The Patreon Letter - 25th February, 2019

Hi everyone, Em here with another late one. If you're paying attention to our release schedule you'll notice that we're missing one. We know. Jackson's just been very busy and they intend to double up this weekend. 

So a few weeks ago the first two volumes of Rumiko Takahashi's classic manga Urusei Yatsura got a new English release after being out of print since two manga booms ago. I've been idly watching the anime when I have some free time, and have mostly enjoyed it, and I like to support classic manga releases since they seem so rare. As I've gotten into anime and manga more seriously over the last 14 months or so it's been really clear that there are huge gaps in not only what gets brought over, but what is available to English-speaking audiences at all even if you're willing to go find scanlations and fansubbed anime. 

Those gaps are all over the place, as there is infinite anime and manga being produced and certainly not enough of an audience to do the work for everything coming out, but also those gaps are clearly not equal. It only takes a cursory glance at the landscape of anime and manga to realizes that the gaps fall much more heavily on those shows and books aimed specifically at girls and women. Which isn't surprising, but the degree of it is really astounding how thin the release history of these things are when you go digging into classic work.

It's great that Sailor Moon and Utena are available, and many other things besides, but recently I've been wanting to get into magical girl shows that aren't those two, and just finding the resources of what's out there in the history of the genre requires more work than you'd think if you don't want a guy writing an article about how Madoka is just groundbreaking because unlike other magical girl shows, it's about how fucked up being a magical girl can be. That's all of them, guy! Yawn.

But classic girls anime is hard to find, with almost none of it brought over  (in English, many of these classic anime found themselves licensed in Europe)  and fansubs being nonexistent. Sally the Witch, considered the first magical girl anime, has one episode and a handful of clips with subtitles, from what I can tell. The manga? Absolutely not. And that's the first one. That's like if Astro Boy were just a stub of a wikipedia article and not available in a ton of prestige formats, because ... the audience.

I've been watching Pretty Cure, the first season of the long running franchise of the same name, most of which has never come over and none of which is streaming outside of two seasons that got picked up by Netflix and renamed to Glitter Force. It's a huge franchise, with literally hundreds of episodes, but it might as well not exist in English outside of a few small fansub groups and a small but emphatic fan base that is willing to seek out these things even at great effort. One quick perusal of CrunchyRoll reveals two dozen identical harem isekai anime, but very little in the way of this kind of content outside of what might be hot this season or in the last few years. 

And Pretty Cure is an ongoing series! The latest show, Star Twinkle PreCure, has just started! When you get into classic anime stuff gets even weirder. Utena has a nice blu-ray release but isn't streaming. Sailor Moon is on Hulu but only half of it is dubbed and its blu-ray release has been a controversial mess as the transfers are generally over-saturated and of poor quality. And this is Sailor Moon, arguably one of the most important shows of the early 90s, and definitely when you consider anime in the west, with a huge crossover audience of boys and men who might not generally fuck with a girls show but Sailor Moon is cool, it doesn't count.

Which brings us to the image at the top of this article, and the classic show Rose of Versailles. The anime is currently out of print, the license expiring last year. You can still pick up DVDs last I checked, but the blu-rays are all sold out and the cost will only go up over time. The manga was only released in English once, when the first two volumes were translated in 1983, before I was born, as a way to teach English speakers Japanese. That was it. Udon Entertainment announced their plans to release the manga several years ago, but as of about five weeks ago only offered an update that they were getting close but had no firm announce date after the original date of 2016 long slipped past. 

And that's not exactly an obscure property. The Rose of Versailles is one of the best selling shoujo manga of all time, the anime influencing many shows for decades and even being so popular they have a crossover episode with Lupin the Third part 2 (the first crossover Lupin had). That's in a recent DVD release of Lupin the Third part 2, with a special commentary for that episode in particular, even as the original show disappears into secondhand purchasing and fansubs. 

Which is why when something like Urusei Yatsura shows up, I generally try to pick it up. It's eternally frustrating that something with the aesthetics but aimed at male audiences like Cutie Honey gets a very nice hardcover release while Versailles languishes and Urusei Yatsura is just now getting 2-in-1 English releases. It's so frustrating to see what gets brought over by the truckload and what languishes in obscurity, and how little it has to do with subject matter versus the target audience. 

I think anybody who knows me isn't surprised that this just makes me more determined to track these things down. I increasingly look, when I'm not watching Gundam, towards anime and manga for women as a healthy reprieve from the fridge-fest special boy parade that is Mobile Suit Gundam. And yeah, before you complain, I know Gundam has always had a big female audience. A lot of things do! Women are endlessly patient about enjoying media that explicitly wasn't made for them. 

But it's also clear that doesn't cut both ways, and that sucks.

And my non-binary ass? I'm gonna cheer for the women's media, almost every time, because the men's work doesn't need my help. And it's not like any of this is actually for me, as much as I enjoy it, so I'll be digging through obscure torrents and ebay listings for gems, and awaiting new licensing announcements for the forgotten classics to finally make their way over to me to enjoy. 

Until next time,

Em