Newtype USA

What have I been doing besides getting all indignant and revved-up about the reaction to those Danish cartoons? From my recent posts, you may suppose not a lot. But that's not true! I have been doing my usual things, like being obsessed with the Japanese anime. Gantz 5 comes out next week so I am very excited about that. I will go to the video store and hire it and watch it and take photos of screenshots and post them, and make a full report about it here.
My video store has a big anime section, so naively, I suppose, I figured that everybody's local video store has an anime section, but I was talking to my friend Gerard Ashworth on the phone tonight and he said his video store doesn't have one. What! No anime section at Mr Ashworth's video store?! That was news to me, and a big surprise. So maybe there are many people out there who don't have a video store with an anime section. That shocking news led me to understand that there might be a good reason that whenever I wrote about one of these Gantz episodes, nobody made a comment about it. If you can't find them anywhere, you can't watch them and find out if you agree with Stratu that they are great great GREAT!

In other anime obsession news, I bought what is surely the world's most expensive magazine: Newtype USA. Is it really the world's most expensive magazine? Maybe not, after all, but it's the most expensive magazine I've ever bought, because it cost $30 (actually $28.95 postpaid). Would you agree that that's a lot to pay for a magazine? I think it's a lot. The cover price for Americans is $12.98, but when an Aussie wants a copy he pays around $30. What does that Fair Dinkum Aussie Mate get for his $30? A big glossy magazine, some black & white manga, a poster and a DVD including three full anime episodes (in the Jan 2006 issue you get Misaki Chronicles, Hare + Guu and Macross) and a bunch of trailers. But even though that Aussie Mate may wonder at the exorbitant price, he doesn't make much of a fuss about it because he is utterly obsessed with this Japanime biz. It's a new world of wonder! It must be investigated and examined, and thoroughly obsessed upon, no matter what the pecuniary cost.

Flipping through the magazine for the first time, it gradually occurs to me that every cent was worth it. In fact, it strikes me that this magazine, for the chappy who has had only a fraction of a peek into the wonderful magical world of Japanese anime, that this magazine represents nothing less than, if the nearest parallel could be found, would be that of the young paperboy, poking around at back of the Newsagent's, first discovering that fabled pile of unsold and coverless soft porn magazines.
Nothing less!