get out!!

[davemerrill]

Awesome gallery of covers of the Japanese animation magazine OUT - lots of super obscure stuff made the cover. It lasted until 1995!!

http://homepage2.nifty.com/out-site/outcover2.html

I only have one issue of this (thanks Dave N.), didn't see any in Japan or I'd have more.
(courtesy Matt Alt- http://altjapan.typepad.com/ )

Comments

[sobieniak.livejournal.com]

I've seen at least an issue or two on eBay but that's about it, those covers certainly kick major ass!

[psychoshinji.livejournal.com]

Wow, that's cool! :D Man, I wish I could someday own the cover with all the various incarnations of Lupin over the years. It also seems like Out! used a lot of unique promotional images and artwork rather than the commonly seen images from a given show. I'd never seen those two images of Nadia & co. before. Was Out! particularly focused on getting exclusive artwork done for their covers from the studios/artists?

Thanks for sharing! :D

[tochiro998.livejournal.com]

Original art was quite common with the anime mags of the '80s. And posters. Man, used to be every month each of the 4 key magazines (Animage, Animedia, My Anime and The Anime) would have at least one poster, a sticker sheet or cassette label, some fun thing like sheets of writing paper for love notes and the like, and a booklet promoting a new show, or collection of songs, or something.

Regretfully I didn't discover the mags until 1982, so I missed the wave of cool stuff generated for Mystery of Mamo and Cagliostro Castle, but they're out there. Animage in particular would have tons of lovely cover paintings done.

Man, I hate all those mags are buried in storage right now.

[psychoshinji.livejournal.com]

GASP! You didn't discover the mags until 1982???!! Steve, that is awful... you're so late to the game. C'mon, get with it! ^_~

Thanks for the detailed answer! As soon as I commented, I thought...okay, there's a 90% chance Steve Harrison is going to have an answer within the next 6 hours or so. :3

[tochiro998.livejournal.com]

Late to the game, baby, I was late to the game. Freely admitted!

Well, modified, I KNEW about Animage thanks to Fred Patten's article on Japanimation in the 1980 fan-produced magazine 'Fanfare', but that was 'over there' in Japanland, I had no knowledge whatsoever such magical things could be had here in the US of A.

1982, lots of stuff happened. Lots of stuff.

Dave's right, every magazine was more or less specialized. Animage was your one-stop for Ghibli stuff and had the air of the 'mature' magazine. Animedia (the only saddlestitch stapled mag of the Big Four, all the others squarebound) seemed focused more on the younger demographic, My Anime was clearly fan focused, always having a nice booklet of establishment sheets from a current show and The Anime seemed to be focused on everything else, kind of in-between Animage and My Anime in tone. It was also the first to die in the 1985 bubble burst, having (as I understand it) WAY overpaid for the license to make Zeta Gundam 'anime comics', when by 1985 there was no real market for such things as the VCR was now omnipresent.

All I know is I have an entire file storage box filled with nothing but posters from my time of mag buying 1982-1995, in addition to the posters that are 'broken out' to file folders for specific shows (which also has the model sheet books, stickers, love mail paper, postcards, calendars, cassette labels, playing cards and so on), which takes up ANOTHER entire file box. THESE I have on hand :)

[sobieniak.livejournal.com]

Shame I was only 4-5 years old when 1982 came and went.

[davemerrill.livejournal.com]

Out! was probably the most 'fannish' of the professional zines - well, unless you count Fan Road, I guess. Lots of original commissioned artwork, lots of fan art - all the magazines had fan art pages but Out seemed to have more - and in general an emphasis on the smaller, weirder, more obscure series. It had a goofy vibe to it. Animage was the Tokuma Shoten house organ - you knew Nausicaa was always going to win the character poll - and Animedia generally seemed to focus on shows I wasn't that interested in, and New Type seemed to cater to Bandai/Sunrise and not much else.

[psychoshinji.livejournal.com]

Heheh...I have to admit, whenever I read about Nausicaa having the Number One character poll spot, I wondered if maybe there was some kind of studio/company politick-in' going on there. I like Nausicaa as a character, but I cannot imagine that she would be intriguing time after time when put up against more interesting and human characters like Nadia, etc. (Didn't Nadia overthrow her for ONE poll or something like that? I can't remember for sure.)

Sweet. I'd love to resurrect the feeling that it sounds like Out! emitted in a magazine. Someday. :D Thanks for the info!

[davemerrill.livejournal.com]

Nausicaa was #1 for years and years, and when Nadia came along Nausicaa was suddenly yesterday's news. To this day I carry a grudge.

Nausicaa was published by Tokuma Shoten, which also published Animage. Actually Nausicaa was serialized in the back of Animage for a while. Ghibli was a subsidiary of Tokuma Shoten, which makes sense. They also published Roman Albums and TV Land magazine, among a ton of other stuff. Apparently they owned Daiei (the movie company).

What's funny is you would NEVER see certain properties on the cover of Animage - no Saint Seiya, no Fist Of The North Star... I'm sure it all had to do with whatever zaibatsu Tokuma Shoten was a part of. In much the same way Animerica would give big press coverage to whatever Viz property was currently in need of promotion (Macross II is Thee Graytest!!)

I don't think "Out" was beholden to any one commerical entity in particular, they might have had more leeway as to what got coverage.

[tochiro998.livejournal.com]

It's funny you mention that about the covers of Animage and the mid-'80s shows.

It was always a head scratching thing to me, seeing what did and what didn't make it as Roman Albums. You'd think that, say, Fist of the North Star was a natural for the RA treatment, but nope.

But if you look at the RA titles, you can see the shift from Toei shows to Sunrise shows to focusing on the Ghibli stuff. One assumes it's what the PTB figured would sell and was worth licensing, and it's been said that fees for that started to skyrocket, so who knows.

And then there's the web of zaibatsu contracts. All Lupin III mooks came from Futabasha. Macross was Shogakukan's ticket to print money. Sankei had the lock on Queen of a 1000 Years TV. Once Kadokawa signed up with Sunrise we started getting those lovely (if thin) Newtype 100% collections. The Keibunsha folks kept chugging along with their 'little encyclopedia' series and OUT managed to do just a couple of astonishing books.

But once My Anime, The Anime and Animec died out, so too did the flood of cool books on shows. I have no idea if it's gotten any better but dudes, THERE'S NO ROMAN ALBUM FOR THE NEW YAMATO MOVIE!! Sacrilege!! It's a GOSH DARN MELONFARMIN' TRADITION!!

grr BARK BARK BARK!

[childings.livejournal.com]

I totally didn't expect to see Ulysses 31

What a great collection, obviously I am very jealous of this particular individual

[rootstudio.livejournal.com]

Man... OUT sure likes them some Locke don't they?

All them covers brings back fond memories of when I first discovered local comic uber-shop Third Planet many years ago and their dizzyingly huge selection of imported anime magazines, mooks and roman albums.

[x-expat.livejournal.com]

Interesting to note only one issue had a photo cover.

Thanks for that trip down memory lane! I have one issue - bet you can't guess which. ;-)

[kidfenris.livejournal.com]

It's interesting that Out closed up just before Evangelion came along and whipped up fans all over Japan. If they'd stuck around, the magazine might've lasted through another year by putting Rei and Asuka on the cover.

[sobieniak.livejournal.com]

Certainly would've helped.