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Matt Alt

@Matt_Alt

29 Sep

The passing of manga artist Takao Saito at age 84 today represents the end of an era. He's famed for creating the antihero assassin-for-hire Golgo 13, but he's also a pioneer of "gekiga" (劇画): a cutting edge form of illustrated entertainment intended to dethrone manga. (1/x

Saito debuted in the rental comics market of the Fifties but really rose to prominence as a member of the Gekiga Workshop, a collective founded and named by artist Yoshihiro Tatsumi. Under Tatsumi's editorship, they launched a magazine called Matenrow (Skyscraper.) (2/x

Until gekiga came around, manga was synonymous with the rounded, cartoony fantasies of Osamu Tezuka and his peers. Matenrow upended all that with dark, crime-filled stories set in gritty urban settings. Saito was a master of hard-boiled crime: guns, gangsters and dames. (3/x

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Matt Alt

@Matt_Alt

27 May

Today marks the 35th anniversary of a transformative game series: Dragon Quest. The first hit the streets on May 27, 1986. It wasn’t the first computer-based role-playing game, but its was the first major one for a console, which make the hurdle to entry a lot lower. (1/?)

It wasn’t much to look at, thanks to the limits of the Famicom. But director Yuji Horii had a knack for distilling the complexity of popular PC games like Wizardry & Ultima, which relied on keyboards, into something that could be played on a control pad.

Nintendo controlled the making of Famicom games with an iron fist. It compelled devs to front the money to manufacture carts at Nintendo facilities. This placed all the risk on the developer. DQ's developer, Enix, bet big, placing an order for 760,000 carts.

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Matt Alt

@Matt_Alt

24 Apr

https://twitter.com/CNN/status/1385782154693685248

Is QAnon really “sophisticated and active” in Japan? No. I don’t think so. But this is more than just opinion, and given that I’m actually quoted here, I feel the need to walk you through why I believe that. (1/x

https://twitter.com/CNN/status/1385782154693685248

First off, I haven't seen anything in this piece or elsewhere to date that dissuades me from what I wrote about this topic for the New York Times last month. I'm more than open to being convinced, but for the moment, the title says it all: nytimes.com/2021/03/26/opi… (2/x

Hats off to CNN for interviewing Q believers here. That's great work, and missing from so much foreign coverage of the topic. BUT, are the subjects fringe cases or indicative of a big trend? CNN would have you believe the latter. That’s where things start falling apart. (3/x

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Matt Alt

@Matt_Alt

23 Feb

Feb 22 marks the 40th anniversary of a momentous occasion: the Anime New Century Declaration of 1981. Originally intended as a promo for the upcoming Mobile Suit Gundam film, it was held in front of Shinjuku Station. They expected a few hundred kids. 20,000 showed up. (1/12

Gundam was an anime series, and director Yoshiyuki Tomino snuck a great deal of overt socio-political criticism into what the sponsor intended simply as a vehicle to sell toys to little kids. In this it failed, and was cancelled. But not forgotten. (2/12

Gundam aired at the cusp of anime’s evolution from kid’s stuff into a more mature storytelling medium. A predecessor, Space Cruiser Yamato, had already energized older fans and spawned an ecosystem of mainstream anime magazines that connected fans in pre-Net era. (3/12

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Matt Alt

@Matt_Alt

21 Feb

In "Pure Invention" I wrote how shocked Westerners were by how many toy stores they saw in in 1800s Japan. I'd long wondered what these shops looked like. I finally found a photo at the Library of Congress. This is of an Osaka toy store called Sumiyashi in 1876, 145 years ago.

And here's another from Tokyo, 1906. This is how street peddlers displayed and carried their wares.

@librarycongress

Thanks very much to the @librarycongress for making material like this available online! loc.gov/search/?in=&q=…

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Matt Alt

@Matt_Alt

17 Feb

It's time to celebrate a pivotal moment in online culture (which is to say, modern culture): the 20th anniversary of the very first Internet meme: “All your base are belong to us!” (Feeling old yet?) (1/9

AYB is the famously garbled translation of the opening animation from a 1992 shoot-em-up called Zero Wing. It was only released in Europe, on the Sega Mega Drive. Nearly a decade later, netizens resurrected it in a thread on a 4chan precursor called Something Awful. (2/9

It’s tough to pinpoint the moment a meme flares into life. Is it first appearance, or the first time it gets traction? People were talking about it in late 2000 on Something Awful, but a Feb 17 2001 video and subsequent Wired piece really blew it up. wired.com/2001/02/when-g… (3/9

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