Introduction by CosmoDNA editor Tim Eldred
Steve Harrison was the first Star Blazers fan I met, all the way back in 1981 when he was announced as the chairman of something called Babel Con. I was still in high school then, and the idea of an actual science-fiction convention being held in my area (the city of Grand Rapids in western Michigan) seemed impossibly exotic to me. Being there was like walking through a dream. Over the next couple of years, I became part of the Babel Con community with Steve as my “sponsor.” (I myself ended up chairing the 1986 Babel Con, but that’s another story.)
Star Blazers was the glue that stuck us together. Beyond it lay the worlds of Space Battleship Yamato and anime in general. Learning about them put me on a whole new road to the life I have today. Steve’s patience, warmth, and generosity made him the best tour guide I could have asked for.
Attending that first Babel Con introduced me to the world of fanzines, which was a revelation to a teenager who was desperate to somehow get his homemade comics out into the world. (See how that went here.) In this area as well, Steve introduced me to a new concept: a fanzine didn’t have to just be a container for fanfic, it could also be a guidebook. And what early anime fandom needed at that particular time was a guidebook to Star Blazers and Yamato.
That’s where Space Fanzine Yamato came in, a vehicle for Steve and two of his closest friends to synthesize their collected knowledge onto the printed page. I heard about it as they were putting it together, and it instantly appealed to my impulse for curating and organizing information for mass consumption. This impulse, shared by just enough of us, would form the backbone of American anime fandom in the 80s.
Space Fanzine was one of – if not THE first – homemade English-language guidebook for an anime series. At the time it was published, almost the entire Yamato phenomenon had run its course in Japan. In just another few weeks, Final Yamato would bring the original production years to a close. Steve and his friends (operating under the name “Project Star Blazers”) had access to just the topmost layers of that phenomenon, but it was still enough to fill many issues. They got only one finished, but the depth and quality of its data gave us all a rock solid foundation to build upon. It’s still there, helping to hold up Cosmo DNA.
Steve has written at length about the making of Space Fanzine, and his account can be read here
Shared with his permission, you can read a complete PDF of Space Fanzine here
See a larger version of the poster here
Ephemera:
