As the creator and first editor-in-chief of the game-changing magazine Animage, Hideo Ogata played an instrumental role in the foundation of anime culture. In this chapter from his memoir Shoot That Flag! he recounts the origin of the magazine and Yamato’s pivotal role in it.
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Hideo Ogata is one of those people who played an instrumental role in building the foundation of anime culture. In 2004, he did the world a huge favor by publishing a book of his memoirs. Yamato figured heavily in two chapters of that book, so we’re presenting the first one here.
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Not everything in anime publishing began with Yamato, but it was certainly the engine that drove it into the modern age. As the audience grew and expanded, publishers who had previously aimed only at the younger set quickly found themselves designing books for teenagers and adults. Read all about their work here.
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From its very beginnings right up to today, the Yamato series has had as big a presence in manga as in anime, sometimes moreso with multiple adaptations existing side by side. Then there are the Star Blazers comic books that appeared outside Japan. They are all examined in this comprehensive history.
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“Anime Comics” was the term publisher Akita Shoten devised to catch the attention of Japanese fans in 1980. They were composed of stills derived from film frames, arranged on a page to retell the story of the film. They did an excellent job of making anime comics look easy to assemble, but they most certainly were not.
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Any devoted anime fan with some cash to spend can easily bury themselves in all manner of publishing from to manga to magazines and more. But one form of print media is still off the radar of English-only fans: novelizations. Examining the history of Yamato novels reveals a lot about who published them.
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It is difficult to determine exactly how many fanzines poured out of the first-generation fan clubs, so it’s impossible to guess what percentage is represented here. But this sampling, which covers the years 1975 to 1980, is certainly enough to grasp the wide range of quality and creativity that was devoted to keeping Yamato alive.
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OUT magazine played a crucial role in bringing the Yamato phenomenon to critical mass by bringing fans out of private clubs and into the professional publishing world. This article examines the history of the magazine and everything the fans did with its pages in the game-changing summer of 1977.
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