Anime magazine history, Part 1: 1975-1977
It’s hard to count all the pathways Japan took to make anime a global phenom. But it didn’t happen by design, and it certainly didn’t happen overnight. From the moment Astro Boy made the jump from manga to TV screens in 1963, it was an uphill climb. For more than an entire decade, the word “anime” (coined by Osamu Tezuka himself) was only heard inside production studios. The public term throughout the 60s and a good chunk of the 70s was the more demeaning “TV manga.” It was something kids were supposed to outgrow, and most of them did.
There were attempts to evolve the system from the inside. Lupin III (1971) was arguably the first “TV manga” aimed at older viewers. Space Battleship Yamato (1974) was the next. Neither succeeded in their respective ratings battles. But as we would learn in later years, they did find the viewers they were seeking.
One of the keys to getting this medium to evolve was to establish a presence beyond TV screens, where images would flit past you and disappear, seemingly forever. A few manga magazines gave animation a nod, but they didn’t do much to break the grip of that “TV manga” term since they were uniformly aimed at younger readers. There was other publishing to be found, but it consisted mainly of illustrated storybooks on thick cardboard intended for no one above early elementary age.
What anime truly needed to break out of the box was a steady print media component that respected, preserved, and promoted the content. It seems inevitable in hindsight, but it took a unique set of circumstances to get that ball rolling. This article tracks the beginning of the process, and subsequent installments will document it in full bloom.
If you were one of those audience members whose interest was awakened by Lupin III in ’71 and Yamato in ’74 (and other notable shows in between), you had just three options for print media: Bouken Oh [Adventure King], Terebi Land, and Terebi Magazine. Each of these publications, like “TV manga” itself, was designed to be outgrown. The foregone conclusion was that when readers turned 10 or 12, they would wander away. Therefore, the content (mainly manga tie-ins to TV shows) was gauged accordingly.
In this environment, it was considered a losing bet to target an animation magazine at a higher age bracket. But sooner or later, some brave pioneer had to give it a try.
Fantoche
The first issue was published on October 31, 1975, with a list price of 300 yen. “Fantoche” is a French word for “puppet,” derived from one of the first animated films ever made (by Frenchman Emile Cohl), which tells you something about the pedigree of its publisher, Takashi Namiki. While attending an international animation festival in France, Namiki was impressed to discover a French magazine dedicated to animation and was inspired to create one for Japan. His mission was exactly what I described above: to respect, preserve, and promote.
This was not an easy task, since he and his staff essentially had to introduce the mechanics of production in ground-up fashion before they could expect readers to follow along. After the launch, Namiki stepped aside in favor of editor Kazuyoshi Hirose.
Fantoche Volume 1, billed as “Japan’s first animation magazine,” laid a lot of groundwork for others to follow and refine. Content was split between the international scene and domestic works, but the Japan-oriented features set a blueprint for the future with news of current shows, research on older productions, interviews with animators, and even a spotlight on a theme song singer (Mitsuko Horie). In a bid to perhaps convey some global prestige, it was composed in a western (left-to-right) format, the opposite of Japanese norms and a clear sign that it wasn’t “TV manga.”
It’s also worth noting that Volume 1 is likely the first public-facing magazine in which the word “anime” appears in print. As indicated above, the word was coined by Osamu Tezuka specifically to distinguish Japanese animation as a medium unto itself, much in the same way Will Eisner coined “graphic novel” to distinguish his work from a standard-format comic book.
Vol. 1 • Oct 31, 1975
See it from cover to cover here
Vol. 2 • April 1, 1976
Volume 2, now edited by Kazuyoshi Hirose, took a leap forward when it published the first-ever cover story on a homegrown anime series. The image was from Space Battleship Yamato, which Hirose himself had worked on as a color designer. It was Yamato‘s first print media coverage outside the manga magazines mentioned above and fronted for an interview with manga artist/director Leiji Matsumoto
Read that interview here
Vol. 3 • July 1, 1976
Vol. 4 • Oct 1, 1976
Vol. 5 • Feb 1, 1977
Vol. 6 • April 1, 1977
Vol. 7 • July 1, 1977
Manga Shonen • Oct 1977
Fantoche continued with five more issues, but since it was a self-published magazine, its operations were inherently unstable due to internal disputes and funding. After it closed shop, Kazuyoshi Hirose took his talents over to Manga Shonen where he continued to serve as an anime ambassador with a monthly series called Animation World (starting in the October 1977 issue).
The World of TV Anime
TVアニメの世界
Color and B&W, 214 pages
Dec 1977, Asahi Sonorama
As far as I can tell, this Manga Shonen spinoff was the first ever book dedicated entirely to anime. It had only 14 years of TV anime to cover, so it could lavish attention on whatever it wanted. Included were scripts and picture stories of favorite episodes (Yamato, Cyborg 009, Gatchaman, and more), creator interviews, indexes of everything made for TV up to October ’77, articles on how anime is made, etc. It earns a place in this spot because it became the repository for the last of the content that had been developed for Fantoche. A 12-page segment titled Fantoche 8 could be found at the end of the book, containing another interview with Leiji Matsumoto and additional features.
Meanwhile, the successor to Fantoche had already arrived, and from an even more unpredictable place.
Monthly OUT
To this day, he is still known only as “Mr. K.” In 1977, he was employed at Minori Shobo, a newsprint wholesaler for the Asahi Shimbun [newspaper]. For whatever reason, he decided to start a monthly magazine called OUT. It’s hard to explain what kind of magazine this really was. For one thing, it never quite matched the size of other magazines, and most of the early issues didn’t even match each other. Readers jokingly referred to it as “deform size” until it settled into a standard B5 format.
