A year later, in 1992 (34 years ago yesterday)...

     [This is a follow-up to the previous post, and also posted on my Facebook page, but more up-to-date here.]

    So 34 years ago yesterday (January 5, 1992), I once again went with Mom to NYC Creation Con (for the last time, sadly; I moved out of NY late that year). I got:

 

-Markalite #2 (pictured here), which focused mainly on the Ultra Series (which I learned so much more about from this issue!), including the then-new Ultraman: Towards the Future (which premiered on WNYW Fox Channel 5 the morning before)! We also got everyone’s reviews of Godzilla Vs. Biollante (covered extensively in the previous issue), and as expected, they were mixed. August Ragone, Bob Johnson and others thought it was fine, despite its issues, but the late Guy Mariner Tucker offered the most *brutal* review of them all! Super Man-chine Metalder (Toei; 1987) was covered, as was Kamen Rider Black RX (Toei; 1988). And also Fred Patten’s in-depth article about Ironman #28/Gigantor! Another great issue! But it would be my last issue. (Issue #3 is extremely rare, and because of the difficulty with the shady distributor Jeffrey Tibbets, Issue #4 was never released.) It’s a shame, because this really is one of the absolute best magazines on the subject of Japanese sci-fi/fantasy, focusing on all of it, and treats it with so much reverence and respect. It was the perfect complement to the myriad anime fanzines put out by geeks and hipsters who often diminished tokusatsu. It was a godsend.

 

-The original Japanese version of King Kong Vs. Godzilla (Toho; 1962), which I saw for the first time (including the beautiful “TohoScope” logo), and loved more than the US version! Breathtaking Ifukube score, great character performances & development, and yes, Kong wins in the end, contrary to all the misinformation we were plagued with in the decades before. :)

 

-From the same video dealer; Devil Hunter Yoko (before it made it to the US!)

 

(I even got to see a bit of Daimajin for the first time, after first reading about him in The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film a few years back. And also the climax of Episode #4 of Zone Fighter, which I was *really* taken aback with, after seeing a few pics of him and Godzilla, thinking he was another Ultraman!)

 

-And from Paul Haberman (who I just met that time at his table, and since became friends with), Episodes 33, 39, and 41 (final) of the Toei Spider-Man! I was aware of it from the “Superhero Rollcall” in Markalite #1, but had no idea that it featured the *actual* Spider-Man! Riding a giant robot! While far from the best adaptation of the character (I would’ve *loved* producer Toru Hirayama’s original idea, far more), it’s nonetheless a great novelty. :)

 

    Oh, I miss NYC Creation Con. Before DragonCon, it was the biggest (and first) convention I’ve ever attended! Even the recent local GalaxyCon here in Richmond reminds me so much of Creation Con.

35 years ago today (January 6, 1991), my life changed forever...

    [I originally posted this on my Facebook page, but it's a little more up-to-date.]

    So it was 35 years ago today, when my life changed forever. 35 years ago today, I officially became a "tokusatsu fan."

 

    (Well, I already was to begin with, but I'll get into it more...)

 

    I was 15 going on 16. I was still in junior high at the time, about to graduate in a few months, and high school was 9 months away (around which time The Ren & Stimpy Show, one of my favorite cartoons of all time, would premiere on Nickelodeon).

 

    On Sunday, after New Year's Day 1991 (which would make it January 6), Mom and I went downtown to Manhattan to go to NYC Creation-Con. It was always exciting to spend a day at Creation-Con. This was my fourth time at the convention. (The first, my first-ever con, was on Thanksgiving Saturday 1989, the second was in early June 1990, and the third, I think, was in July or August of that year.)

