Anime & Manga

Artmic is a name you should know if you at all like 80s OVAs. This zine is a good introduction.

Artmic Fan Book: The Story of Artmic 1977-1997
Sean O’Mara
56 pages
published in 2025

Sometime in 1989 or 1990 I got that first videotape of Bubblegum Crisis from my local videostore; I must’ve gone looking for something sci-fi I hadn’t seen yet, not even necessarily an anime video. The moment I put that tape in the VHS player and Konya wa Hurricane started I knew that I was watching something special. Here was something new, something I couldn’t get from Hollywood, something that matched the energy of the cyberpunk I was reading. This and Akira had me watching every anime (or as it was called then, “manga” (sic)) tape the store carried. Which means I’m pretty much the target audience for a zine about Artmic, the company behind Bubblegum Crisis, who not only put their stamp on my personal anime history, but were arguably one of the most important companies shaping the OVA boom of the eighties.

Sean O’Mara is the person behind Zimmerit.moe, the now ten year old website that’s a celebration of fandom in its (relative) infancy, of forgotten fads and trends, and the idea that fans can create their own cool shit, too. The fandom that refers to is specifically that of eighties otakudom, from before being an otaku got codified, when the line between pro and fan was not as sharp as it is now. Zimmerit is of course the anti-magnetic paste the Germans put on their tanks during World War II, which accurately shows off the vibe of the site and the corners of fandom it focuses on. The Artmic Fan Book is the logical outflow from this, the latest in a range of zines Sean has published through his site, of which more later.

At only 56 pages, this doesn’t pretend to be any kind of history of Artmic, rather it attempts to give an impression of what Artmic was like, a guided tour taking you past its greatest works if you will. Of which there are quite a few. Bubblegum Crisis is perhaps the best known, but there’s also the science fiction classic Megazone 23, one of the biggest selling products of the OVA era, Genesis Climber Mospaeda, later reworked into part of Robotech, the American action movie-esque Riding Bean, the very Moebius looking Dragon Heaven, the Gall ForceOVA series, Metal Skin Panic MAdox-01 etc. etc. For the best part of a decade Artmic created some of the best looking, interesting OVAs before the end of Japan’s Bubble Economy put an end to it.

The Artmic Fan Book looks at all these shows in roughly chronological order, from the founding of the company in 1977 to its end two decades later. Artmic’s first true production was Techno Police 21C, developed as a television series, which was cancelled before launch so the intended first two episodes were instead made into a movie. Mospeada a year later was more successful in that it did get to air, but at only half the intended run length. (Artmic Fan Book mentions it ran for just a cour, but at 25 episodes it actually managed a full season if not the year Artmic wanted). Their next project, the one that put them on the map was Megazone 23, another failed tv series reworked into a very successful OVA, at a time the OVA market was just getting established, the first real OVA, Dallos having come out just two years before. Everything else Artmic did animewise would be an OVA.

What Artmic Fan Book mainly interests in all this is how Artmic’s relatively small group of key creative personnel like mech designers Shinji Aramaki, Kimitoshi Yamane and Hideki Kakinuma, mangaka and character designer Kenichi Sonoda and producer Satoshi Koizumi meant that most of its output had a similar style and vibe. Most noticeably those (transforming) motorcycles seen in e.g Bubblegum Crisis and Megazone 23. There’s a bit of repetition in the various chapters, as the same people keep getting reintroduced, but this is a minor niggle.

One thing I would’ve liked to have seen some mention of is Artmic’s involvement with The Hakkenden, based on a 106 volume (!) historical novel, set in the Muromachi period. As a historical fantasy it’s very much outside’s Artmic’s normal wheelhouse of hardcore science fiction. It would’ve been interesting to see Sean’s thoughts on this, even if it doesn’t quite fit his or Artmic’s vibe.

I bought the Artmic Fan Book alongside every other zine available from Zimmerit. Hobby Shopping: Japanese Model Shop Ads 1980-89 as its title suggests is a collection of ads for model shops, with added commentary by Sean, the ads focusing on mecha and other sfnal models. Gainazine, “the Secret History of Studio Gainax, looks at that studio’s earlier pre-Evangelion history, focusing on proto-Gainax work for the Daicon science fiction conventions, Gainax’s garage kit producing arm General Products as well as obscure projects related to Gainax most prominent release before Evangelion, Royal Space Force. Koba-Kondoh Document is a look at two mech designers involved with 1980s Gundam series, Makoto Kobayashi & Kazuhisa Kondoh, especially their model figure work, even including a guide on how to kitbash mecha in their style.

