Other Stuff Monthly #3

I'm not sure how to write well about toys, so you'll have to forgive me if this post isn't great. But hopefully it's something I'll get used to and figure out over time, okay? Anyway, this post is about a figure from the 1994 anime series Haou Taikei Ryu Knight. The series is a fantasy mecha show, that occasionally throws a bit of wild west stuff in there too. It's nothing spectacular, but it's decent enough. If someone had dubbed it into english and had it broadcast in the US or UK at 6am, I'm sure it would've been a cult hit that a few people remembered and loved to this day.

The protagonist party in the show all fit into typical RPG classes, like knight, mage, ninja, and most pertinent to this post, priest. They all also have giant robots called Ryus, that are thematically appropriate to their character class. What I have in this post is the Ryu Priest Baurus action figure, accompanied by a smaller, unarticulated figure of its pilot, the priest Izumi. Getting Izumi out of the way, in terms of toyeticity, he's kind of superfluous here: nicely sculpted and painted, but unarticulated and not to scale with his mecha. Thinking like a kid, though, if you had a bunch of the other figures, having the pilots with them, even in this form, would add a lot of between-battle play value.

Onto the main figure: it's pretty good! I'm missing a couple of pieces (the big tall priest hat, and a part to attach unused weapons to the figure's back), but it's not too big a deal. It occupies a space between model kit and normal action figure, which I guess must have been a common trait for kids' mecha shows in the early 1990s, as I remember having, when I was a kid, a Samurai Pizza Cats figure that I later learned was an imported and repackaged Japanese toy. So the figure comes mostly pre-assembled, apart from weapons and a few details, and it can also be dismantled to a certai extent, too.

You might expect this hybrid approach to result in great articulation, but while there are some points you wouldn't have normally seen on regular action figures of this period, like in the middle of the feet, there's also some weird omissions of joints you'd think would be mandatory. The most glaring of these is the lack of elbow joints, especially since the figure comes with multiple weapon options (a large club, two smaller clubs, and a shield), that can be health in either hand. Speaking od which, the hands are pretty interesting: they're in a weapon-holding position that similar to what you'd see on Gunpla. The difference is that this toy is skewed towards a younger audience, and towards play more than display. So the hands are made of a slightly flexible rubber/plastic, making it easy to change what they're holding.

How do I end a review of a toy? I don't know, I guess I'll just say that I really like the squat, cute mecha designs of this series, and they do make for great-looking toys. I also think that as a kid, the lack of elbow joints would have annoyed me, but not enough for it to be a deal-breaker. That's all I've got, really: it's a pretty good toy, but it definitely could have been better.

Other Stuff Monthly #2: Marvel Cross

There's not much information around regarding the Japanese fandom of western-produced comics and cartoons. I think the most well known piece of that world are the cute pieces of fanart made of South Park characters by mainly female Japanese fans. If we go into things a little more specifically, towards Japanese fans of western superhero comics, the only time an english-language spotlight has been shone on that area that I'm aware of is the 1994 one-shot "Justice", printed by Antarctic Press, which featured fanart and translated fanzine articles drawn and written by Japanese fans, mainly about Marvel and DC characters.

A couple of years ago, however, I became aware of an officially licensed magazine published in Japan in the 1990s entitled Marvel Cross, which featured Japanese translated reprints of various Marvel comics. A while later, I actually managed to get my hands on a copy, and here we are. Before we get onto the actual contents, it should be noted that those Japanese fans must have been truly dedicated: a 120-page issue of Marvel cross cost 1000 Yen, compared to the breezebloack-sized Shonen Jump, which in 1997 cost a mere 210 Yen a pop. Furthermore, while collected trade paperback editions of manga also cost a couple of hundred yen per volume, this issue contains ads for the first volume of the X-Men storyline The Age of Apocalypse, carrying a hefty 3200 Yen pricetage.

