule up to that point and they'd shown nothing more lethal than the Macross: Do You Remember Love up to that point in the day, so if you've seen Wicked City, you might guess what's coming next. I certainly couldn't, having absolutely no clue about what I was popping into the VCR.  I went about rummaging through the laser disks, marvelling at how much money these guys had to spend on cartoon stuff and when I finally looked up at the nice projection screen, the first thing I saw was the part where Taki's getting attacked by the spider demon and suddenly NO ONE in the room is sleeping anymore. The fanboys are too busy making sure their respective favorite organs are where they're supposed to be, if you know what I mean.  Me, I'm wondering what in the hell I've done and whether or not I'm gonna get in trouble for it. It's not exactly Cream Lemon Rall or Urotsukidoji material here, but about as close as these geeks have probably seen.  As soon as the scene is over, two of the seven guys get up and zip out of the room, so I figure, what the hell, there's only five left and they're probably too scared to complain anyway, 'cause they'd have to admit they were there to sleep - not that they're snoozing after THAT particular scene. And, besides, I'm actually kinda digging this thing.  And I'll NEVER get to see it on such a nice screen ever again.

This gal might just put you off puttin' it in...like forever.

Anyway, five to ten minutes go by and the two guys who high-tailed it out of the room come BACK - bringing five or six more guys with them.  They all gang up at the front of the room and start mumbling to each other. Finally, one of them comes up to me and asks me if I can start the movie over.  I tell 'em if it were just us, I'd have no problem with it, but there are the other five guys in the room who might have a problem with it.  So this guy goes to each and every one of 'em until they all say they'd LOVE to see some animated siren turn into a spider with teeth where her hoochie should be all over again.  Hey, who am I to argue?  So, while I'm rewinding the tape, two or three of the guys run straight out of the room and ask me if I can hold off for about five more minutes, so they can go wake up their buddies. 

By the time the film is through, there are no less than twenty people in this video room at 2am, watching this semi-porn animated horror film that no one can understand a word of.  I think there may have even been one gal there, though I doubt she'd ever admit it.  It's the damndest thing that's ever happened to me in 15 years of anime vidrooms. I like to think that I ruined the lives of at least five people that night. If nothing else, they didn't get a whole lot of sleep.

The rest of the con went by fairly uneventfully and if anyone else showed up overnight expecting an escallation of the experience from the night before, they were disappointed.  I just wasn't gonna take that chance.  I did give out my address to a few people who definitely wanted copies of "that video," and I made sure to let the Phoenix guys know it was something that they just HAD to get on laserdisk.  Heh.

So I still have a soft spot in my heart for Yoju Toshi, even after all these years.  I've just learned to never, NEVER stick anything in that I haven't screened first.  Uh, video and otherwise.

Twenty Five Years Fights Kenshiro! The All About Man Punishes Old Typewriting!

"Yeah. I'm looking at you."

My Twenty-Five Year Love Affair with Kenshiro (or does this headline make me look gay?)

It all started in Ben Dunn's living room, sometime during the winter of 1985.  A bunch of us would gather there a few times a month to play Champions or just hang out and watch third or fourth generation anime vids Ben had managed to gather from here there and everywhere.  In between the giant robots slugging it out and Dr. Slump potty jokes, the first episode of a peculiar anime came on. Something the likes of which I'd certainly never seen before among the anime shows Ben had introduced us to.  It was slowly paced, with the requisite too cute by half little girl (complete with puppy), a boy who yakked way too much and a bunch of escapees from the latest Mad Max movie riding around on motorcycles.  About halfway through this mishmash of B-movie tropes, something even more peculiar happened:  one of the brutish thugs' head blew clean off.  Being a Cronenberg fanatic, my first thought was, of course, that in addition to The Road Warrior and Bruce Lee flicks, the folks who were responsible for this one must've been huge fans of "Scanners."  But the whole thing was about to get even more bizarre.  By the time Kenshiro let out that first "Atatatat...etc." and unloaded his thousand fists at Zeed, we were all laughing too hard to listen to the village elder explain the finer points of Hokuto Shinken to the audience.  Not that we'd have understood anyway, since none of us spoke a word of Japanese.  The general consensus of the show was that it was curious and good for a couple of laughs, but that lasted a whole minute or two and we fast-forwarded the tape to the next episode of Aura Battler Dunbine or whatever.