The only category it fit into was “eclectic.” A typical issue had science-fiction articles right next to comics, pulp fiction, opinion essays, B-movie reviews and nonfic. The only unifying factor was that its editorial style was consistently downbeat, and each article appealed to a particular subculture that wasn’t being served by mainstream publishers. In other words, OUT was not a particularly big seller…at first.
The first issue, dated May 1977 (which actually went on sale in March), included the English words “For young adult people” on its cover. The lead feature focused on SF movie posters from the 1950s and included an extensive article on author Ray Bradbury. Though sales weren’t great, the announcement for issue 2 provided a bright spot: its cover story was to be all about Space Battleship Yamato!
To Mr. K’s surprise, long lines formed in bookshops the day OUT #2 was released in April. The editorial office was besieged with phone calls from fans who couldn’t find copies. Their friends couldn’t, either.
It wasn’t strange for Yamato fans to be tuned in. After all, OUT openly catered to the science-fiction crowd. The strange part was the staggering amount of interest over this one particular feature, a 60-page Yamato encyclopedia. It was essential to these fans that they not miss the issue. To have such an intense reaction to a 2nd issue was unheard of, and it became the stuff of legend afterward. Even when OUT ceased publication 18 years later, its first two covers were still iconic. OUT #1 was known as the “light beams from the eyes” issue and #2 was nicknamed the “Yamato polkadot” issue.
As it turned out, the first sight of those polkadots was a milestone in the lives of many Yamato fans. It was also a historic moment in the annals of Otaku-dom, since the articles had come from their very own ranks.
Everything you’ve just read is an excerpt from a longer article I wrote for my Yamato website, Cosmo DNA. The rest of it can be read here, but I’ll summarize the backstory:
While Space Battleship Yamato was on the air (1974-75), a handful of fans were so intrigued by the show that they tracked down the production studio and paid it a visit. The staff was so delighted to make contact with their audience that they handed over generous piles of souvenirs; copies of scripts, design sheets, cels, you name it. None of them realized at the time that they were planting a seed that would grow into a mighty tree.
After the show went off the air (seemingly forever), Mr. K made contact with the members of Yamato Association, the best-known of all the early fan clubs, and hired them to create the Yamato encyclopedia in OUT #2. Their priceless archive of production materials had filled many fanzines and club newsletters, and could now serve the same purpose in a more visible publication.
This didn’t just save OUT magazine, it also saved Space Battleship Yamato. It gave Exec Producer Yoshinobu Nishizaki the fuel he needed to promote a compilation film cut together from the TV episodes. It became a monster hit in theaters that August. This was when everything reached critical mass. Yamato ignited the “anime boom” of the late 70s that gave us everything we have today, including the word “anime” itself.
It’s no overstatement to say that OUT #2 played a critical role in this chain of events.
Issue 3 • May 1977
Issue 4 • June 1977
Predictably, sales dropped with issue 3, so Mr. K quickly called the fans back to create more Yamato content. This spawned more anime content in general, and by the end of 1977 the inmates were running the asylum. One of their first moves was to create a larger-format spinoff magazine called Rendezvous, which was entirely devoted to anime and related media. It was the first to popularize the picture-story format that would add another ingredient to the brew.
Issue 5 • July 1977
Issue 6 • Aug 1977
Issue 7 • Sept 1977
Issue 8 • Oct 1977
Issue 9 • Nov 1977
Issue 10 • Dec 1977
Rendezvous #1 • Nov 1977
Rendezvous #2 • Dec 1977
There is more to be said about OUT magazine, since it continued to respect, preserve, and promote anime for years to come. And it would soon have some fierce competition.
Terebi Land covers from 1977
Terebi Land magazine
Terebi [TV] Land was described earlier as a manga magazine, and that’s mainly what it was. But since many of its manga features were tie-ins with anime shows, it was a place to go for coverage, even if it was written for elementary students. This was true for Space Battleship Yamato as well, since the magazine published a 6-part Yamato manga serial while the series was on TV from October 1974 to April 1975.
During that time, Yamato articles examined the anime as well, showing a better-than-average attention to detail. This was the work of forward-thinking editor Hideo Ogata, who believed anime had a brighter future in print media. As the 70s progressed, he was already thinking beyond magazines into the book world. When he learned that a Yamato feature film was coming in 1977, he saw an opportunity to act on that belief.
In his 2004 book Shoot That Flag! Animage Blood Wind Record, Ogata described the process in detail. (Read a translation here.) Wanting to cultivate new readers, he thought tapping into the growing Yamato audience (centered on teenagers) seemed like a good way to start.
“I decided immediately, ‘Okay, let’s do a Yamato movie Complete Works book!’ I wasn’t 100% sure about it. But I wanted to take action first and then we could think about it after we started running. Otherwise, nothing would move forward.”
The sales department of Tokuma Shoten Publishing wasn’t keen on trying to sell something unprecedented, so Ogata reduced resistance by calling it a Terebi Land special edition. He also gave it its own title: “Roman Album.” (This has nothing to do with Rome; in Japanese the word suggests “romantic adventure.”) The Yamato Roman Album was Volume 1 in a proposed series that would continue to focus on different anime programs.
“Although it was not released in time for the movie premiere on August 6, 1977, the first 100,000 copies appeared in bookstores on August 27 and were almost sold out by the 10th day. On September 6, the second printing of the book sold 100,000 copies, and it went on to a further eight printings. By September 1978, the total number of copies sold was 400,000, making it a hit product.”
Armed with proof that there was a market for anime publishing after all, Ogata dialed up his ambition. In 1978, everyone would see the results.
Coming in Part 2: hello, mainstream!