#newtype usa

[annlarimer]

Newtype USA cost a bit, but its free DVD generally more than paid for the cover price - either directing you to series you needed or sparing you buying ones you didn't - and it was gorgeous. If you find a cache at a garage sale, grab it.

[anime-herald]

Looking Back on Newtype USA 15 Years Later

“Oh no! We’ve…we’ve just received word that this is the last issue of Newtype USA magazine. Good heavens!”, reads a small line of text tucked quietly to the bottom of the final page of Newtype USA’s February 2008 issue. “There was so much anime left to watch, so much manga to read…but no worries, for we hear that the same folks are launching a new, even better magazine real soon! Wahey! Oooh, and…

[theinternetisaweboflies]

[keroinnie]

i have never felt so insane in my life until i physically flipped through this magazine like actually had to put it down and turn around hands on my head wanted to SCREAM these shoots are so fucking good yang jeongin is so INSANE i need to give jungwook mok and shin kim kisses on their lips bc of how insanely incredible yang jeongin's shoot is like i wanted to SCREAM ALSO FUCKING BAE DOONA ADDITION??? I DIDNT EVEN KNOW ???? THE BAE DOONA THEEEEE BAE DOONA IM SO SICK ALSO A LIM KIM INTERVIEW ?????????????????

[animepopheart]

Look what I dug up!

I used to be obsessed with Newtype USA, though I rarely bought the magazines because of the cost. At $9.95, they would be a steal nowadays.

This issue had Fooly Cooly postcards! The coolest character designs but I could never make it through the OVAs—a little too manic for me. :/

The cover story: .Hack stuff! Another series I never finished (.hack//Sign—I don't think I've watched or played anything else). The OP, art design, and whole "trapped-in-a-game" story (before SAO) were cool, though!

L: I'm pretty good with recognizing anime but this one is not in my memory bank at all. Anyone watch this series? Was it good?

R: Oh boy, look at all the dead companies here: Central Park Media, Suncoast, Fry's, and—my prediction—Best Buy eventually, too. That Ebert quote got a TON of play back in the day, too. I'm pretty sure I used it in more than one article.

More FLCL. Any fans out there?

And yet ANOTHER show I never finished. The colors and designs in Witch Hunter Robin were A+, but I got bored and dropped the series around maybe episode 15...

If y'all like these, I'll post some more photos another time. I only made it about 10% of the way through this Newtype USA issue!

[l-crimson-l]

If you can help it don’t buy gunpla from Amazon. It’ll almost always be at an inflated price if it’s not a brand new batch release.

Here’s some US based shops that I’ve found/used to help you avoid using Amazon:

-Newtype

-USA Gundam Store

-Mecha Warehouse

-Gundam Planet

-Gundam Place Store

-The Gunpla Hermits Shop

-Premium Bandai US

Extra! Lose/broke a part? Check out Plamo Kitbash to order individual parts from runners (I had to do this for my Kyrios)

I’ve ordered from all of these shops so I can confirm they’re all legit

Important thing to note here tho is that shipping for some of these shops is $10 flat rate shipping without another option. So save up a little and then make a bigger cart to make it worth it more. They also have frequent sales (USAGS has one like every week on something) so keep an eye out for that as well!

Now Physical stores is kind of a mixed bag. Barnes and Noble started carrying a few kits, so did Target and Hobby Lobby (I know how we feel about HL but they also put those kits on sale every other week 40% off). But if you’re lucky enough to live close to one Hobbytown USA always has a pretty great selection and you might even seen a Grandpa statue in there too. But of course always do some searching around you and see what local hobby shops are there. Always nice to not have to pay shipping and get it straight in your hands

[fma03anniversary]

Happy 20th anniversary FMA. Let's put some forgotten feathers back in your cap.

Melissa was the #1 anime theme song to wrap 2003, and peaked at #2 on the Oricon Singles Chart - Japan's music industry standard for charting CD singles. Melissa became the #34th top selling single for 2003 and was only on sale for two months of the year (Melissa went on sale Sept 26th and Oricon is tracked Dec 1 - Nov 30). Melissa ranked #66 in top Japanese singles for 2004 too. The song would be on the Oricon charts for 38 weeks! Melissa won Animage Magazine's 2004 Anime Grand Prix for Best Anime Song.

