i lost my mind when this happened. like you have got to be kidding me.
I didn’t at the time appreciate how Correct as a judgement on the state of audiovisual entertainment it was that there was a Toxic Avenger cartoon in 1991
(up there with the The Maxx and The Tick 90s cartoons as “I hope the producers were getting something out of this, cuz I just took it for granted.”)
Remember when there were articles about Western urbanites doing the Falun Gong Tai Chi stuff because “Free Tibet” was played out but They hadn’t realized to pivot back to Russia again?
Anyway, I’m not hating on superpowers tryna rouse the public in the name of their geopolitical interests, that’s how it is. I’ve been realizing how much of Clintonite foreign policy was really about tying off Cold War loose threads, and it was really clear with Cuba, Northern Ireland (remember Bono as a Clinton sidekick?) and especially Israel/Palestine that the other side’s propaganda apparatus fell apart without the Russians to prop it up
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]
Man younger than me trying to establish himself as an authority for people even younger by recounting Sopranos episodes I realize yeah, would have been before their times
Wait, the guy in The Tick (1994-1997) was Die Fledermaus? I was wondering why he was “Deflator Mouse”, but I guess not that hard and the internet wasn’t a thing yet.
Snoop Dogg coming out of the gangsta era rich and famous for rapping about pimping, then taking the outlaw level down to “your weed guy” and forming a cheeky tag-team with Martha Stewart is a perfect distillation of the ‘90s ideology of racial progress
I wonder exactly which day it was that the amount of time Comedy Central had spent broadcasting The Daily Show finally caught up to the amount of time they had spent broadcasting PCU
This was supposed to be a culture war joke, in fairness on further reflection I was like “yeah but maybe put all the hours of South Park, Tosh.0, and The Man Show on the PCU side too.” Maybe the Kilborn years, even.
Okay, for the benefit of all the followers I’m getting with absurd ages in their profiles, let me explain this one.
When Comedy Central started in the ‘90s, they didn’t have much original programming, and what they did was mostly one-off (but frequently rerun) specials - filmed standup sets, basically.
So what they ran was mostly secondhand content they’d picked up rights to, and what was most common were these two movies, I swear to god I’d seen them run back to back and then over again, I’m pretty sure I’ve seen the same one run twice in a row. One was Throw Momma From The Train, a Danny DeVito comedic riff on Strangers On A Train.
The other was PCU, a campus comedy in the Animal House vein starring a visibly balding Jeremy Piven. It was a lovable frat fighting the dean and his Young Republican lackeys, but (because “boat shoe and dinner jacket-wearing WASPs” were overdone and increasingly anachronistic as villains by then) there was a third faction that took the brunt of the mockery: earnest, censorious social issue activists. Thus the title. The climax involved the activists protesting the big frat party (tagline: “Everyone Gets Laid”), but then realizing “holy shit, we’re against drinking, sex, parties, freedom, and fun, we’re the bad guys” and giving up and chilling out and hooking up with the frat members.
Because obviously you were supposed to see that as the only acceptable position for anyone with any pretensions to being cool and with it. Like I said, ‘60s-derived social liberalism used to offer something for everyone.
If you don’t know who Howard Stern is, he was the foremost crude “Morning Zoo” radio DJ in the country.
Like, in the '90s, white, blue collar (or “dudebro”) tits-n-beer vulgarity was plausibly coded left/liberal/Democratic. And that’s a little disorienting to remember.
I mean hell, Benny Hill was aired in part by an official arm of the most socialist Anglosphere government ever. Benny Hill.
If you’ve never seen Benny Hill, it’s from the British “light entertainment” tradition, a little variety but kind of sketch comedy, only a lot of the “comedy” was basically dirty old man leering. Sketch leering. Episodes famously ended with sped up comedic chase scenes where Benny would try to catch and grope some pretty young girls, then turn and run away as they tried to catch and punish him.
