15 years of distractions

I just read that they signed Toby McGuire to be in the Robotech movie. The timing is spooky weird. When we started doing Psychommu Gaijin 15 years ago we were watching the Robotech Movie, which was actually Megazone 23 edited to fit the cosmology of a syndicated tv series made from three different japanese cartoons mashed together into something else. Something that made a big cultural impact. And we stood on the edge of that crater and gave our pisstake of the scene.

Back in the day anime club zines were a big part of fandom. This was because fansubbing was still in it's infancy. Anime shows were being traded on VHS tape, usually from raw off air sources. So the norm was to have a synopsis of the episode or movie printed up and passed around. The club zines were just collections of synopsis and a schedule of what was gonna be played at the club meeting.

Yeah, we printed up our share of those anime guides. But somewhere we decided to do a zine. A zine like the punk rock zines we'd seen at Northern Lights or those self published fan books we'd seen from Japan called doujinshi. And with that as our inspiration we gathered up our gluesticks and x-acto knives and went to Kinkos. And somehow we published a zine, and people read it and liked it. And we liked it, too.

So why are we still doing this 15 years later? My answer is in the DaiConIV opening, "I only meant to stay awhile..."