Ready Steady Go! was the 18th best selling single of 2004 and peaked at #1 on the Oricon Singles Chart, and would do so charting less than half the time of Melissa, 16 weeks.

FMA sweeps Animage Magazine's 26th Annual Anime Grand Prix held in June 2004 - winning best series, best male character (Ed), best female character (Riza), best voice performance (Romi Park), best song (Melissa @ #1, Kesenai Tsumi @ #2), and best episode (7).

FMA is on the cover of all 3 major Japanese animation magazines for July 2004 - Newtype, Animage, and Animedia.

July 31, 2004 L'arc~en~Ciel make their North American debut at Otakon. Prior to their concert held at the 1st Mariner Place (now CFG Bank Arena) in Baltimore, to a crowd of 12,000 the first episode of the upcoming FMA English dub is premiered.

Rewrite peaks at #4 on the Oricon charts and becomes the 63rd best selling single of 2004. Rewrite won Best Anime Theme Song at the American Anime Awards at New York City Comicon in 2007.

FMA gets the rare honour of going to reruns in Japan.

FMA debuts on Adult Swim and is on the cover of all 3 major North American anime magazines for November 2004 - Newtype USA, Anime Insider, and Animerica.

FMA pulls in a ton of new viewers to Adult Swim for December 2004.

TV Asahi ranks FMA the most popular animated TV series in Japan in fall 2005, a year after it finished airing.

FMA is the best selling anime series on DVD for 2005 in North America. Individual DVD volume sales are so strong they rank alongside anime movies.

Anime News Network crowns FMA the best series of 2005.

Link is the #4 anime song for 2005 and peaks at #2 on the Oricon chart.

Conqueror of Shamballa is the #7 anime movie and #47 movie overall in Japan for 2005.

Anime Expo 2006 celebrates FMA. AX teams up with FUNimation to premiere Conqueror of Shamballa at the convention, hosted by guests of honour: Seiji Mizushima (Series Director), Mike McFarland (EN Director), Masahiko Minami (President of Studio Bones), Romi Park (who unfortunately had to cancel last minute), and Vic Mignogna.

Conqueror of Shamballa set to screen in 40 North American theatres. In !!2006!!

In the first ever event to honour voice acting, direction, production, etc of English anime in North America, the American Anime Awards were held at New York City Comic Con in 2007, handing out awards for the Best Of 2006. Online fan voting selected the finalists and FMA led the nominations with 5. The series would lose Best Feature (CoS) to FFVII Advent Children, but win Best Long Series, Best DVD Packaging, Best Cast, and Best Theme Song (Rewrite). Source (1), (2), (3)

Over five years after its Japanese debut and four years after it's North American start, as Brotherhood begins airing in Japan FMA still ranks #7 for best selling anime series on DVD in North America for spring 2009!

[distress]

a tragic affair - AIR (2005 Movie) Spread from NewType USA November 2004

Scanned from personal collection.

[animehouse-moe]

The Animanga Find Of A Lifetime

Yeah, I haven't really been too active this week. I've been busy during the week with life and whatnot, but a good chunk of the end of this week has been about this pile of anime and manga magazines. It's no longer just a "pile" of Animerica Extra, but a bonafide Mt. Everest encroaching on 400 issues, so I have lot to explain with just this haul alone.

So, where to begin? An outline is probably best.

This haul is a total of about 311 issues (a little more because of a few duplicates and magazines that aren't strongly related to animanga). That huge number is split across 16 different magazines, 4 of which (combining for 37 issues) are Japanese language.

The full list, in alphabetical order, is: Animage (JP), Animerica, Animerica Extra, Anime USA, AX (JP), AX DVD (JP), Mangajin, Neo, Newtype (JP), NewtypeUSA, OtakuUSA, Pulp, Protoculture Addicts, Shoujo Beat, Super Manga Blast, and Yen+.

Protoculture Addicts and Animerica stand out in the bunch because they together combine for over 100 of the issues in the haul, which is good because they're by far the longest running in the lot.