Now by the '90s that was already a bit off, but still, it ran in reruns on Comedy Central. It ran on fucking PBS.
If you ever wonder why intelligent educated sensitive me is wary of if not actively hostile to so much of what passes for modern cultural liberalism, it’s because it pattern-matches so closely not only to the apocalypse visions conservatives were warning of when I was growing up, but to the liberals’ versions as well.
The Chad PCU (1993) clasping hands with the Virgin “Fallen Angels” by Jerry Pournelle [1991]
That’s the one where the fandom alliance launched some sorta spaceplane that dipped back into the atmosphere to collect oxygen atop a museum Titan V to fight global cooling, right? I still remember the climax where the bureaucrat villain asks for her assistant’s pistol to shoot at the takeoff but he maliciously complies with safety regulations by tediously clearing it first. You know by 1991 I guess Pournelle might well have seen Wings of Honneamise.
It makes so much sense that 90s comics would introduce a crazy/hot bisexual manic pixie that it’s easy to forget Harley Quinn’s original concept was “woman in an abusive relationship”
Michelle Pfeiffer in ’Batman Returns’ - Tim Burton - 1992 - USA
just like Burton’s first Batman was about NYC’s 80s “urban crisis”, violence on the streets, Batman Returns was about the turn to the ‘90s and the return of the city, as the never-left faction of unmarried women traded image as mousy to leather-clad dominatrix sexy, and meanwhile the Penguin, disgustingly waddlingly fat… with freakishly large nose… cut off from his heritage… laughably styling himself as heir to the old urban ruling class…
huh.
Like, I get it, penguins really do have beaks, waddle, and look like they’re wearing tuxedos, and have since before Moses came down from the mountain, but still this take on a character from pulp fiction set in German Expressionist ersatz-NYC is in fact all those things, plus he starts the movie being set in a basket to float down a river, uses a businessman named for the German actor who played lead in Nosferatu as a front, and after his attempt to win a PR war against the rightful old-money heir to the city fails when his vulgarity is revealed and the people reject him (and the sexy single woman figure rejects him as hideously unappealing) he strikes out at high society by stealing their children and killing their firstborn sons.
Like, holy shit you guys.
Oh also, this child-stealing, where he realizes his real beef is with the German industrialist who doesn’t respect him enough to invite him to social functions, comes in the context of ruining Christmas.
we have ideologies saying that homosexuality is caused by ghosts, and that’s bad. we have ideologies saying that homosexuality is natural, and that’s good. we have ideologies saying that homosexuality is natural, and that’s bad.
we must advance the thought that homosexuality is caused by ghosts and supernatural influence, and that’s good, for symmetry if nothing else.
Male homosexuality is caused by fujoshi ghosts. Female homosexuality is caused by…
It’s kinda interesting, isn’t it, that there isn’t a word for the male equivalent of a fujoshi.
Because nobody thinks anything of a man liking lesbian porn.
We’ll know we have achieved a better society when women watching gay porn is seen as expected and unremarkable…
This is basically why I expect the next decade or so will be for bi men what the ‘90s were for bi women
What do you think the ‘90s were for bi women?
Thoroughly sexualized, sought as mates, and constantly pestered for threesomes, but I don’t expect it to be that good, I’m thinking more “benefited from spillover of ‘lesbian chic’”-level
Michelle Pfeiffer in ’Batman Returns’ - Tim Burton - 1992 - USA
just like Burton’s first Batman was about NYC’s 80s “urban crisis”, violence on the streets, Batman Returns was about the turn to the ‘90s and the return of the city, as the never-left faction of unmarried women traded image as mousy to leather-clad dominatrix sexy, and meanwhile the Penguin, disgustingly waddlingly fat… with freakishly large nose… cut off from his heritage… laughably styling himself as heir to the old urban ruling class…
Thinking about how the main qualification for Melissa auf der Maur joining Smashing Pumpkins was clearly “she can handle herself on tour with a space-claiming lead she won’t try to upstage”