Still, there was something about it that stuck with me after I'd left to go home later that night.  That animation was no great shakes and I wasn't at all interested in martial arts films, and after all the goofy fists were unleashed on the thugs with the Zs on their heads, all thoughts of this guy being a scanner who spent all his time at the post-apocalyptic gym went right out the window.  Still, the show was...different.  Yeah, it was a mash-up of the familiar, plot-wise, but...then it hit me.  It was the character designs and the artwork.  I would be told over and over and over again during my early days in anime fandom that the artwork on Hokuto no Ken is "ugly" and that prevented a lot of people from getting into it, as if it didn't really fit into the "anime" style, whatever the hell that was.  As someone who grew up with Neal Adams, Steranko, and Jack Kirby, it seemed an odd objection, but since much of the appeal of anime and manga on this side of the Pacific is in the artistic differences between American and Japanese sensibilities, I guess it might be explained that way.  In any case, there was enough there to pique my curiousity as to exactly what would get such a "different" show made in the first place.  And that thought stayed in the back of my brain.

"Who are you calling 'ugly'?"

Anyway, we were so clueless that we didn't even have an idea what the bloody thing was called.  Something with "Fist" in the title.  It wasn't until a few weeks later when I was going through a C/FO publication of one kind or another where I noticed the LA chapter was showing something called "Fist of the North Star" in their meetings, that I figured my mystery show had a name, so I wouldn't embarrass myself when asking around for more episodes.  Assuming, of course, that there were more episodes.  I seriously had no way of knowing, even the most basic of information being extremely difficult to come by back in those days.  Enter Mary Kennard.

Mary is one of those under-the radar angels for whom American anime fandom owes a great debt - the rare early anime/manga fan with contacts, enthusiasm, a bit of understanding of the Japanese language and, most importantly, the willingness to use them all to help others without asking for an arm and a leg in return.  Plus, she had a killer tape collection.  And, amazingly enough, she LOVED Hokuto no Ken.  I can't remember where I originally got her phone number from, but she helped the C/FO-San Antonio tape collection get started and, more importantly for myself, personally, shaped the way I deal with others in the fandom.  She'd answer my questions to the best of her abilities and knowledge and absolutely loved doing so.  If it weren't for Mary Kennard, you wouldn't be reading this. 

Anyway, it turned out she had most of the HnK episodes up to that point and patiently explained to me about Shin, Toki, Mamiya, and especially Rei.  Turns out she was a huge Kaneto Shiozawa fan. It was...interesting to hear her go on about Japanese voice actors while talking to a guy who didn't know shit about much of anything.  I guess that's part of the definition of a true fan.  Anyway, she sent me the later Rei episodes, right up to that fatal showdown with Raoh, which was just a month or so behind the anime episodes airing in Japan.  Between her explanations and actually seeing those episodes, I was hooked. 

"My, that's a big...horse you have."

About that time, C/FO-San Antonio got in the thick of things in North American fandom and I was trading tapes like crazy.  I had contacted Mitsuyoshi in Japan and he'd agreed to tape TV anime for us, which meant we sometimes got episodes of stuff before any of my other contacts, which meant even MORE tape trading. The first batch of tapes I got from him included the great Rei death episode and the beginning of the Shuu/Souther arc, which just totally blew me away.  I mean, I was REALLY heavy into this thing now.  Unfortunately, even armed with my sparkling personality and first generation episodes of what I had come to believe was a real phenom here, I just could not get anyone else interested in this show. It just wasn't happening.  "Real" anime fans were into mecha and Dirty Pair and Urusei Yatsura, not mystical martial artist who made heads explode.  With "ugly" artwork.  Saint Seiya was all the rage.

On this side of the Pacific, anyway.  Basically, near as I could tell, Hokuto no Ken fandom consisted of Mary, Jeff Blend, Tim Eldred, Laurine White, Steven Barnes. And me. 

The C/FO had a listing for "favorite anime" in the membership directory and out of the total membership, fewer than 10 people listed Hokuto no Ken among their favorites.  It was a really tough time to be a manly man among men.

Then, in 1986, three things happened, creating the perfect storm for this particular fanboy.  The feature film was released in Japan. I got in touch with Tomoaki Okuzumi, a Japanese native (and Hokuto no Ken fan) living in California.  And the Shonen Jump "All About the Man" book was released by Shueisha. 