Speaking of those, let me give a bit of broad history in regards to the magazines.

While the majority are English language, there's actually a pair of them that were created/published outside of the US.

Starting it off, Protoculture Addicts was created in Montreal, and was actually ran as a Robotech Fanzine for about a year or so before becoming a full fledged magazine.

And then there's Neo, the UK based magazine. It's arguably the most interesting ongoing magazine out of the lot (with Otaku/Anime USA being the only others). It's also the only monthly animanga magazine to be currently published in English as OtakuUSA is bimonthly, and AnimeUSA is quarterly.

But that's enough history, what about the insides? For the most part they're relatively standard, but there's not "as many" manga anthology issues in this mountain.

Super Manga Blast, Shoujo Beat (only 9 issues), Animerica Extra (which I now have extras of), Pulp (only 2 issues), and Yen+.

That last one is the most interesting to me purely because of an editorial/column penned by "The Otaku Pimp". Yeah, that's a real thing that appears in that magazine which is incredibly funny to me.

More on the interesting side though is Mangajin, a magazine focused on teaching Japanese through Japanese culture, which of course includes manga. This one is especially interesting because it oftentimes features the only instance of the manga inside being translated to English.

And this is all just the tip of the iceberg. There's an insane amount of information and history in the magazines, and an exciting amount of unknowns with the frankly incredible amount of promotional DVDs that remain attached to so many of these issues.

I just have to get through it all.... which will take a long time. Will certainly be recruiting friends and whoever to help out, so hopefully I won't be doing this for the rest of my life haha

[flojocabron]

11/20/24: Alrighty then! Here's the breakdown of my Wednesday fleamarket finds. First pic was all for $30 bucks: three blurays, three videogames, three Issues of Raijin comics 0, one Newtype USA magazine, and two Anime Expo program guides. Second pic got me for $14 bucks: one board game, a Ken Shamrock figure and four pre-teen novels and comics. Guitar Hero 3 and Devil's Rejects were a quarter each! And $4.00 got me a new unopened dvd series of Hatfields and McCoy's and an empty case for Xbox Conker Live and Reloaded. Last pic has a lot of movies and a wii game. They were $2 each, totaling $38 for everything. Some criterion collections, some 30s gangster flicks, and other cool random flicks. A great day!

[testure-1988]

Speaking of magazines, feast your eyeballs on this! It's a two page advertisement for the first DVD of Invader Zim, circa an anime magazine (Newtype USA) from 2004!

[conventionalwisdomcomic]

Weekly Anime Comic: Dirty Pair - page 12

I will be very, VERY annoyed if it turns out there actually WAS an issue on Rats at some point and I just couldn't find it during a Google search. But come on, do I look like a guy with a Fangoria collection stashed away in my room? My shelves are full of old issues of Electronic Gaming Monthly and Newtype USA, thank you very much. ...and yeah, I realize I'm totally allowing the blatant Flowers for Algernon reference to go entirely unremarked. Clearly, that was just way too obvious for me.

Conventional Wisdom / Patreon

[memesmadefullmetal]

Congratulations to you on reaching 3,000 followers! And thank you for running this fun tournament to celebrate! In Fullmetal Alchemist character popularity contests, Ed and Roy so often take the top two spots, and as much as I love those characters, it is refreshing to see their counterparts Al and Riza take the top two spots for a change. Also, although I voted for Riza, I think that Hiromu Arakawa would possibly be pleased by Al's win. When Newtype USA magazine interviewed her for an article in their January 2006 issue, she reportedly told them that she identified with Al.

Thank you so much! 🥹🫶🏻3️⃣0️⃣0️⃣0️⃣

We’re so, so glad you enjoyed the tournament! It really means the world to us <33

We didn’t anticipate this outcome at all, so we’re pleasantly surprised that both Roy’s and Ed’s counterparts were the ones taking the top spots this time around! Go Al and Riza! 🥰

(Mod Mustang is also always VERY happy to see Riza do well! 🤭)

It is the greatest honour to think that we might have also even pleased the great Arawaka 😍

- Mod Mustang & Mod Hawkeye 🔥🦅

[dorothydalmati1]

Obscure Animation Subject #55: Serial Experiments Lain

Originally posted on Twitter on April 15, 2023.

