Manga Xanadu

The current issue of Otaku USA, as well as featuring stories about the anime Space Battleship Yamato and Star Blazers, also had an insert on the Star Blazers webcomic, Star Blazers: Rebirth. This is a web comic written by THE authority on Star Blazers, Tim Eldred. It is a continuation of the Star Blazers saga, taking place after the Final Yamato movie, and features a new generation of characters. But, did you know there were other comics based on the Star Blazers series? StarBlazers.com, the place for all things Star Blazers, has a section on the history of Space Battleship Yamato and Star Blazers in comics. Being a Leiji Matsumoto fan, I found the entries on the manga version of Yamato very interesting, since all that I’ve ever seen of them are the covers. (I had a chance waaaayyyyyy back in the eighties to buy them from the LA store Books Nippon. I really wish I had…) The article goes into some detail about the history of the comic, even showing covers of the magazines they were serialized in. It also includes a really cool bonus: a translation of a rarely seen side story, Eternal Story of Jura. Yamato/Star Blazers…

The latest issue of Otaku USA has a couple of features on the anime classic series Space Battleship Yamato. While reading these features and the writers talking about their first times seeing the series, it got me thinking about how I was introduced to it. Like most other people my age, my first exposure to Japanese animation was through the cartoons that were brought over and re-written for a US audience. Kimba the White Lion, Speed Racer, and Battle of the Planets (Gatchaman) were all shows I remember watching and liking, but they never differentiated them from the other cartoons I watched. That honor goes to another show; Star Blazers. It was 1978, I’m almost certain. KTLA, channel 5, a local television station in the Los Angeles area. It had a show on the weekends that showed movies for kids; The Family Film Festival. It ran in the afternoons, after the morning cartoons were over, and there was only sports on the local channels (there was no cable at the time). So, the Family Film Festival was the best thing on. It was hosted by Tom Hatten, a well-known local personality. He sat in a director’s chair, a clipboard in…