Other Stuff Monthly #19!

 Around the turn of the century, there was a sudden boom in English translated manga. Fuelled partially by the popularity of various dubbed anime series that were being shown on TV in the UK and US, and partially by a company called Tokyopop pumping out tons and tons of low-priced volumes of series in every genre, it was a time that saw translated manga go from being a niche part of the English comics to the biggest part of it by a long way. Alongside the cheap volumes, there was also a mini-boom of Japan-style manga anthology magazines.

 

It's a shame that there aren't any of these magazines left today, because they were a really nice format, and each magazine had its own identity formed from the kinds of series they'd print, along with the general aesthetic and house style. My favourites were Pulp, which printed a lot of gritty and slightly artsy comics aimed at adults, and Raijin Comics, which stuck most closely to the visual style of Japanese magazines, and had a strange mix of series from well-known creators and stuff by people who'd never been printed in English before. But today, I'm going to talk about a short-lived magazine that I only discovered a few years ago, and seemed to last only a year or two circa 1999-2000: Chibi-Pop Manga.

 

As far as I can tell, this magazine was published by an American comic shop owner, and he took on a business model that I've actually wondered about many times: licensing works from up-and-coming, lesser-known creators, and translating it as cheaply as possible. The most amazing bit of cost-cutting is the way in which one of the series is printed: four shrunken manga pages on each magazine page, fitting a fifteen-page story into five! As well as the manga, the issue I have (vol. 2 #3) also has an error-laden article on the 1999 Amusement Machine Show in Tokyo, and a few pages of cosplay photos, presumably from the same event. Unfortunately, the cosplay photos are printed in black and white and the contrast is terrible, so you can barely see anything in them.

 

So, you're probably wondering by now what series were printed in here, right? Here's the list:
The Twilight Files (Fujiwara & Atsu) - A Twilight Zone-esque weird tales anthology type series, hosted by a nameless person who's been interergrated into an information-gathering computer who tells us in this chapter, two stories of scientists experimenting on humans to try and cheat death.
Nagi: Coastguard 2 (Denjiro) - Appears to be a post-apocalyptic action series? There's a girl with metal manipulation powers fighting a giant robot in a ruined city, at least. There's only a few pages of this, and i'd like to see more.
Artifacts Breaker (Ataru Cagiva) - A shonen action series about marital artists with unique special powers, which I think are the result of human experimentation? Like Nagi, the small taste I have here makes me curious to read more.
Fubuki The Female Ninja (Tsugumi) - A very nineties action comedy about a ninja going to a modern day high school.
Adventures of Tokyo Kid (Tetsu Suzuki) - I have no idea what this is about. Most of the chapter is taken up by a young man and a young woman speaking in his apartment, where he reveals himself to be an inventor.
Trout Burger (Syuntaro Masuki) - This is the series printed in the weird shrunken format, and it's a silly comedy where a fast food restaurant employee foils a pair of bank robbers using a can of disgusting vegetable juice and a giant anti-tank cannon.

 

I admire the amateur enthusiast charm that Chibi-Pop Manga exudes, both in the production of the magazine itself, and in the series printed within, and as mentioned, I am genuinely curious about several of them, and I'd like to see more. Unfortunately, I can find almost no information on the series or the creators. Ataru Cagiva is an exception, and seems to have done a few manga adaptations of videogame RPGs. Tsugumi is the other exception, their full name being Nishino Tsugumi, and their most notable work being a single volume story called Hanamaru Angels, which I think was self-published, and even more interestingly, was a bilingual release! I actually managed to track a copy of Hanamaru Angels down, so I'll review it here at some point in the future.

 

So yeah, that's Chibi-Pop Manga: a clear labour of love for all concerned that unfortunately seems to have been totally forgotten. I enjoyed it, though, and if anyone can offer more information on any of the series listed in this post, please contact me! Also, I apologise for the phone photos, but my ancient scanner has no drivers for Windows 10. Forced Absolecence!

Desi Adda: Games of India (PSP)

 Like Chandragupta: Warrior Prince, Desi Adda is a product of Sony's short-lived effort to have videogames made in india, specifically for the Indian market. It's a collection of five adaptations of traditional games, and the main thing to learn from it is that various games that we might think of as being traditionally British are actually Indian in origin, or at least derived from these games, some of which are apparently thousands of years old.

 

The first game is Pachisi, which is almost identical to the game known in the UK as Ludo, which has you gradually moving four pieces around a cross-shaped board, and is just as boring. It's made worse by the fact that the AI player will always roll so much better than you do, and there's pretty much no skill or strategy involved in whether you win or lose anyway. It's not worth bothering with in real life or in videogame form.

 

Another board game is Aadu Puli Aattam, an asymmetrical strategy game, where one player controls three tigers, and the other controls twelve goats. A tiger can jump over a goat into an empty space to kill the goat, and each side has different win conditions: the tigers have to kill half of the goats, while the goats have to trap all the tigers so they can't move or kill. This one's probably the most playable in the compilation, and could probably have been sold at a super-low price on its own.

 

The other three games are different sports. Gilli Danda is a game that's kind of similar to Cricket and Baseball, but there doesn't seem to be any running on the part of the guy with the bat, and the ball is actually a small wooden stick. Kite Fighting has overly complicated controls, and I really think they overreached in trying to turn it into a videogame. I tink the aim is to fly your kite in such a manner that your kite's string cuts the strings of other people's kites. But it's hard to tell what's going on or the position of the kites in relation to each other and it just doesn't work.

 

Finally, there's Kabaddi. This game has a lot of similarities to British Bulldog or Red Rover, and it involves a field split into to halves, each controlled by a team of five. The teams take turns sending one of their members into enemy territory to reach the other side, tag members of the opponent's team, and get back home again. The defenders, of course, try to grab and stop them. I'm sure there could probably be a better interpretation of the game into a videogame form, but this one is competent, if not particularly exciting, and so far, it's the only one that exists (as far as I know).

 

There's other stuff in here, too, like a story mode where you slowly walk around a village somewhere in rural India and have the locals teach you the rules of the various games, but it's the games themselves that are the draw here. Unfortunately, none of them are really very good, and unless you're very curious, I wouldn't bother playing this one. Finally, because I know at least some of you are wondering this: yes, the players do constantly chant "kabaddi kabaddi kabaddi kabaddi" while playing that game.