The Rosetta Stone

I'm going to get into the HnK movie in another blog post.  In a strange turn of events, Tomoaki got in touch with me, instead of the other way around.  I guess he found my name in one of the C/FO publications, I don't know if I ever asked him where or how he found me. But he did.  I guess the stars were all lined up just right. Without him, none of those early Hokuto no Ken translations would have gotten done.  He'd call me up on the phone and we'd sometimes talk for more than an hour at a time about either what had come before or what was currently happening in the weekly Shonen Jump, which he got from relatives in Japan. I guess he either had a really good job or just really loved talking Kenshiro.  For whatever his reasons, his efforts were greatly appreciated.  When I had questions about this or that, he'd occasionally send me actual Jump pages from the weeklies when a new character was introducted along with written translations of song lyrics and such. 

And then one day, out of the blue, an extremely large package came in the mail, and it wasn't from Mitsuyoshi, but from Tomoaki.  Inside was, quite simply, the most important part of the puzzle that was Hokuto no Ken yet released, aside from the actual running manga.  And quite a bargain at 390 yen, I might add.

Everything you ever wanted to know about kumo no Juuza, except maybe the size of his package.

Now, I've sure there have been more colorfull and more detailed Hokuto no Ken books released over the subsequent 20+ years, but not many would prove more useful.  It had inverviews with Tetsuo Hara and Buronson, color-pullouts of paintings which would later become the covers of HnK books both in Japan and elsewhere around the globe, detailed character pics and discriptions of martial arts styles, a nifty reprinting of the original Ken story from Fresh Jump, facts and figures about the man himself and so much other Hokuto heavenliness that when I first opened it, I'm sure they felt the fanboy orgasm all the way to Kansas.

Want to know how long he can hold his breath? There's an app for that!

Now I understand that the All About the Man Special has been reprinted a few times in Japan since the original release in  '86 and I'm sure more detailed books have come out since then (this one only covers up to Raoh's death), but a recent scan of ebay shows this puppy is still getting bids of forty bucks or so, which isn't bad for a cover price of 390 yen!  "What a bargain!"  Anyway, I still think it's fairly required to have this puppy in your collection if you're a completist, but the rarity and price thing can certainly be a hindrance, especially to those who came into the series because of the new animation a few years back.  For whatever reason, Shueisha and Toei didn't release a whole lot of supplemental material for the manga and anime during their first runs, compared to the products of other companies, but I'm certainly glad if there had to be an exception, it was an important one.

Dunno why Raoh has a weapon here, seems just a tad redundant.

A welcome side-effect of the All About the Man book, at least for us would-be HnK evangelists, was it collected a lot of the needed reference material from the manga in one place.  No longer would you have to scan back over the manga volumes or anime episodes to find the name of, say, Rei's Nanto art (nanto sui cho ken), because it was right there on his page, along with his governing star (gi sei). In addition, it cleared up the whole Shin thing, since neither the name of his actual art nor his governing star were given in his original manga arc - just one of the many things they added as they went along. But, thanks to the good folk at Shueisha, all of that was now cleared up, assuming you had someone who could translate it all, of course.

Which is where Tomoaki came in.  Being a fan of HnK as well as fluent in Japanese, he was genuinely interested in helping me impart hokuto knowledge to the unwashed masses over here, whether they wanted it or not.  Back in the wild west of anime fandom (1986 or so) the rule wasn't "If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself."  It was more like "If you want something done AT ALL, you have to do it yourself."  Basically, the only translations being done were personal pet projects for APAs, the occasional translation guides for conventions like Baycon, small movie or episode synopses for anime club newsletters, and Toren Smith's Urusei Yatsura manga projects with Miyako Graham. People with the skills to translate (and materials to translate from) were working on stuff they liked personally, and not much else.  Of course, since there wasn't really any money in it, that was to be expected. Anime and manga fandom was still a very small market, even after Robotech issued in a new wave of fans.  Personal computers were still incredibly expensive, word processors weren't a whole lot cheaper, and most work was still being done either by hand or by typewriter.  Al Gore had yet to invent the internet as we now know it and even Usenet was still in its infancy.  Even communication by telephone could be incredibly expensive, depending on what time of the day or night you were talking.  "Snail mail" was the rule, rather than the exception. 

But, hey, you do what you can, with what you have.  Which is what we did. Armed with the manga, the All About the Man Special, telephones, communication via the US Postal Service, and using my trusty antique manual typewriter and illos by Mike Cogliandro (who wasn't really a HnK fan, but a good sport nontheless), Tomoaki and I managed to assemble and distribute what I'm pretty sure was the first Hokuto no Ken guide of any note in English.  

