This got elevated to tablet background for inscrutable reasons, so it deserves a reblog - I think its the Death in Midsummer that really gets me, it goes from generic emo-weeb-waif to this fucker knows, man. They’ve seen the other side of their own despondent vibe, they are all-in and aren’t coming back.
By tablet, I, of course, mean my work tablet I bring to the office.
Comic Box was a magazine in Japan launched in, from what I can gather, 1982. It was a bit of an ‘alt” magazine - it has an imprint, Comic Box Jr, which focused on doujinshi for example - and would cover anything anime-adjacent, including western films. The October 1997 release of the magazine was dedicated to the release of the End of Evangelion film, and to answering the question “what was the phenomenon called Evangelion?”. Towards that end it features fan submissions, art, comics, essays, all talking about what Eva meant to them. Some are serious, some are fully comedic, way way more than I expected are erotic, and overall it is a time capsule of how the anime community was thinking about Evangelion when EoE came out. The magazine dissolved in 1998 from what I can tell, so this was one of its last releases - you can still see its absolutely vintage website here! Complete with dashing chibi cat gif.
I discovered this magazine through japanese anime/manga archivist-in-residence ehoba on twitter, who provided photos and rough summaries of some of the pages. They are just camera photos of an open magazine though, not scans, and not at all complete. I hunted around for a while to find a scanned version, messaged ehoba and a few others, posted on forums like Evageeks, and drew total blanks. I couldn’t find any listings of it online, so I set the quest aside…until I was placing another order for some artbooks for import and decide to check Yahoo Auctions Japan and lo and behold, there is was! It arrived this week.
So that image above is not one pulled from the internet - I have scanned the entire Evangelion segment of Comic Box - October 1997 issue. I am a neophyte scanner & image editor, these aren’t gonna be amazing or anything, but while I hope to make a more polished version I wanted to share the drafts now. I really aspire to translate it, but of course I don’t speak Japanese, so I am going to see how far working with some people I know and brute-forcing with AI would go. If you are interested or know someone who would be, definitely reach out! 100% would crowdsource this. If someone already scanned and translated this, also let me know, I would groan heavily and curse my google skills but i’d rather it be available and know, and not waste time.
Below will be some reduced-down PNG’s of the magazine to fit Tumblr image limits with Ehoba’s notes and a few of my own attached to them. A link to the full images as a singular PDF is on the Internet Archive [Here]
the shitstains at youtube memoryhole’d propane genesis evangelion but I had already downloaded it because I know youtube is full of absolute cunts so here it is
I wonder what kind of symbolism they’re trying to get at
“There are a lot of giant robot shows in Japan, and we did want our story to have a religious theme to help distinguish us. Because Christianity is an uncommon religion in Japan we thought it would be mysterious. None of the staff who worked on Eva are Christians. There is no actual Christian meaning to the show, we just thought the visual symbols of Christianity look cool. If we had known the show would get distributed in the US and Europe we might have rethought that choice.” -Kazuya Tsurumaki, assistant director/art director on Neon Genesis Evangelion