    We spent the whole afternoon going to the Dealer's Hall, and I made 3 purchases. First, I stopped off at a dealer's table where I bought both Ultraman (Tsuburaya; 1966) Vol. 1, with the first 5 episodes dubbed in English, and Voyage Into Space (AIP-TV; 1970), the compilation film of Giant Robo (Toei; 1967), AKA: Johnny Sokko and His Flying Robot. I even got to watch the first five minutes of an episode of Ambassador Magma (P-Productions; 1966), AKA: The Space Giants! It was absolutely wild! As I mentioned in the past, I'd seen Voyage Into Space before, on ABC Channel 7's The 4:30 Movie back in about 1978, but I always wanted to see Ultraman, and with this, I finally did, for the very first time! (My third purchase made that experience all the more special, but I'll get back to that in a bit...)

    Near the end of our day at the con, I watched something else on another dealer's table: It was an awesome superhero similar to Inframan! A shiny, black insectoid superhero riding on a motorcycle. It was the first Toei Manga Festival theatrical episode (Hurry to the Island of Demons!) of Kamen Rider Black (Toei; 1987)! I watched Kamen Rider in action for the first time! (I saw toys of this guy at Forbidden Planet in 1988.) I would soon find out that this guy is the other famous superhero in Japan besides Ultraman, and is basically the Japanese equivalent of Spider-Man! (Though I would soon become aware of the actual localized Spidey, which I saw exactly a year later.)

    My third purchase was this very magazine, which I read about a few months earlier in Filmfax Magazine. This is the first issue of Markalite Magazine, from Summer 1990. Markalite (named after the Markalite FAHP/Flying Atomic Heat Projectors from Toho's 1957 sci-fi epic, The Mysterians) was devoted to Japanese sci-fi, both live-action and anime, and the first one I ever read of its kind. Ever since reading it on the train trip back home with Mom, it opened a whole new world for me, and I finally found the name of the medium of Japanese live-action special effects I loved so much: Tokusatsu (short for "tokubetsu/tokushuu satsuei," or "special photography" in Japanese).

    It had a "Superhero Rollcall," which had me on the lookout for almost every Japanese superhero TV show up to 1990 (just a few of them I'd already seen, and this magazine had more info on them!). From the Rollcall, I was gobsmacked to learn that Ultraman and its follow-up series Ultraseven (Tsuburaya; 1967), who I saw pictures and toys of, were created by Eiji Tsuburaya! EIJI FUCKING TSUBURAYA!!! Godzilla and Ultraman (and even Ultraseven) are BROTHERS!!! It had an in-depth look at its main feature, Godzilla Vs. Biollante (Toho; 1989), which I saw months earlier. It had an article on Japanese giant robot anime and their effects in America, where I learned about Go Nagai's Mazinger Z, Getter Robo and others. It had an article on the aforementioned Kamen Rider Black, and an interview with its star, Tetsuo Kurata. There was an article about Spectreman (P-Productions; 1971), which I learned about for the first time! Tributes to deceased veterans like actors Akihiko Hirata, Jun Tazaki, and screenwriter Takeshi Kimura (AKA: Kaoru Mabuchi)! And many others! Reviews, commentary, etc. And I learned about the experts in fandom, who were behind this magazine: August Ragone, Bob Johnson, Ed Godziszewski, and even the late Guy Mariner Tucker. This magazine was PACKED!!!

I was one crazy obsessed guy, looking around for this stuff. Long before we had the Internet, file-sharing platforms, and even YouTube and streaming! Even when that unfortunate phenomenon called Mighty Morphin Power Rangers (Americanized from Zyuranger, which I saw almost a year earlier) premiered in 1993 and caused a meteoric market for tokusatsu (which kind of hampered things for me, because I loved this stuff being so obscure so only I could find it; Godzilla was much more in vogue at the time)! And thanks to this magazine (of which I bought Issue # 2 a year later at NYC Creation-Con), I've become a tokusatsu master in my own right, even though, true to my childhood dream, I was already more inspired to want to *create* my own version of this stuff! And you're already seeing that with my life's work in progress, Rekira the Super-Monster, which I started work on (originally as a Godzilla fan-fiction) just a few months later. But that's another story.

