Watching Anime, Reading Manga

http://www.otakunovideo.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/patten.jpeg

Year: 2004

Author: Fred Patten

Availability: Readily available from sites like Amazon

Book Review
Watching Anime, Reading Manga is a collection of essays Fred Patten's written over the years. Who is Fred Patten? He's been a manga and anime fan since the early 1970's.

The book offers a remarkable window into American anime fandom over the decades. Yes, decades. A few interesting takeaways:


 * Early on, Patten worried about anime fandom establishing its own subculture outside of SF/F fandom. He pointed out that the vast majority of anime has some science fiction or fantasy element, so why don't anime fans consider themselves part of SF/F fandom? I wonder if the much-complained-about elitism of anime fans can't be traced back to this.
 * He was writing articles about anime and manga for trade journals and other serious publications starting in 1980. This stuff's been around for a long time!
 * He was shown a full-blown loli hentai magazine during a trip to Japan in 1984. Which he wrote about in the prestigious Comics Journal, as part of a long article about the state of manga in Japan.
 * He was writing about anime soundtracks in 1986.
 * American anime companies cracked down on bootlegs in 1995, as part of their "JAILED" initiative (Japanese Animation Industry Legal Enforcement Division). They were going after the major operations who operated full-blown businesses by selling fansubs, but the crackdown quickly fizzled when fans worried that anime companies were going after them. Think about that:  when American anime companies realized that fans were afraid of legal action, they stopped (publicly) going after major bootleggers.  (They still pursued obvious illegal activity, of course; they just didn't trumpet it.)
 * There's a great article on the origins of Robotech. Patten was good friends with Carl Macek (who wrote the forward to this book), so Patten got an insider's view of the activity leading up to the creation of Robotech. Did you know Macek was an anime fan before he got involved with Harmony Gold, and that he was the one who recommended they license Macross?
 * Speaking of which, in 1999 Patten listed the 13 most important developments in anime up to that point, from the perspective of American fandom. The list included the internet, conventions, video games, specialty magazines, Disney's releases of Hayao Miyazaki's movies, etc.  The #1 most important development? Robotech. It was that hugely responsible for turning regular Americans into otaku.
 * There's an excellent article listing the similarities (and differences!) between The Lion King and Kimba the White Lion (a.k.a. Jungle Emperor Leo), plus another doing the same for Disney's Atlantis and Nadia and the Secret of Blue Water.

You get the idea. All sorts of stuff hides in this book.