"Hokuto no Ken: An Initiate's Guide," circa 1986.

The fanboy hype just oozes out of my typewriter, doesn't it?  Oh, to be young and in love.

Looking at this shit now, I'm amazed anyone could do freakin' ANYTHING back then.  First I had to take the illos, find a photocopy machine that could reduce them to manageable size, cut and paste them on a blank sheet of paper (and by cutting and pasting, I'm talking scissors and glue stick here), insert them into the manual typewriter, type AROUND the illos, then photocopy the pages again, which is why everything is so faint. Then you have to find a public copy machine that makes good copies, because you have to do one side at a time in order to make double-sided copies.  Then you reduce the pages yet again so two pages can fit side by side on a larger sized paper and fit together as a booklet. It's all rather...complicated.

I don't even have any original copies of this thing anymore, what's pictured here are the reprints of a reprint that the C/FO distributed through its newsletter in '87.  You can even see Randall Stukey's hand-written page numbers on the bottom of the pages.  Or maybe you can't. Sigh.  Hey, it this was 1986, okay. 

Manual typewriters don't have spell checkers, obviously.

I'll put the rest of the pages at the end of this in case anyone reading this hasn't abused their eyes enough with these.  If you read the whole thing, you'll see references to an Initiate's Guide, Part 2.  Yes, we did that one too, covering the Nanto Go Sha Sei arc, Yuria, and the end of the first series, along with some assorted bits and pieces like martial arts stuff and more song translations.  I actually liked it a bit better than the first one, mostly because we learned from our mistakes, but, sadly, I don't have any copies at all of it among the crap I've managed to dig out of boxes, so it may be forever lost to the dustbin of fandom history.  Which might not actually be such a bad thing...

Among my other HnK fannish activities during that maniac period of 1984-89 was a round-robin project that worked fairly well for the first round or so before everyone just lost interest.  For those of you unfamiliar with the concept of a round-robin, it was kind of a poor man's APA, usefull for smaller groups of fans who don't publish tons of material.  Instead of everyone making a bunch of copies of their "trib" and sending them to a specific collator for mass mailing, there's just one package that gets mailed from one participant to the next participant, who then copies whatever he or she wants from the whole, includes his or her contribution to the package, then mails the whole thing to the next person on the list, who does the same, until the package makes it back to the person who started the whole thing, who re-starts the process after replacing his or her original contribution with a new one.  This way, everyone only has to make one copy of their material and everyone saves on postage and only have to spring for the copies of stuff they want to keep.  Of course the downside is that if the one person who has the package gets lazy...

And, of course, I don't have much material from that either, which is kind of a shame.  I remember some fun stuff from that, including a strip from Tim Eldred about Kenshiro and Rei going to McDonalds...

Of course the translation/information game hit its stride in the '90s and never looked back.  Hokuto no Ken was no exception in this regard, though the fandom remained smaller than many comparable anime/manga from the time period.  When the net exploded during roughly the same time period, web sites like Evan Jacobson's most excellent Hokuto Renkitoza popped up, making amateurs like me superflous (well, okay, I always wanted to be super at something).

I have to admit to feeling a slight depression when I walked by all those arcades with all those kids playing Street Fighter 4 or Mortal Kombat 21 or whatever during the past two decades and thinking to myself "Do these people even know about Hokuto no Ken?"  But that  pales in comparison to the joy I feel now when I surf the web and realize just how LARGE the fanbase has grown compared to the small handfull of us who eagerly waited for the manga chapters or anime episodes to come out during that original run in the '80s. It just goes to show that quality wins out, whether it takes two months or twenty-five years.

I'm just happy I lived long enough to finally see it.

How to make the bad guys blow up REAL GOOD!

Hey, at least we didn't forget Jagi existed!

I know this probably still sounds lame, but I plead not guilty on account that it was fucking 1986.

Notice the "Sauzer" spelling.  We did that waaay back in '86 just to piss off Daryl Surat, who was probably all of 10 years old at the time.

Hell, we even did lame song translations!

Credit where credit is due. In this case, to Dudley Do-All, Mister Jeff Blend. The second biggest HnK fan I knew back then.

Next up: The Movie and the comics. Or, how Kenshiro found America a LOT tougher to conquer than Asura.

Texas Invades the Fifth Radish! Old Fans Find Funny Clothes!