 

    If you stumble upon this magazine with limited knowledge of tokusatsu and even anime, I guarantee, your life will change forever as mine did. But don't say I didn't warn you that it was an addiction! Seeking out all the stuff I read in Markalite (and being informed about stuff I've already seen) was one hell of a journey. ;)

 

Who's the true "God of Anime?"

I posted the below article on Tumblr, and it has become the most popular thing I've ever posted!  At 120 notes at this writing, I am both flattered and thankful.

To put things in perspective, this article was never meant to be an attack on Osamu Tezuka.  (Remember, I'm a Tezuka fan!)  I'm simply trying to dispel a long-standing American misconception; while he indeed revolutionized the modern manga industry (thus, he has earned the title, "God of Manga" in Japan), he did not create anime.  Yes, he did revolutionize it on television (the same way Jay Ward or Hanna-Barbera revolutionized animation on TV)!  But I would think that the proper credit for "God of Anime" goes to Yasuji Mori.  Of course, there were animators before Mori, going as far back as the 1910s (they included Noburou Oofuji and Mori's friend/senior Taiji Yabushita, among others)!  But many true anime historians have noted that Mori, who worked on animation as far back as 1948, shaped the modern anime industry in 1957, when he became the first animation director at Toei Animation Studios (which Toei set up in aspirations of being the Walt Disney Studios of Japan)!  Without him, we wouldn't have Hayao Miyazaki, Isao Takahata and others, and Tezuka may not have gotten into animation, if it weren't for Toei's adaptation of Alakazam the Great (which Mori worked on as animation director, although credited only as an animator)!  Mori was a true master, and helped make Tezuka himself a master of both worlds, comics and animation.

So for the longest time, I found it really upsetting and saddening that many people still refer to Tezuka as the one who started anime, and the beautiful, colorful works of Yasuji Mori are forgotten.  And so, because no one else ever stepped up to do something like this, I was eventually inspired to make this article (on May 31 in Flash) to help people understand things better.

And when you're surfing Google or YouTube, look up not only Yasuji Mori, but his works including the short film (and Toei's first animation ever) Koneko no Rakugaki/Kitty's Graffiti (Toei; 1957), Panda and the Magic Serpent (Toei; 1958), Magic Boy (Toei; 1959), The Wonderful World of Puss 'n Boots (Toei; 1969), and my personal favorite ever (and the first where he finally got onscreen credit as "Animation Director"), The Little Prince and the Eight-Headed Dragon (Toei; 1963).

To paraphrase Walt Disney, "I only hope we never lose sight of one thing - that at Toei in 1957, it was all started by a cat."  ;)

Manga-style Lily!

Mind you, I'm firmly sticking with the current Franco-Belgian style I had just experimented with, but I simply did this piece out of amusement.  This is a highly-detailed manga/anime version of Lily Merriweather, which I would use if I had ever decided to work with a manga/anime style!  Done this morning on tablet in Photoshop (but started on yesterday evening, due to family commitments).

Happy New Year - 2011!

To ring in 2011, here's the traditional last drawing I did of 2010, while on vacation in the Outer Banks, on New Year's Eve (about an hour before the new year):

Displayed in this pencil sketch are Rekira and Lily Merriweather, waving goodbye for the end of 2010.

And below is the first sketch I did on the evening of New Year's Day (another tradition). It was started on at about 11:30 PM (Mom and I had gotten back home from the Outer Banks during the day), and I was very busy for much of the day, so it was a half-hour sketch!

April 23rd of this year will be the 20th Anniversary of the creation of Rekira (as I discussed in a past post), and I am, at this moment, preparing the first issue for this year, in commemoration!

The bottom half of this pencil sketch has little headshots of characters who have anniversaries this year! In case you don't know, there's (top row, left to right) Ultraman, Kanegon (from Ultra Q), Masked Rider, Spectreman, and Silver Mask. Between first and second row is Ambassador Magma (Goldar). Second row is Mothra, Astro-Boy, Hedorah, and Mirrorman. And in the third row are Batman and Mr. Spock. I could've sketched more, but I was running out of time!