Animerica 8.9

Posted: Saturday, November 18
By: Craig Lemon

"The Anime & Manga Monthly Magazine"

Publisher: Viz Communications


This is one of those weird titles that could score either 2 or 4 bullets, depending on where you're coming from. Give it 4 if you're a fan of Manga and Anime, and want to know the latest news, views and reviews of these fields. However, give it 2 if you're not really that interested, or only mildly interested, as existing knowledge is necessary to yield the best results from reading this.

Animerica is a monthly magazine from Viz Communications, 96 pages with no that many adverts, for just under five bucks. This particular issue I'm looking at here is volume eight, issue nine (October 2000), but these comments apply to any issue of it in general. What you're getting is a magazine predominantly concerned with Anime (Japanese Manga-style cartoons) of which there are a phenomenal number in Japan, and it concentrates mainly on those that have crossed the oceans and made it onto the shores of the US.

However, rather than restricting itself to Anime that his the US, there are a number of features on stuff that is only out in Japan (at the moment), plus a smaller amount of news and reviews of Manga titles. You also get a Manga strip - an episode of Galaxy Express 999, a cute (but rushed) story of an intergalactic train.

As this is published by Viz Comms, you might expect some form of editorial bias towards translations and products available from the Viz conglomerate, but this is refreshingly not the case - the magazine seems to be totally independent of any outside editorial control, and covers other companies' products extensively.

The only disadvantage with this magazine is that the features, interviews, reviews, etc, are actually quite short - it is rare for a feature to go over two pages. Now this is handy in one regard - you can dip into the magazine over a period of time, read a bite-sized chunk and feel satisfied - but if you're the sort of person that likes to read a magazine in one sitting from cover to cover, you'll feel a little disappointed by the end, feeling that you've just skimmed the surface of a large number of topics - but just when it gets interesting, you have to move onto something else.

Of course the other advantage with lots of short articles, is that if you don't like one at least you can move onto another very quickly without feeling that half the magazine is taken up by a uninteresting feature.

So you mileage will vary - if you've an interest in the subject, give this magazine a go, it will open your eyes to the vast amount of material you've probably never even heard of, and may even give you some decent pointers of what is out there that will interest you and products to track down.