"A scanner. A scanner.  My kingdom for a scanner."

Sometime in late 1984 or early '85, the Daicon III&IV anime shorts started making the American fannish rounds and the result was, in the words of a fellow C/FO-San Antonio member who will remain nameless, a "giant fanboy orgasm" that went up one side of the US and down the other. Seriously, there was so much sweaty goodness concentrated in that seven plus minutes of freeze-frame bait that I made a whole seperate tape (at two-hour speed no less!) of it in order to make copies from so I wouldn't screw up my own.  Yeah, I think I might have made 10 or so copies just for local SA types, some of whom were barely interested in anime.  That's just the kind of magic it held - something for just about everyone, provided they looked hard enough.

Better people than me have done articles on the anime itself, as well as the history both behind it and of the resulting formation of Studio Gainax, so I won't go into it here except to say that it just fucking rocked.

Cute girl with deadly backpack destroying every sf/fantasy vehicle ever put on film or video.  You'd think there'd be screenshots all over the net, eh?

Being the kind of curious critter I was back then, I started asking around about the origin of the thing (all we knew is that it was from some convention in Japan named after a radish) and was informed that the Japanese science fiction community had - and, actually, still has - a national sf convention that moves around the country each year. The con isn't actually called "Daicon" except in the years it's held in Osaka. Strangely enough, I also found that the 1986 version of the convention was also going to be held in Osaka. Which, coincidently, is where my new Japanese friend Mitsuyoshi lived...

Robotech hit the airwaves, the Shonen Jump manga spin-offs and Nippon Sunrise mecha shows were dominating the anime TV schedules in Japan, VCRs were getting cheaper, and new anime fan clubs were popping up all over the country.  Basically, it was a pretty good time to be getting into the fandom - something which was not lost on certain creative business types on this side of the pond hoping to take advantage of the expanding market.  One of these was a California-based travel agency called Ladera Travel.  They organized several fan tours of Japan, mostly using the C/FO and other networks to get the word out.  One of the events on the tour was the upcoming 1986 Daicon 5 in Osaka.

Now, word of the tour spread down to us in San Antonio, but there wasn't a whole lot of interest because, well, because even organized through a travel agency, a trip to Japan was pretty expensive.  Of our group of 20 or so regular attendees, only Ray Elliot and Jack Thielepape showed both the interest and had enough moola to make the trip. Ray was a friend of Randy Stukey and Shon Howell and one of the founding members of C/FO-San Antonio, a military type who joined a lot of his servicemen in deciding to retire in the great town of San Antone.  Jack actually lived in Austin, but made the trip down to SA just about every month for our meetings, a camera around his neck like it was part of his character design or somethin'.  He's since been a fixture at the convention scene in Texas and I think he's still the official photo go-to guy at Project A-Kon.

When I found they were planning to attend, I dropped Mitsuyoshi a letter explaining the tour and he ended up meeting them in Osaka in August of '86 - seems he'd really gotten into the whole fandom thing.  Luckily, he remembered to bring his camera...

An auditorium of Japanese fans all studiously studying...something.

I dunno exactly what's going on here, but I'm guessing a re-enactment of that classic Lost in Space episode?

Jack, on the other side of the camera for a change, showing off a poster to a movie no one saw.

Ray, checking out animation cels.

That's either supposed to be Black Jack in the back or Japanese conventions don't smell a whole lot better than ours.

Great Original Story! The Country Singer Leads to Treasure!

I owe a great part of my '80s anime fandom happiness to Deborah Allen. Never heard of her, huh?  Yeah, I wouldn't expect you to, especially if you're neither over 40 nor a fan of country music.

In just another example of how life comes at you from directions you wouldn't expect, a song on AM radio in 1983 changed my life.  I used to ride with my father to the mobile home outfit we worked at back then and he always had the radio tuned to country music stations.  The song was Baby I Lied, the debut single from the perky C&W singer/songrwriter, produced by her then boyfriend (later hubby) Rafe VanHoy.  As was often the case back then, country singles "crossed over" to the pop charts, and such it was with this one.  I fell in love with it the first time I heard it.  Since she didn't have enough songs put together to make up a full album, the record company released a "mini-album" with six songs. I dunno why, exactly, but it didn't matter to me.  All I knew is that I wanted the damned thing and I wanted it NOW.  Well, I had to wait until the end of the work day, but later that night I was wearing it out on the turntable.  That's "record player" for all of you kids.

