Tag: Translations

Flipped and Flopped: Manga Fandom In The Mid-1990s

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I have mentioned in various Internet communities about Operation: Get Your Shit Out Of My House – the appearance of stuff, presented by my parents at holidays or other family gatherings that for one reason or another – college living, pre-home-ownership transient lifestyles, etc, stuck around at their house and they are ready for it to be gone. ‘Stuff’ is the best way to describe it. Once it was model kits (finished and unfinished), another time, it was computer stuff like floppy disks (detailed in another Free Talk). This time it was comic books.

I was really into comics in the early 1990s and my comic book fandom was, ultimately, what got me into anime. But as allowances are limited, I’d quit American superhero comics by the mid-90s to put that thin-stack of cash towards cartoons. But going through the comics in those long boxes was a trip down memory lane of not just a piece of my childhood (and getting everything priced to sell) but a time capsule of anime fandom more than I could ever imagine.

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What’s In A Name? Various Name-Related Puns In Japanese Cartoons

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When I first decided that I was going to start running panels at anime conventions about ten years ago, I kicked around all sorts of ideas of what to talk about. Early on in my fandom, even longer before I went to anime conventions, Dragonball fansites often discussed the trivia related to Toriyama Akira’s puns when it came to naming characters in his epic. As I started watching more anime and reading more manga, I started noticing more and more of these puns and I thought this would be a fun convention topic to present. But when I started with even the most rough draft of this, I found this was a real short topic indeed and wouldn’t fit a convention format very well. Which means it’s perfect for Free Talk here at Akihabara Renditions.

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