Originally published in 1995,The Manga Collector’s Edition was one of the first extensive English-language guides to Japanese animation (“anime”), co-written by James Swallow and Peter J. Evans.
AUTHOR’S NOTES:
In the heyday of the British anime industry, Manga Video were the top dog in the industry; riding high with massive sales from titles like Akira, and Fist of the North Star, they weathered the slings and arrows of outraged fans and a censorious media, and were solely responsible for convincing an entire generation of people that cartoons from Japan were called ‘manga’ – which is actually the Japanese word for comics.
Early in my journalistic career I worked with Manga Video as a freelance consultant and writer, recruited from my work on Britain’s anime magazines to provide a degree of expertise to a company who often played fast and loose about the nature of their product. They had been convinced to hire on some outside knowledge after a gaffe on on release, when the mistranslated sleeve notes for the anime Tokyo Babylon promised “a nightmare of terror and phone sex” despite the fact that no-one in the movie ever actually used a telephone. Without the time to police the blurbs in-house, Manga looked for freelancers to check through the upcoming releases and make sure there was phone sex where it was supposed to be.
The job of writing many of their video sleeves was offered to me and I took it with glee, indulging myself with huge amounts of marketing-speak hyperbole like “pulse-pounding!“, “nerve-shattering!“, “eyeball-searing action!” and “high-octane – with attitude!”
Manga liked the sleeves so much they called me in to write an anime guidebook for them that could be sold in specialist stores and to members of the company fan club. I split the writing duties with my old friend Peter J. Evans (now a novelist in his own right but back then, another anime journo and metaphor jockey).
Peter and I took on the task with gusto and created The Manga Video Collector’s Edition, Volume One. The fifty-page guide covered over seventy different anime titles and won the Award of Excellence at the Video Home Entertainment awards the same year. While restricted in its range by Manga’s back catalogue, the Collector’s Edition was nonetheless one of the first professionally-published English-language guides to Japanese animation, superseded in later years by books of greater scope and depth. Despite the ‘volume one’ subtitle, a follow-up was never written and plans for an updated edition on CD-ROM were scuppered by Manga Entertainment UK’s downsizing.
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