By the next morning, I was in love.  Well, okay, more like a potent mixture of lust and admiration, but when I get ahold of a good lookin' woman who can sing and (in the words of Miss Nanci Griffith) "play her own damn rhythm guitar and write her own damn songs" I tend to lose it.  Still holds true today for that matter, but getting into that would make this blog post incredibly long and mostly boring.  In any case, I wanted more.  But, aside from the record itself, there wasn't any more.

Except an address for the official Deborah Allen fan club.

Now, I was 23 years old and the only "fan club" I'd ever joined in my life was the Banana Splits fan club back when I was nine years old.  Hey, don't laugh, those songs were kinda groovy (and if you don't believe me, check out the background music to this.)  And the records (you would NOT believe who wrote and performed some of that shit) they sent played better than the cardboard cut-outs you got on the back of the cereal boxes.  But, again, I'm getting sidetracked.  Gonna have to figure out how to stop doing that.  It's hard when you keep finding new cool crap while googling for old cool crap.  Sigh. Where was I?  Oh, yeah, fan clubs.

Guilty as charged. If it weren't for little shits like me funding Sid&Marty, the world may have been spared the horror that was Sigmund and the Sea Monsters.

I was 23 freakin' years old and told myself I had no business joining a fan club.  Heh, right.  Little did I know.  I don't even remember how much it cost to join the "official" Deborah Allen fan club, but I figured it was worth it to get a poster and autograph.  So I sent out my money and went about my business waiting for the package to come in.  And by "business," I meant comic books and anime. At that time, my newfound love of Japanese toons was slowly replacing my old love of American toons because, frankly, American toons had turned to crap.  This was before the advent of cheap VCRs so even the classic Looney Tunes stuff wasn't being marketted and Saturday morning toons were dying.  It really was quite depressing. Houston UHF stations had shown stuff like Battle of the Planets and Star Blazers, but San Antonio was a wasteland at the time. So a good portion of my time was spent playing and running tabletop RPGs (Champions had come out a few years earlier and was a major obsession) and going over to Ben Dunn's house to watch second or third - or worse - generation Japanese toons and wondering how we could possible get more.  Preferably some that we could watch without getting headaches from all the snow and squiggles and without having to adjust the FUCKING TRACKING EVERY TWO MINUTES!!!!!! 

Sorry, had a VCR flashback there.  I'm sure the oldtimers can sympathize. All better now.

Anyway, months passed and the fan club package came in and I was a happy camper for a while.  Deborah released a new album which I enjoyed as much as the first, but didn't get country airplay because she probably got a little TOO much on the pop side of things.  We started getting a few more tapes from sources other than Austin, I joined the EDC in the summer of '84 and started a collection of my own and started hauling it around to area SF and gaming conventions showing this stuff to pretty much anyone showed any interest whatsoever and even a lot of people who didn't.  But as soon as I landed a pretty decent copy of that Golgo-13 feature from the early '80s, it made my job a whole lot easier.  Nothing like a bunch of sex, guns and death to get the attention of the kinds of people who used to frequent cons back then.

Then, sometime in early '85 I got another package from the Deborah Allen fan club and this one included a membership list and a few reprinted fan letters.  Lo and behold (I always wanted to write that), one of the fan letters was from a Mitsuyoshi Yamashita of Osaka Japan.  "Hmm,"  I thought - for all of two seconds - then I grabbed the letter and hiked up to Mike Cogliandro's house because I knew absolutely nil about Japanese names and had no earthly idea if "Mitsuyoshi" was a guy's name or a girl's name.  Really stupid, huh?  Mike's mom, being Japanese, assured me that Mituyoshi was, indeed a guy, and I wasn't going to be committing some unpardonable offense demanding trans-Pacific communicational seppaku by addressing him as such.  I never was much for the whole "to whom it may concern" thing and I worry about dumb crap like that.  Or did.  In any case, I have the internet now so those kinds of silly problems are a thing of the '80s.  Seriously, you young'uns don't EVEN know how much fandom life is easier now.

To make a long story shorter, I wrote Mitsuyoshi a nice simple letter and had to take it down to the post office, where I was given a quick primer on the ins and outs of sending mail to Japan because, well, because I'd never actually sent anything oversees before. Boy, let me tell you, I got to know all the local post office employees by their first names over the next couple years.  Even brought 'em cookies one year. 