The final zine published by Zimmerit is the only one not written by Sean O’Mara, but by Renzo Adler and is also the only one not involved with mecha and model kits one way or the other: Demon Zine Shinjuku, a look at the more outre Japanese horror creations of the Bubble Economy Age. Horror OVAs were of course the second leg of the western anime boom of the late eighties/early nineties, so it’s great to have a zine celebrating them too.

All zines are available from Garagekit Club.

The Soul of Anime: Collaborative Creativity and Japan’s Media Success Story
Ian Condry
242 pages including notes and index
published in 2013

Sometime in 2015 I became obsessed with anime. I’m not sure why, but from something that I had only a passing interest in, it became an overwhelming passion in the course of a few months. Before long just watching anime wasn’t enough and I wanted to know more about its history and the context in which anime was made. So I started reading blogs and anime websites and then looking for books. At the time a few books kept popping in any anime discussion that went further than whether Goko could beat up One Punch Man. Those included Sait Takami’s Beautiful Fighting Girl, Hiroki Azuma’s Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals and this, Ian Condry’s The Soul of Anime. I bought all of them, I tried to read all of them, but never managed to finish or understand any of them. I can only blame my own inexperience and lack of knowledge; I just didn’t know enough about anime back them to be able to understand them.

I was reminded of this book earlier this week by a tweet complaining about the lack of understanding of what anime is, which brought me to pick it up again. This time I managed to understand its purpose a lot better, now that I wasn’t labouring under the misunderstanding it was intended as any sort of history of anime. Instead what Condry was trying to accomplish should’ve been clear to me from the title. He was trying to pin down the essence of what makes anime anime, when it was no longer sufficient to say that anime is just Japanese animation. Much of the actual animation work after all is outsourced to other, cheaper countries, like Korea or the Philipines. At the same time, anime even at the time of writing was increasingly aimed at an international market, not necessarily the domestic Japanese markets. Similarly, the success of anime in e.g the United States also led to various local anime-like projects, like Avatar: the Last Airbender. Yet anime is clearly is its own thing, so how do we find out what that particular thing is made of?

Condry tries to answer this question through making use of techniques developed in ethnography. Specifically, he does so by interviewing and especially observing the people working on creating anime. For Condry, what makes anime interesting is the way it is being made. And he means that in the broadest possible sense of the word. The Soul of Anime looks not just at how various studios work, but also at e.g. the fansubbing community. As Condry explains in the first chapter, the book is the result of half a decade of field work done between 2004-2010 at various anime companies: mainly Gonzo, Aniplex and Madhouse, supplemented by visits to other companies in both Japan and the US as well as explorations into various fan activities. Condry also looks into the history of anime, though it’s fairly superficial, to further support his thesis.

For Condry, the “Soul of Anime” is its social aspect. Anime as a collaborative enterprise, networks of people interacting with their own ideas about anime, where the distinction between professionals, producers and fans, consumers is not that clear. It’s that collaborative creativity that links fan labour and professional labour for Condry, that made anime into the worldwide media success it is now. So for example you had the top down push of Nintendo’s global marketing campaign and the pull of overseas fans wanting to see the anime version of their favourite game that made Pokemon a global powerhouse. It is a decent enough explanation for what makes anime and the anime media complex different from other media, but I’m not quite convinced that this really is all this unique to anime, especially now.

There is no getting around it: The Soul of Anime is dated, in some aspects badly dated. The book was published in 2013, which already makes it ten years old, but worse, most of the field work Condry did was done in 2005-2006. A lot of his references therefore are almost two decades old at this point and take place in a very different world. There’s no mention of streaming in here. Crunchyroll was founded in 2006 but was still a piracy site at the time. Overseas fans still had to get their anime either from tv broadcasts or through licensed DVDs. Anime was popular outside Japan, but still very much a cult phenomenon mostly. Espcially in the fansubbing section of the book, things have changed so much that it has become mostly useless for understanding modern anime culture.

Reading The Soul of Anime is like opening a time capsule of what anime was like in 2006, on the cusp of global success and mainstream acceptance, but hesitant about what that would mean. Which means that Condry spends time examining the Gonzo series Red Garden as an example of an internationally orientated anime series because it’s set in New York. In a world in which Netflix and Disney order their own anime series this is small beer indeed. In 2023, with anime being a globally consumed medium and streaming media in general being much more globally orientated; Netflix streaming Korean game shows and cute romcoms alongside Mexican and Spanish mafia dramas, some of its uniqueness has been lost. This is also true in fandom, with fandoms for mainstream ‘properties’ evolving to be more like anime fandoms.

I’m not sure whether this undercuts Condry’s thesis, but it is something to take into account when reading The Soul of Anime. In the end it is a very mid-2000s look at what anime is, with very mid-2000s idea of what anime fandom and otakus are like. I’m not sure it really fits modern anime fandom anymore. Nevertheless a good, accessible book to get into anime criticism with.