Created by Yasuyuki Ueda, written by Chiaki J. Konaka and directed by Ryūtarō Nakamura, this is a 13-episode miniseries produced by Triangle Staff, and aired on TV Tokyo from July 6 to September 28, 1998.

The series follows Lain Iwakura, an adolescent girl in suburban Japan, and her relation to the Wired, a global communications network similar to the internet. The show is an original idea to the point of it being considered "an enormous risk" by its producer Yasuyuki Ueda.

Ueda had to answer repeated queries about a statement made in an Animerica interview. He stated that Lain was "a sort of cultural war against American culture and the American sense of values we [Japan] adopted after WWII". He later expanded this in numerous interviews.

He created Lain with a set of values he took as distinctly Japanese; he hoped Americans would not understand the series as the Japanese would. This would lead to a "war of ideas" over the meaning of the anime, hopefully culminating in new communication between the two cultures.

When he discovered that the American audience held the same views on the series as the Japanese, he was disappointed. The Lain franchise was originally conceived to connect across forms of media (anime, video games, manga), but due to its failure that was scrapped.

Ueda said in an interview, "the approach I took for this project was to communicate the essence of the work by the total sum of many media products". The scenario for the video game was written first, and the video game was produced at the same time as the anime series.

However, the anime was released first. A dōjinshi titled "The Nightmare of Fabrication" was produced by Yoshitoshi ABe and released in an artbook An Omnipresence in Wired. Ueda and Konaka declared that the idea of a multimedia project wasn’t unusual in Japan, as opposed for Lain.

Despite the show’s confusion to the audience it wanted to appeal to, critics responded positively to the thematic and stylistic characteristics, and it was awarded an Excellence Prize by the 1998 Japan Media Arts Festival for "its question the meaning of contemporary life".

According to Christian Nutt from Newtype USA, the main attraction to the series is its keen view on "the interlocking problems of identity and technology". Nutt saluted Abe's "crisp, clean character design" and the "perfect soundtrack" in his 2005 review of series.

He said that "Serial Experiments Lain might not yet be considered a true classic, but it's a fascinating evolutionary leap that helped change the future of anime." Anime Jump gave it 4.5/5, and Anime on DVD gave it A+ on most criteria with some As for volume 3 and 4.

Lain was subject to commentary in the literary and academic worlds. The Asian Horror Encyclopedia calls it "an outstanding psycho-horror anime about the psychic and spiritual influence of the Internet". It notes that the red spots present in all the shadows look like blood pools.

It also notes the death of a girl in a train accident is "a source of much ghost lore in the twentieth century", more so in Tokyo. Gilles Poitras describes it as a "complex and somehow existential" anime that "pushed the envelope" of anime diversity in the 1990s.

Susan J. Napier in her 2003 reading to The Problem of Existence in Japanese Animation, compared the show to Ghost in the Shell and Spirited Away. According to her, the main characters of the two other works cross barriers; they can cross back to our world, but Lain can’t.

Napier asks whether there is something to which Lain should return, "between an empty 'real' and a dark 'virtual'". Mike Toole named SEL as one of the most important anime of the 90s. Anime Academy gave the series a 75%, but criticized it due to the "lifeless" setting it had.

Michael Poirier of EX magazine stated that the last three episodes fail to resolve the questions in other DVD volumes. Justin Sevakis of Anime News Network noted that the English dub was decent, but that the show relied so little on dialogue that it hardly mattered.

So all in all, this show is one of the weirdest shows out there, but despite being a miniseries, it still has significance thanks to the bizarre nature and sci-fi themes. Not in the levels of Neon Genesis Evangelion or Cowboy Bebop, but still really interesting to go through.

[nildrohain9]

Anyone else remember when Newtype was still published in the USA? I had an issue or two myself. Shame that they stopped publishing it here in 2008 or so, along with the Gothic Lolita Bible (which I ALSO loved).

Newtype Magazine, November 1991 vs November 2024 (Classic Newtype cover scanned by @oldtypenewtype!)