Two weeks later, I find a letter sitting in my mailbox from Mitsuyoshi and my life...changes. 

The moral of the story?  

If you want to get a swell friend from Japan (not to mention anime, manga and all sorts of other goodies) - join a freakin' country music fan club!!!!!

The scary thing is that I had most of those albums myself.

Email?  WTF is email?!!!!

Captain Aardvark Rocks the Convention! Drive, Magic T-Bird, Drive!

Dallas Fantasy Fair, 1984

Back in cave man days, before the dawn of civilized anime conventions, we had to pretty much make do with whatever was in the immediate area.  In the early '80s, in Texas, that meant comic book conventions or science fiction conventions. SF Cons were still fairly strong in Texas, with NASFIC (the American convention held in place of WorldCon when the latter is held somewhere, well, not in the US) held in Austin in 1985, and AggieCon at Texas A&M and a few others scattered here and there around the Lone Star State. At the SF cons I went to (admittedly, not all that many) during that period, they'd have video rooms and, every once in a while, even let us show this anime stuff in raw Japanese.  But, for the most part, the comic book conventions was where the real action was at.

And, in Texas, during the '80s, Larry Lankford's Bulldog Productions ruled the comic book convention  biz in the state.  For a number of years, they'd run two cons per year in Dallas and rotate conventions through Houston, San Antonio and Austin as, I suppose, the money became available.

As I've mentioned a few time in previous posts, I'd become addicted to conventions before I moved from Houston to San Antonio, in '80 and so long as I could managed to scrape up the cash (and a ride), I hit as many of them as humanly possible.  The first "LarryCon" - which is what almost everyone I know called 'em - I can remember attending was a Dallas Fantasy Fair in 1984, though I'd attended a few other comic cons in Houston and San Antonio before then. The San Antonio "cons" were especially weak, most of them being glorified excuses for the local comic shops to set up booths in the middle of malls with no other programming to speak of. 

My running buddy back then was Mike Cogliandro, a fellow comic book nut and aspiring artist.  We met at the only comic book shop in our area of town and after shooting the bull for a few weeks found out we lived - get this - five blocks from each other.  Talk about kismet, eh? Anyway, Mike had a car and a job, so I  mooched off hung around with him through most of the '80s and some of that time was spent driving to and from comic book conventions.  Mainly in Houston, 'cause I still had relatives there who would let us set up shop for a few nights,  but occassionally in Dallas because of Mike's association with local San Antonio comic book pro Sam De La Rosa.  Sam worked closely with Kerry Gammill (who lived in Dallas) and Mike helped Sam out by doing background work on some of his books. This meant carting Sam up to Dallas every once in a while (Sam didn't drive) and I usually hitched a ride because I was pretty much a bum. 

Kerry and Sam.  You really don't see this kind of detail in American comics much anymore.  Mainly  'cause it took FOREVER.

Anyway, Kerry was going to be a guest at one of Larry's cons in '84 and Mike, Sam and I piled into Mike's white T-Bird and headed for Big D.  I'd been over to Ben Dunn's house a few times and had been intrigued by some of the contemporary anime I'd seen, so when I came across the EDC's anime video room at the con, I picked up a copy of probably the same flyer that Dave Merrill did and flopped down at the back of the room to watch the stuff.  Manning the room was Jeff Blend, who may just be the hardest-working anime fan that no one outside of Dallas remembers.  Seriously, I've been in many a video room and run more than my share of them, but Jeff Blend just totally rocked. 

I don't recall a whole lot more about that particular con, but I joined the EDC and swapped information with Jeff and promised Derek and Meri that I'd make more trips up their way and try my best to drag Ben up for some tape-swapping sessions and maybe even a few EDC meetings.  My interest in American comics hadn't quite died yet, but it was definitely narrowing, and I found myself in an extremely rare position back then - I actually had money to spend and couldn't find a whole lot to spend it on.  I was a collector of original  art, but there weren't a whole lot of artists I particularly admired doing sketches.  Then I spotted Dave Sim sitting off by himself looking extremely bored and, for some reason thinking that he had a reputation as being a bit of a grouch back then, I got a particularly evil thought.  I headed to the dealer's room to track down some cheap reference material, 'cause I hadn't thought to bring mine...

Okay, every Harlock fan worth his salt had at LEAST one of these back in '84.

And, cackling like a maniac, I head back over to artist's alley to see if Sim's gotten any richer in the fifteen minutes since I'd left him...