Now, we finally get onto the contents! There's four issues reprinted in Marvel Cross #14, all of which come from the 1980s: The Amazing Spider-Man #310 (December 1988), Uncanny X-Men #137 (September 1980), The Mighty Thor #337 (November 1983, and X-Men Annual #12 (1988). It looks like, judging what's listed in the previous issues directory towards the back, and on the next issue preview page, that Spider-Man was in there as a permanent fixture, while the other series would cycle in and out in 4-6 issue long arcs. For example, the X-Men annual is listed as the first part of a three-part X-Babies story, while Uncanny X-Men #137 is the double-length climax to the five-part Dark Phoenix storyline, to be replaced in the next issue by the start of a three-part Iron Man/Captain America team-up, and what I think is the start of ongoing 1960s Iron Man stories.

As well as the comics themselves, there's a fairly generous portion of back matter, too: a letters page, a Q&A section "hosted" by Uatu the Watcher, a few columns, comics news and sales charts from the US, and, most exciting of all: a fanart section with a couple of cosplay photos thrown in for good measure! The magazine in general is pretty well-presented, to be honest. Each comic is preceded by a brief recap/dramatis personae section, with the Dark Phoenix's page being especially impressive, listing twenty-two characters!

All in all, there's really no good reason beyond curiosity for western fans to pick up issues of Marvel Cross: even if you can read Japanese, it'd be easier to get hold of the comics contained therein in their original English. I'm glad I did, though, just because it means I could learn about a previously unknown facet of a fandom that's been a part of my life for as long as I can remember, and even more importantly, to share that learning with you. Having said that, it is a really aesthetically great-looking magazine, and I've long been of the opinion that superhero publishers should look further into anthology formats (which, to give them credit, they actually do in the UK). As this isn't a review, I'm not sure how to end it. I'm done imparting information now. Goodbye!

Other Stuff Monthly #1

So, this blog has been around for a whole decade now, and I've decided, for various reasons, to add something to the formula. What is that something? Monthly posts about things that aren't obscure videogames! But they will be mostly other obscure things. And sometimes they might also be videogames. Plus, it's only one post a month, so don't worry about the blog's focus changing or anything, okay? It'll be fine. Anyway, the first subject is this cute piece of merchandise from the 90s anime Magic Knight Rayearth!

I saw it on YAJ, with its name machine-translated as "The Book of Rayearth Magic Chapter 2", which is almost definitely wrong, but it was cheap, and I wanted to know what it was. What it is is a kind of Rayearth-themed personal organiser thing, kind of similar to the Funfax line that was popular among UK kids in the early-mid 1990s. The back of the box even advertises what appears to be additional inserts (sold seperately), just like what Funfax had! Some of you might be left in the dark by the past few sentences, so I'll elaborate further: this is a little ring binder/filofax-type thing, that contains various pre-printed inserts for organising your life when you're a mid-90s 10-year-old Japanese girl on the go.

Oddly, it doesn't contain an address book section, which you'd think would be standard for this sort of thing. It does have lots of other stuff, though, and I'll tell you about it, in as much detail as I can muster without being able to read Japanese. The first section seems to be teling a little about each of the three main characters, and contains what I think is a little personality quiz to see which one you're most like. Then, each of them has their own section, in which I think they're giving the reader advice on things like fashion, excercises, making gifts, and so on. After that is the most disturbing part, considering that this is a product for little girls: the "power-up record" section, which seems to contain sheets for keeping a record of one's height, weight, and other measurements over an extended period of time. Why'd you include a thing like that, SEGA?

Finally, there's a series of plastic envelopes containing various useful day-to-day items, like a Magic Knight Rayearth ballpoint pen (which doesn't work. I assume the ink inside has solidified over the decades rather than ran out, since everything else in the box was totally unused when I got it.), a couple of blue plastic magatama, a bunch of cards with some really nice MKR artwork, and a little mirror. Altogether, this thing is a nice little piece of anime merch, with the exception of the power-up record, which is unpleasant in so many ways, like if they made a Dragonball organiser for boys with a page to keep track of like, your bicep size or something? Just really drive home those body image issues early, right? But the concept of it is really cool, at least. So that ends the first post of this new series, I hope you liked it, and look forward to more old toys and stuff in the future.